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By Shon Rathbone, Founder, Creative Chairman & CEO, 3Headed Monster
Playing Dungeons and Dragons is great training for leading a creative agency. I should know because the only thing I’ve been doing longer than leading creative agencies is playing Dungeons and Dragons, which I’ve been doing since I was 12. Yes, I am a huge nerd. But I can tell you that D&D has enhanced my skills as a creative director and an agency leader in incredibly powerful and surprising ways, giving me a perspective on creative storytelling and leadership they don’t teach in ad school or business school.
I am not alone. Advertising is full of D&D nerds and in that bastion of content creation called Hollywood it’s become quite vogue to come out of the D&D closet. Actors like Joe Manganiello, Vince Vaughn, and the showrunners from Game of Thrones proudly play a weekly game. Critical Role, a streaming show run by Hollywood voice actors, is so popular they’re now selling out stadiums for live performances. If you’re in marketing, D&D is a cultural phenomenon you should know about and the lessons that translate to our discipline are legit. So if you’re curious and don’t mind spending a few minutes at the nerd table in the agency lunch room, I’ll give you a peek inside this world and share a few things I’ve learned from playing D&D.
The Game is Collaborative Storytelling
D&D is very different from most games because it isn’t about competition or winning. The game mechanics are a construct designed to allow a small group of friends to collaborate together on the live telling of a story. At the head of the table is the Dungeon Master, who leads the effort but leaves plenty of room for the individual contributions of every player. There is structure, with rules and a plot, but the creative details are up for grabs and every session is full of surprises. If you work in an agency, the parallels should be obvious. How do you lead and direct while leaving room for others to contribute and inviting them to do so? Developing this skill set is great preparation for leading a group of creatives or any group, for that matter. The ability to shepherd an idea through a gauntlet of contributors and collaborators, embracing their best ideas, while gently redirecting away from the stinkers is not an easy thing to do. D&D teaches this in the most fun way, as you navigate a maze of ghouls and goblins together, with no real world repercussions. When it works, the ebb and flow is magical. Yet so many leaders, in the agency world and beyond, struggle to find a balance between heavy-handed dictatorship and squishy ineffectiveness. Maybe instead of executive coaching, we should sign them up for a weekly game of Dungeons and Dragons!
A Blend of Skills Needed to Survive
The core of the D&D experience is exploring a dangerous dungeon with different challenges waiting around every spooky corner. Your best chance of surviving the adventure is to bring together a group of mixed disciplines that include classic archetypes like warrior, wizard, rogue and healer – and find a way to work together, blending these different skills and personalities into a cohesive unit. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s what every agency is trying to do but they all struggle with it. It’s hard to get it right. We all know the benefits of the disciplines coming together as one unit are tremendous. Every session of D&D gives you a chance to practice. But what D&D also teaches you is that there will be certain challenges where one of those disciplines is especially useful. Let’s say, your group of heroes finds a treasure chest and only the rogue has the skills required to pick the lock and get to the treasure. Will the others stand aside and let the tricky thief with the nimble fingers do his thing? Let’s hope so. This is a useful lesson because sometimes productive collaboration is knowing when to flex between working the problem as a group and letting the individual discipline have their hero moment. Handling every assignment like a group project is just as unproductive as not collaborating at all. Learning how to lead a group that can flex naturally between these two states and cheer for each other along the way is when you’re really cooking. D&D teaches that.
You’re Always Rolling the Dice
Risk is a part of the game. There’s lots of dice rolling in D&D. No matter how good you are, success is never guaranteed. The same is true in marketing but so often when I hear marketing professionals talk, I hear people who are under the illusion that risk can be engineered out of the game. That is a dangerous delusion. Is it smart to mitigate your risks when making business decisions? Sure, fine. But there’s already too much fear floating in the air of most conference rooms. The leader who understands there is risk in every action or inaction is the leader we need. All the best moments in D&D happen when someone has the courage to roll the dice. The same thing is true in business and most especially true in advertising. Roll the dice.
Win or Lose, Level Up
If you ask a D&D player how their game went and they answer, “I won,” they’re messing with you. Nobody really wins or loses in Dungeons and Dragons. The point is to seek new challenges, enjoy the experience, and grow from it. In gaming, we call that “leveling up.” Sometimes you’ll crush a challenge, sometimes you get chased from the dragon’s cave with your tail between your legs. No matter what happens, your character gains experience points and advances to the next level, gaining new skills and abilities. This is how we all should approach our jobs. You’re going to win some and lose some. But if you’re growing, it’s never really a loss, it’s just an experience. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to make sure we’re helping our people learn from the challenges they face. Are we actively looking for coaching moments throughout the adventure? I sure hope so. Because there’s nothing more deeply satisfying than leveling up.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here. Hope you gleaned something useful from my nerd talk. More importantly, I hope you’ll be inspired to grab some friends and play D&D. It’s a truly remarkable game that certainly shaped this creative leader and continues to do so.
