In other words, if people aren’t sold on the effectiveness of collaboration, you probably shouldn’t have hired them if you want to have a team culture that relies on collaboration. By the time you realize that, it’s usually too late :) Of course, whether you agree or not depends on how much you think people can change.

Maybe my thoughts regarding an ultimate authority are just a reflection of what I think it would take to try to patch the cabal system into the team culture that I’m familiar with. If everyone on the project was inherently sold on the effectiveness of collaboration, perhaps you wouldn’t need an enforcer of authority. That seems to have been the case for Valve.

(Then again, if people aren’t sold on the effectiveness of collaboration, perhaps they wouldn’t accept the authority anyway. Whee.)

The original article can be found at: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwell_01.htm

There is no explicit mention of any ultimate authority, either intra- or inter-cabal, just recorders. I quote:

“The first few months of the Cabal process were somewhat nerve wracking for those outside the process. It wasn’t clear that egos could be suppressed enough to get anything done, or that a vision of the game filtered through a large number of people would be anything other than bland.”

Which implies to me that they did not have an explicit mechanism, but were, basically, just lucky because they picked the right people with the right level of maturity. (I think the lack of an explicit mechanism is scary and makes people attend more meetings than they strictly have to, but hey.)

The article also mentions the value of having a professional writer (Marc Laidlaw, presumably) on staff: “his ability to keep track of thematic structures, plot twists, pacing, and consistency was invaluable.”

I think he did more than just keep track of things. It is Half-Life’s consistency that is one of its strongest (and least appreciated) traits, and one of the things that’s pretty hard to make happen without squashing everyone else’s creativity.

* Ideas and suggestions can and should come from any member of a cabal, at any time. This is necessary because it ensures that the project is open to the best ideas.

* There is a single individual who is the cabal’s “ultimate authority.” This is necessary in order to filter out the best ideas and assemble them into a coherent vision & plan of action.

* The “ultimate authority” is someone within the cabal, obviously. This person don’t have to go outside the cabal for approval — of anything. This is necessary in order to ensure that the cabal is self-sufficient. (It does not preclude a cabal of cabals.)

* The “ultimate authority” is supremely reasonable. Which means: this person will select the ideas that are the most compelling, taking all factors into account, especially including scheduling. Furthermore, this person can then justify their decisions, in a way that’s compelling even to those who initially disagreed. (The goal is not that this person’s authority should be challenged constantly, but rather that this person’s capacity for reason eventually becomes so self-evident that the cabal gains complete confidence in this person’s ability to make the right decisions.)

So, rather than a “creative democracy,” what I’m really looking for is a “creative President-and-cabinet”. Except that the president isn’t necessarily elected. The whole cabal has to be pretty level-headed, in order to pick the most reasonable of their number to be the vision-keeper.

Given how I’ve just described my own wacky vision of “cabals,” I must agree with you: I’m quite willing to believe that there are companies that could not possibly work effectively using such a system.

However, the cabal process, as described in that GD article, can easily be interpreted as being a creative democracy, and that’s something I am convinced can’t work, as a repeatable approach or process. Simply put, you need to have one person who keeps the vision.

A friend of mine once interviewed Ken Birdwell, the author of that article, and it turned out their implementation is not a creative democracy, and they do have vision keepers.

The problem with success, as I’m sure you’re aware of, is that it is hard to pin-point why someone has been successful. It is often a combination of many things, plus some ineffable qualities and some luck. But it is very easy to pick one obvious trait, such as the cabal process, and emulate it. But even if this process was the reason for someone else’s success, you may emulate it badly, and – more importantly – it may not fit your organization at all.

Having worked for several companies, I’ve grown to appreciate the influence of company culture and how it influences what an organization can and cannot do. I am entirely hypothesizing here, but likely cabal works for Valve because they were founded by certain people who hired the right people and who shaped the company so that that works. And probably the cabal idea came completely naturally to them.

(Yes, I can and do argue with success.)

For an impressive and apparently successful approach to consciously shaping a company’s culture, try to find out how Ensemble and their offspring studios work. I don’t think I can quote it here, and anyway I’m not the right person to write about it.

I will write about the powerful idea from that GD article in a separate post.

Well finish the digression, dammit! :) What do you find powerful and poisonous about the cabal concept?

I say it’s powerful when it’s implemented, and it’s poisonous when it’s not. ;)

To elaborate: when design-competent artists and programmers learn about the idea of a “cabal,” and can point to how successful it was for Valve, it causes them to feel extremely justified in wanting input into their project’s design — and even more disgruntled than they otherwise would have been, when management and the design team refuse to try it.

Yep. “Like my hat? It’s made of poison!” ;)

(A bit of an obvious set up for trying to get a free dinner, I know.)

I’m going to lift the “talking about story in stand-up meetings” idea from your post (and probably the chart one too). We do have daily stand-up meetings for planning and I hadn’t realize how great an opportunity they were.

Thanks.