An open letter regarding wizden leadership.

A little over a year ago, Wizden had an exodus of hardworking, once enthusiastic staff. This arose from the organizational culture and… remarkably, lessons do not seem to have been learnt. We’re seeing problems arise again as an aura of conflict within the project bubbles up more frequently and overtly and the team sheds talent… maybe not en masse this time, but definitively bit by bit. It is unsustainable.

I dearly love SS14, and while I don’t often play on Wizden servers, I believe that a strong upstream is vital to maintaining a robust community, ecosystem, and longevity writ large. When problems are deep set, it is often necessary if uncomfortable to draw them into the open and shine a light so that they can be acknowledged, confronted, and resolved. As humans, we tend toward maintaining the status quo. Part of this comes from the cost of challenging the status quo, particularly from within an organization. As someone outside of the organization, I don’t have to worry about that cost. Given my love for SS14, I’m going invest some time in writing up a good faith attempt at shining said light on problems.

Now, this open letter talks about project leadership. It will try to keep that definition in the abstract for two reasons. First is that I’m not involved in development. I’m not in the room. PJB might be the most visible part of leadership, but I genuinely have no idea how the upper echelons are structured. Is it the individual? Is it a cluster of people? Don’t know, don’t care. Leadership is a characteristic of an organization - it is structural. Ergo, it best serves to confront the visible characteristic. Second, this is an online niche community. As is inevitable, it’s had a fair share of conflict arising from … personalities, good old Online Social Skills, and the information loss found in games of telephone. I don’t care about drama unless it involves myself or people close to me. There’s no space station drama that fits this criteria, so whatever. I’ve no skin in the drama game so trying to frame things to sidestep perception of that. This letter engages not with personality or reputation, but with what I can see - what’s apparent through reading discussions, comment threads, PRs, and observing development over the past year and a half. It engages with that, and filters it through my own experience of working in software development, both boots on the ground and at a leadership level.

So, moving past the preamble:

An organization is reflective of it’s leadership. Poor leadership results in stagnation, it creates spiraling problems of it’s own making, and is incapable of driving solutions forward. Projects with poor leadership have a tendency toward withering and dying. Sometimes this comes through visible schism, other times it’s a gradual and drawn out decline.

Leadership is it’s own skill set. We often don’t realize this. ‘Management’ is often incorrectly synonymous with ‘leadership’. This isn’t helped by an ubiquity of corporate promotion ladders that push people up an organizational hierarchy where team member becomes team leader with a sudden expectation of ditching the crunchy hard skill sets involved in actual production in lieu of the soft skills of drawing productivity out of other people. Leadership is a skill and aptitude. It is not inherent, and mere ‘ownership’ over a project does not bequest capabilities in the discipline.

Good leaders set a cause, and rally people to it. They cultivate healthy organizations, and are proactive in identifying, confronting, and resolving problems. Good leadership sees major issues as challenges to overcome rather than as inherent characteristics of an environment. Good leaders are inspiring rather than complacent. It builds trust. Good leadership is never the elephant in the room.

When I’m browsing PR comments and reading responses from leadership that fall into the sort of belligerence, dismissal, and disrespect that in a professional workplace would have me looking for employment elsewhere, I have to ask why someone would stick around when they’re not earning a dime for their troubles. Why on earth would someone be motivated to volunteer, and why wouldn’t they start looking to move downstream to an environment where what they do with their spare time is enjoyable and rewarding?

For the sake of brevity, let’s cherry-pick just a couple of recent examples.

There’s the situation with Salvage. Actions from leadership are impulsive, unpredictable, and show disregard to the efforts of contributors. Discussions around it are opaque. There’s no formal work groups or projects trying to drive things forward. There’s no “let’s solve salvage” banner planting. The development culture -from the top- is setting things up to fail.

Same happens within the recent PR around removing dwarves. Impulsive and unpredictable action from the powers above. Combative dialogue. No attempt to actually drive solutions.

Two relatively loud recent examples sharing a narrow scope of demonstrable behavior. But this can be seen time and time again. Attitudes are toxic, though it runs deeper than just being rude. We have baseline failings in organizational leadership. There’s no ‘pulling people together’. There’s no ‘driving solutions’. There’s no sense of direction. How is this sustainable?

You can make an argument that people should have a thicker skin, that the job of helping to run a show like this is hard. I’m sure there’s any number of defensive flexes. The only thing that concerns me is outcomes. Do the outcomes of defensiveness benefit the project when there’s so many clearly demonstrable issues? No.

Look at the process involved in forward development. Invest time in a design doc. Haggle over it with an inevitably binary outcome. A focus on gatekeeping feature development (perhaps under misapprehensions of quality control), rather than on actual problem solving. A tendency toward volunteer work and time investment being shut down on a whim. When a process is so inherently confrontational and tailored toward throttling forward movement, is it any wonder that Wizden struggles to ship significant feature? Good leadership identifies and confronts faulty processes. SS14’s development community does not have that.

What does the development community have? Does it have a point of focus, a direction to things? A collective sense of working toward specific goals and targets? Milestones, horizons to strive for, etc, etc, etc. Does a shared sense of purpose trickle down and encourage people to contribute and cheer on the hardworking volunteers? Is there trust.

To answer rhetorical questions and start repeating myself, the outcomes that we see as a result of current leadership are apparent. Struggles with staff retention. Struggles with consistently delivering major features. An inability to resolve problems inside and outside the game’s design. A lack of direction. As an organization, Wizden does not display capable leadership.

We are well past the stage of pulling everything together to deliver a baseline software product. Now we’re at a different phase in the game’s lifespan: the point where we need to create consensus, steer the ship forward while serving both upstream and downstream and hold people together against conflicting expectations. Even beyond the big picture development stuff, that’s a lot of stakeholders to navigate, many competing interests, a lot of points of data to account for, and a lot of PRs coming through! Unfortunately, Wizden leadership is has displayed itself unable to meet these challenges. The organization, from the top down, is not fit for purpose. We can see their struggle in simply treading water. The staff is overworked, but this is a problem of the project’s own making.

It is easy to get on the defensive around this. But does that solve any problems? It does not.

Ultimately, the question that needs to be answered is whether we’re trying to make a good game with a healthy & broad development community… or is the development community just working to buoy up the pastime of project leadership and project leadership only. From a perspective of raw, cynical property rights ‘ownership’, the latter option could be argued as being completely valid. If that is the case, it needs to be said out loud so that the wider community can identify the limitations of Wizden’s lifespan & potential, and act accordingly.

Yes, running something big is difficult. This is precisely why it should be handled by those who are up to the task.