The USS Quad Damage

Uber Micro Management

While micro management shows that you don't trust the autonomy of your team members, understanding your doods is t3h pwn.

It's about understanding your team's motivations, attitudes, and personalities

I was reading a review of a video game and it got me thinking: It’s a video game about war and in order to make the most of your units, you have to consider their emotional state. Let me re-iterate: This is a video game, and as you’re explaining how you play to your friends, you’re telling them to put this female unit next to a guy because she fancies men, and it will help her do her job.

How many real managers think about the emotional state and attitudes of their workers when thinking about how to solve their problems? In most video games (RTS mostly) you can sometimes see units as expendable, and until the more recent games, where managing individual units to get the most out of them — by placing them in appropriate positions, or thinking about their individual strengths and weaknesses. Valkyrie Chronicles is the only one, to my knowledge, that makes you tactically address two units with the same roles (such as engineers or snipers) differently, based on their personality traits.

I’m going to mash up a term: Uber Micro Management. Unlike micro-management, this doesn’t really involve messing with your team’s daily activities, or telling them how to do their job. Rather it’s about understanding your team’s motivations, attitudes, and personalities. A single guy came up with twitter in his own time. He’s not a magician, just a nucleation point. All engineers can come up with the same ideas, but they need to be nourished for the seed to grow.