Worse Than You’d Hoped. Better Than You’d Feared.

They can’t all be winners.

Getting anything done at all is a triumph. Celebrate! But not too much.

I once had a coworker who loved this aphorism: “You’re not as good as you think you are when you’re succeeding, and you’re not as bad as you think you are when you’ve failed.” 

There was a time when I thought that sentiment was a recipe for mediocrity. I was sure that kind of luke-warm, middle-path crap would just lead to false modesty on the one hand and convenient self-justifications on the other. 

Better, I thought, to really celebrate the wins! Chase that high. And vigorously interrogate the failures. Expose the flaws and crush them! 

But as I got older and worked on both resounding successes and abject failures, and especially as I led and managed teams, my attitude changed, at least a little. 

I still absolutely believe honest assessment and expression is fundamentally important: false modesty is gross, self-justification is worse. 

Trying to understand the complex dynamics of success and failure is a really worthwhile endeavor.

The margins, they are wafer thin.

I worked for many (many!) years in games. The modern game industry tends to be “hit driven”: publishers make huge upfront investments in development and hope to make money on the other side. That means you spend two or three or four years and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in development and then…hope the title succeeds.

There are many, many things wrong with this model. But that’s not my point today. For today, we take all of that as it stands. Today is about a tiny glimpse into how that can feel from the inside.

In my time I contributed to some massive successes — games that won prestigious awards, sold tens of millions of copies, and made money hand over fist.

I can think of plenty of examples during those productions where I felt I had done something particularly clever or innovative, or my team had executed at a particularly high level, and I began to think, yeah, we really got that thing over the finish line.

Of course, in my time in the industry I also worked on some real turds. Games that we knew were terrible during development but had to finish for some obscure business reason. Games that were canceled before seeing the light of day. Games that saw the light of day and then really wished they hadn’t. At least one game that made a prominent “Most Disappointing Game of the Year” list.¹

And, unsurprisingly, I can think of plenty of decisions I made during those developments that were…poor. Priority-setting that emphasized the wrong work, moments of sub-par execution that I chose to ignore, creative risks that lacked commitment.

Even when I doubted much of the success or failure was because of me and my contributions, it was nonetheless hard to imagine all of it was in spite of me and my contributions, either. I played a role! 

But most importantly, I don’t think I was ever very good at recognizing which was which in the moment. 

That mistake that I was sure derailed the whole thing? No one ever even notices. The clever tweak I was so proud of? Every review mentions it with a cringe. Who knows! I don’t think I’m worse at this than others. It’s just really hard to do.

In fact, it’s impossible to really know specifically if there was one winning move that truly made a project successful, much less what that move was. If it was knowable, everyone would do it! All the time! It’s also impossible to really know if one or another idea or execution fatally tanked a project. 

But I’ll bet a neutral analysis, if such a thing were possible, would find that I made very, very close to the same percentage of clever contributions on the failures and poorly wrought decisions on the successes, and vice versa. The framing is different based on the outcomes, but realistically, the work itself is just shades apart.

Making up numbers. Quantify!

Note that while much of my experience is in the game industry, not all of it is. Plus, I’ve gone deep enough with folks in film, music, academia, publishing, advertising, architecture, and more that I believe these observations generalize across creative teams pretty well. So here we go. 

I’m convinced that at our best, when we’re really kicking ass, the most any of us can do is be, say, 52% right, 48% wrong. When that’s clicking, those are amazing times.

Winning teams are those where, say, 52% of the folks on the team are at their 52% best. That’s it.

(Obviously, I’m making these numbers up. 52? 48? I don’t know what real numbers might be, or how to quantify all this…or even if it can be quantified. But I’m pretty sure, in broad strokes, this is more or less how it works.)

The thing is, people are complex. Even the best performers get surprise medical diagnoses, fall out with old friends, or lose loved ones. Their basements flood, their cars die, their kids get suspended — who knows! All kinds of things are happening all the time to all of us.

And they’re not even all bad things. Maybe they win the lottery! Maybe their spouse gets a huge promotion at work, their best friend has a baby, or their softball team goes to nationals. Those things happen too. At any given point, there are huge forces at work on each and every one of us, which we may or may not even be conscious of. 

Can those forces tip even the best of us from 52 to 48? They can. They will.

When big projects go wrong, it’s usually not some catastrophic single failure — in my experience, those usually get caught and fixed (or at least mitigated). Rather, it’s the slow slog of a team where, for whatever reason, 52% of the folks are at 48%, as it were. It’s still a good team made up of good people. But the “wrongs” are adding up just that little bit more than the “rights.”

“Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it. Beware feeling you’re too good to need it.” -Audre Lorde

So what do we do? Well, I’ve come to believe that in addition to all the usual team-leadership stuff (there’s so much!), we must be forthright that the margin between success and failure is razor thin — and extremely hard to see. So hard, that we’re probably not seeing it.

We must create an environment that recognizes and celebrates the little successes, but also recognizes and addresses the little failures. It’s not blowing sunshine in everyone’s faces, but it’s also not dwelling on what isn’t working.

It’s a total buzzkill to tamp down legitimate pride in good work for fear of hubris taking over. At the same time, it is credibility-killing pablum to celebrate successes that don’t exist, or deny failures that do.

Working on a winning team is fun! It can feel like all the ideas are genius. Working on a failing team is very much not fun. It can seem like a march to oblivion. Both can become self-supporting spirals. Neither is probably the whole truth.²

Admitting this, and being open and clear about it is not a recipe for mediocrity — and it’s not cynical or defeatist. It is just meeting the world as it is.

It’s all fun and games until somebody gets laid off.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all this lately as my old industry is really going through it right now. Tens of thousands of layoffs in the last couple years. Big projects canceled, or released to a resounding thud and pulled. Studios closing, innovative ideas getting shelved. Good people jettisoned into a workforce in tumult.

It strikes me as extremely unlikely that all of those people paying the price for these failed projects were, themselves, to blame. Still, we tend to be very hard on ourselves.

I really have a lot of empathy for those folks who are kicking themselves for some imagined mistake or missed opportunity. I also empathize with wanting to blame someone else for some “obvious” wrong decision or ignorant miscalculation.

But I don’t think it’s very productive. Are there senior executives who should feel ashamed of themselves? Yes. Does the entire model have some deep-seated problems? Double yes.

There is some real cynical bullshit in the industry, for sure. Nonetheless (and I think this generalizes to every industry), most people aren’t trying to fail. They’re trying to make good decisions. 

And while all of us would probably rather be judged only at our most right, none of us deserves to be judged only at our most wrong. You don’t owe anyone the former, but we all owe each other — and ourselves — the latter.

1. FWIW I’m using the notion of “success” here the way the industry does. I could argue that some of those financially successful projects were utter creative failures, but, well, here we are.

2. Yes, sometimes it is the whole truth. Some projects just kick ass, and some are just awful. But I really think that more often than not those assessments only work in retrospect. No matter how awesome and fun and productive the team felt in production, if their project comes out and lays an egg, the assessment is liable to become colored by that. And vice versa — we can forget a lot of pain in the light of a big sales bonus…