*Planted: 18 April 2025 | Last Tended: 22 April 2025* There are three types of approaches that game development studios tend to take when it comes to the concept of agency. These groups are not mapped to junior versus senior levels, but instead describe the general approach a company takes to how much agency they give their employees to solve problems. *** ##### 🟢 The Green Light group: Genuine Agency This group of people is regularly executing on work they have high agency on. They've been given an outcome to solve for (the Strategy) and the agency to determine the solution (the Approach) and leadership serves as a tool to unblock them from whatever they need to accomplish that outcome. Leadership owns the strategy and gives agency to this group to decide on the approach that solves that strategy. This group probably reports high satisfaction with their work and probably stays with their employer for a long time. There’s an assumption here that the work they’re producing is also good work or the right work. It’s certainly possible for a game studio to give their employees genuine agency but the employees go off the rails with it and produce poor outcomes. But this would likely lead to the studio folding without correcting this, thus removing it from this group as a successful example. So it only makes sense to assume that genuine agency for this group is also leading to successful outcomes. (See [[🌿Agency versus Accountability]]). ##### 🔴 The Red Light group: No Agency This group of people does not have any agency -- they're told what the Approach is that they need to execute, and they may or may not have any understanding or visibility into what the desired outcome actually is or why that Approach was chosen as a solution to get that outcome. Auteur-driven development houses sometimes employ this approach, and the people that best fit with this approach are those that would prefer a tight spec to execute on that has no ambiguity or room for their interpretation. People who don't fit this approach and want agency in their work will leave places like this, and it'll be clear why they leave. The "red light" assignment here implies that this is a negative outcome, but that's not actually the case -- a studio that explicitly gives no agency to their developers is simply making a choice that they feel is the best choice for the structure of the studio and/or who runs it. While many people want agency in their work, there is a certain degree of clarity when a studio is very explicit about deciding the approach that people will take. The studio, however, will run most efficiently when the developers working at it are aligned with leadership on this, and when leadership is effective in their choices. ##### 🟠 The Yellow Light group: Faux Agency This is the group that's the hardest to detect and has the worst outcomes: people leaving but for reasons that no one can articulate well, so there is little understanding in how to fix constant attrition. People in this group are told they have agency to solve problems, but when they decide on an approach they often encounter two scenarios: - the stakeholders take over ownership of the approach by constantly asking this group to redesign their approach until it looks exactly like the stakeholder's mental model of how they think it should be solved — the stakeholders are doing the work, but at max inefficiency through other people. - there's a lack of trust in their approach so they're required to justify the approach to the stakeholders in ways that belie the lack of trust (i.e., their approach must be validated as mistake-free or an airtight correct answer instead of a hypothesis to explore). This can also result in the first bullet point: redesigning the approach because there's a lack of trust in the team. This group is being told they have agency they don't actually have, and leadership may actually believe they're giving this group agency when they aren't. This is why it can be difficult to know why people in this group leave. They may in fact end up executing work that they've identified as something they own, but they either feel like the pen was taken out of their hands through the process, or they had to work some multiplier longer on winning over a stakeholder every cycle than someone at a high-agency place would have, and they feel exhausted and demoralized by the process. These people eventually leave (anecdotally from my observation, within 1-2 years) because they have high dissatisfaction with their job but they may not be able to articulate exactly what the cause is. *** There’s an assumption built into this model that, fundamentally, people want two things: 1. To do good work. 2. To have high or genuine agency. And there’s an assumption that people have high career satisfaction when both of these things are happening for them, and that the Green Light group is the place where they can achieve both of these things. *To work on:* - what keeps the Genuine Agency approach successful over time? - Thought: [[🌿Agency versus Accountability|accountability]] - how do you move a group from other categories into Genuine Agency effectively? Can you even do that? - Thought: add [[🌿Agency versus Accountability|accountability]] to the process and have product owners frame goals as [[🌿Questions as a mental framework|questions to answer]] instead prescribe a thing for the team to do - How much of a role does effective leadership play in successfully maintaining a Green Light style of work, and how much of it is an innate ability for the people in that group to work independently with genuine agency and good outcomes? What *is* that role? What do leaders need to do and *not* do? - Thought: provide [[🌿Agency versus Accountability|acountability]] *Related:* - [https://www.highagency.com](https://www.highagency.com/) (only slightly related) - "The moment you tell someone how to do something, you're doing their job for them." -- quote from FD