How to play Surviving Design Projects
Surviving Design Projects is a card game I designed to teach creative teams how to deal with difficult situations. At its core, the game involves story-telling. Players tell stories about difficult situations and then offer suggestions for managing them.
The hardest part of design isn’t doing the design. It’s working with everyone else without wanting to run screaming for the hills.
Collaborating with smart people on challenging problems is, inevitably, fraught with conflict. Conflict is good for creative work, moving a project forward as designers wrestle with the challenge. In this way, conflict isn’t inherently negative. But not all team members are equipped to deal with conflict, whatever its form.
Use patterns to manage situations
Surviving Design Projects is, among other things, a little game based on that model to help designers hone their people skills. The current version of the game consists of two decks of cards: situations and patterns.
- Situations describe typical scenarios on design projects. They’re things like not having all the right inputs or working with a poorly defined business strategy.
- Patterns are behaviors you can use to address these difficult situations. There are some classic ones like reflecting back what you heard to show that you’re listening, as well as some others I’ve gathered over the years.
How to play
Before you start, you need to get a copy of the game from print-on-demand vendor TheGameCrafter.com. You’ll want at least 2 other people to play with. Groups of 5–8 work best.
0. Set up
Separate the pattern (brown) cards from the situation (blue) cards. Deal everyone 3 pattern cards and put the rest in a draw pile in the middle of the table. Shuffle the situation cards and put the stack face-down in the middle of the table.
Pick one person to be the Creative Director, the person who describes the difficult situation. Everyone will have a chance to play Creative Director.
1. Describe the situation
The Creative Director turns over the first Situation card and makes up a story about the scenario on it.
Let’s say I turn over Lack of Clearly Defined Inputs. Maybe I make up this story:
Though the client has provided stacks of user research, they can’t offer us any clear business priorities. They’re just asking us to make their site better without giving us a sense of what they want to accomplish. I need to go talk to the client about this, and try to get them to give us some inputs.
How do you think I should do this?
2. Play patterns
One-by-one, starting with the player to the Creative Director’s left, each player selects a pattern from their hand. They describe how they would apply the pattern to the situation.
Let’s say one player uses Make Assumptions and describes it like this:
This pattern suggests we fill in the holes ourselves with some assumptions. I guess the idea is that we’re smart people, so we should know what the starting point is. We could brainstorm a list of assumptions about the project’s business priorities, then share that with the client to validate it.
3. Choose the best approach
The Creative Director chooses which technique she would use to deal with the situation. The person who suggested the pattern gets to keep the Situation card. (In this example, that’s the Lack of Clearly Defined Inputs card.)
If you’re the Creative Director, you can just pick which one you like, or narrow it down to a couple and discuss with everyone else. The point of the game isn’t to win; it’s to talk about how to deal with difficult situations.
4. Clean-up and change creative director
Everyone who played a pattern card should take a new one to get their hand up to 3 cards.
The person to the left of the creative director now assumes that role, turns over the top situation card, and tells the story.
Ending the Game
You can play until everyone at the table has assumed the role of creative director once. If you’re playing with five or fewer people, maybe give each person two chances to be creative director.
At the end of the game, the person with the most Situation cards is the winner. Everyone else needs to buy them a beverage of their choice. The real point, though, is to engage in a conversation in how to deal with difficult situations.
The deck includes a card with discussion prompts, so you and your team can reflect on the game.
So that’s it. It’s a pretty simple game, but it will definitely get you and your team talking about difficult situations in a no-strings environment.
What’s Next?
Pick up a copy of the cards! Or buy Designing Together, my book on conflict and collaboration that elaborates the frameworks introduced by the game. If you get a chance to play, drop me a tweet: I’d love to hear about it.
I have a workshop on collaboration. If your team dynamics need a tweak or you’re just looking to level up your team’s collaboration chops, get in touch!
