I’m a plotter.

This is distinct from being a planner, someone who comes up with an executes a plan. No, I’m a plotter, someone who creates plans within plans, working out unlikely contingencies and thinking about how things might go wrong. It’s not simply enough for me to drive to the store to pick up some food, I need to think about the precise time to optimally make the trip, the routes I’ll take at that time, what other things I can do on the way and while there, and in what order those are best accomplished, and what I’ll do if there’s unexpected difficulties– there’s traffic on my route, they’re out of what I want, and so on.

D.W. Frydendall, “Plotting”

I’ve described the way I think to other people, and I’ve frequently heard the comment that it sounds “exhausting”. I wouldn’t know– I get agitated and stressed when I’m not thinking multiple steps ahead. When I take someone out to dinner, I’m thinking of what I’m going to wear, where we’re going to go, two backup places in case the place I chose is closed / busy / not to taste, I’ve probably looked at the menu and decided what I’m going to order before I go, put gas in my car, look for parking nearby… and if I don’t do one or some of these things, I’ll worry about them. I don’t get excited about things unless I’m watching all of the pieces fall into place, at which point it’s usually already happening and I’m feeling relief.

I’ve had friends call me a mastermind; it’s certainly what my Myers-Briggs profile uses, and it seems apt. I’m most comfortable when I’m making an effort to predict what’s going to come next. When I don’t adequately plan, I find that things don’t go well. If I plan to go out during the weekend, and I don’t have an explicit idea of where I’m going to go and with whom, I often find myself listlessly sipping a drink, bored and often regretting my choices. Even the places I frequent are places where I know ahead of time will have something for me to enjoy. I’ve found that if I don’t plan and make sure things are going to work out right, I’ll spend a lot of time sitting, bored. When I arrive somewhere, my first instinct is to look around to see who I might want to talk to and start thinking about how to approach them; if I don’t, I’ll wind up just sitting and wondering why I bothered. I’m very rarely surprised, partly because I’ve thought about things well in advance, and partly because if I haven’t, things tend not to happen.

As a result, I tend to only get excited when a plan is coming together nicely, when I think something unexpected and good might happen (exceedingly rare), or after I’ve gotten an unexpected, awesome surprise (also very rare). In recent memory, the latter two have only happened once (well, twice, at the same time), and it’s one of my most cherished memories of the past year. As a child, I got so good at guessing my birthday and Christmas presents that my mom simply stopped trying to surprise me, because I could deduce what she was going to get me. My dad has always been able to surprise me; he plays the game better than I do and is able to think further ahead than me, so he’s consistently been able to get me gifts I didn’t realize I wanted. It’s probably where I get it from; he also gets “pleased” that things are going well rather than “excited” that something is happening.

This blog is a conscious attempt for me to break out of my plotting habit. Except for the occasional series, I don’t think ahead to what I might write about before I’m sitting in front of the computer, and even when writing series, I have a vague idea but conscientiously avoid specifics until I’m actually writing. I do one draft and submit, doing only a cursory check for errors (more often editing them out later). It forces me to think on my feet, and write something without mulling over it beforehand.

In the past year, I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten better at spontaneity, especially when it comes to collecting my thoughts. I’m less worried about breaking from a plan or going off-script, and can adapt better than I was able to before posting regularly. Since moving to a five-day-a-week schedule, this has only gotten more noticeable. I’m forcing myself to think in the moment rather than having everything planned ahead, and it has simultaneously made me calmer about changing situations and more obsessive about making sure my plans are perfect and executed on point.

At this point, it’s undeniable that regular blogging has significantly changed my behavior, and I’m interested to see where else it goes. I still don’t get excited about things, and I still lean heavily towards planning than not, but it’s not at quite the same incorrigible level it used to be.

Source: Digital Initiative
The Downsides of Being a Mastermind

In FFXIV, the raid group I lead uses an unpopular strategy for part of Turn 9. Rather than an “everyone do this” strategy, requiring everyone in the group to move to a single point and then run around in sync, we use what has affectionately been called the “Benny Hill” strategy, which has everyone running around and more or less panicking through the phase.

I’ve been roundly criticized, both directly and indirectly, about pushing this strategy over the “standard” one. It’s been described as less efficient, more random, and unreliable, not to mention counter to what our players with experience in T9 are used to.

So, why do I insist upon it? Because I know my team. My raid group is contemptuously good at controlled chaos in fights. Put us in a situation where we just need to REACT and handle things as they come up and we absolutely dominate. By comparison, set up a situation in which we need to precisely execute a specific, detailed plan and we’re passable, but not amazing. The group has incredibly good instincts, and so as a result any strategy which focuses on general concepts versus specific solutions is far more successful for us.

It’s a pretty significant departure from how a lot of groups operate. Many raids go by a sort of stimulus/response strategy– “when X happens, do Y”. Very lengthy, detailed plans arise from this sort of thing– “when X happens, do Y if A is also happening, otherwise do Z if B is happening, and if neither A nor B is happening, do nothing”, which everyone needs to just internalize. It works very well for a group that’s focused on following orders and being told what to do. In large part, this was true of LNR– we divided fights up into specific stimuli that people needed to watch for and react specifically to and otherwise ignore. I knew a great many people in LNR who had no idea how certain fights worked, just what to do as their specific class at specific key points.

In FFXIV, the group is very different. Everyone is very active and very involved. Instead of describing stimulus/response strategy, I focus on what the boss is going to actually do, and leave the solutions up to individuals. The only time specific “do this” strategies come up is when we need a coordinated effort in a very specific way, but most of the time I can let the strategy adapt itself as people figure out what they need to do.

Tonight, we went into Shiva Extreme, a fight that a lot of groups break down into very specific, very detailed stimulus/response strategies. All of the guides I’ve read online talk about “when you see X, do Y”, but not what’s actually happening or what you’re avoiding. I find it frustrating, because there are often multiple ways to deal with a particular situation, and boiling it down into a single strategy that works for a single group doesn’t necessarily spread evenly across all groups (in fact, it rarely does). Instead, we quickly described the kinds of things the boss did, and some general concepts for dealing with them, and did extremely well as a result. Rather than proscribing specific behaviors, we described the situation and let people handle it as best they could. We certainly did things “wrong” in a number of ways, but we had a lot of success with the fight as a whole, and will probably beat it with little difficulty next week.

One particularly unsuccessful raid group I ran with focused exclusively on the “right” way to do boss fights, often to the detriment of the group, because deviating from the “correct strategy” was unthinkable, even when the group’s strengths clearly lied elsewhere. In one specific case, after multiple weeks of wipes to a particular chain of mechanics, I suggested we simply take the damage that we were trying to avoid, and have our healers heal through it. The suggestion received widespread derision, but since it was late and people were tired, we tried it anyway… and beat the boss handily on that attempt. The next week, we were… back to the “official” strategy, losing, even though we’d proven we could win a different way.

One of the most important things about raid leading, and I suspect leading teams in general, is paying attention to what your team is good at and can excel at and slightly altering your parameters to play to those strengths. Sometimes this leads to some really bizarre behavior, but however weird your approach might be, if your output is successful, it largely doesn’t matter. Every successful new paradigm started as a weird idea, and not every successful approach is going to be universally successful for everyone who tries it. Paying attention to what’s good about what you have to work with is an important part of a team’s success.

Square peg and a round hole. Metaphor for a misfit or nonconformist.

In a lot of cases, I’ve seen people use the phrase “square peg, round hole”. Most of the time, this is used as critique of the person or team or strategy– the “peg”, and suggests that maybe the peg should change to fit, or that a different peg entirely should be used. Sometimes, I think, it’s worth looking instead at the hole, and changing that.

Source: Digital Initiative
Playing To Your Strengths