Get it Done

How Corporate Life Accidentally Gives You "Open World Syndrome"

In a video game like Pac Man, there’s a “board” and there are dots and ghosts and fruit. It’s pretty easy to understand the basics. Move the little chomping face around the board avoiding the ghosts and eating the things. Easy. That’s a “closed world” in video games. Everything is easy to figure out.

By contrast, some video games offer an “open world” environment, where there are many story points, but there’s also a whole lot of unscripted adventuring you might experience. Games like Red Dead Redemption or No Man’s Sky or Skyrim are open world.

I think if we look at corporate life as an “open world” environment, where there are lots of days where you’ve got some tasks to do, but also a lot of unstructured time, there’s a huge risk of wandering off and not actually completing a lot of challenges, such as it is.

Our Little Human Brains and Time

One challenge we have is that we think of time as infinite. There will always be enough time. And I think it’s hard to perceive this any other way until we find ourselves against a barrier or a marker in that time.

Deadlines, for instance, are primary challenges. They’re good in that way.

By contrast, we have lots of “what else could I do” time in any given day. Time where there’s not an express push against us, and I think in corporations, this is a challenge a lot of people face. It’s not especially that people choose to waste time, but rather that missions are always so vague and hard to connect to someone’s day to day.

If you’re told the mission is to reduce spending, you know NOT to buy things. Okay, now what?

When we have time and when we can’t align our time with useful ways to approach our mission, that’s when I fear we go “open world.”

Leading is Modeling, In This Case

No matter if you’re leading yourself or guiding a team, the mission here is to model what will align some of this “open world” time with the actual challenges that will benefit everyone to accomplish or solve.

For whatever reason, we love repetition. We love reminders. We love packaging things into simple-to-consume shapes and sizes. Think about church/temple/mosque time. You go there to re-read the same book you’ve read many times. But at work, for some reason, we don’t do this often enough. (Except for franchises, right?)

So if you’re leading, model. Show people what ties today to the mission. Turn the open world into a closed board.

And I have some career advice for the paid members after the cut.

Chris…