The Red Queen

Another way of running projects

Nov 16, 2020

After playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. I fell in love with the open-ended world idea, you write your own game basically

When does work become a despective word?

Why my daughter goes to Childcare to play and I go to the office to work?

Is there another way of working?

Maybe your next project could be a D&D campaign like this

—

Background

A small rocket ship in the course of Mars has made great progress and shown incredible potential to reach its destination. Unfortunately, the original designers failed to predict the ever-growing size of the ship and the dangers of the environment.

Your job is to study the insides and outs of the ship and create an AI humanoid to control it

The Red Queen is a voice-enabled first respond assistant.

👨‍✈️ Red queen, status report
👧🏼 All systems operational, slightly higher latency on rates service

Value Proposition

For members

Have Fun
Learn a broad range of AWS managed services
Cross-Pollinate different domains
Socialize
Fulfill Intrinsic motivation
- Autonomy — Our desire to be self-directed.
- Mastery — The urge to get better skills.
- Purpose — The desire to do something that has meaning and is important.

For Business

Metrics, there is a lot of information which make it hard to filter noise and cause from effects
Runbooks, one we have identified the problem, what remediations could we execute?
Audit, accountability and post-mortem content
Collaboration, what’s the current hypothesis? what have we tried? latest state?
Communication, Internal and External
Security, Espionage and Intelligence

Rules

As you know, I'm always working on some random project.

This project, The Red Queen, is about teams and trying ways of getting work done

All of you share explorer traits, I believe you all are looking for ways to master your craft

I encourage you to take this time to practice those skills that you find useful or interesting,

whatever that is

We still need to live with some boundaries that we all can agree on

Structure

We are going to split our interactions into chapters

Each chapter is formed by:

Open

its goal is to imagine as many crazy ideas as possible, those ideas may be impossible but could influence or spark innovative ideas, in this phase we want to arm ourselves with as many options as possible

The first act is the opening act, and it’s all about opening - opening people’s minds, opening up possibilities. The opening act is about getting the people in the room, the cards on the table, the information and ideas flowing. You think of the opening as a big bang, an explosion of items and opportunities.
The more ideas you can get out in the open, the more you will have to work with in the next stage.

Explore

its goal is to try, answer why or why not

Once you have the energy and the ideas flowing into the room, you need to do some exploration and experimentation. This is where the rubber hits the road, where you look for patterns and analogies, try to see old things in new ways, sift and sort thought the ideas, build and test things, and so on. You want to create the conditions that will allow unexpected, surprising and delightful things to emerge

Close

it's all about accomplishing the mission, this is the getting it done part

In the final act you want to move toward conclusions - toward a decision, a actions and next steps. This is the time to assess ideas, to look at them with a critical and realistic eye. You can’t do everything or pursue every opportunity, which of them is the most promising?

Timeline

In terms of time. Every chapter progress with

Schedule

Between meetings, individual and group exploration is encouraged

Graphic Game Plan

A graphic game plan is one way of summarizing the current state, what problems are we facing? what’s next? what are we trying to accomplish?

Moreover, have you asked what have we done all this time, it’s hard for our minds to remember how you thought a month ago, blame the hindsight bias

Having a Game plan developed overtime will capture our journey

Chapter #1 - The Shuttle

You guys are in the waiting room to get into the shuttle,

You don't really know what's coming, you just enlisted through a random ad and thought that it would be cool to work in space.

Once you are all seated, Phil, a small and energetic crew member in the earth comes with a bit bucket and goes one by one asking you for all your belongings, storage in the ship is a luxury.

Phil,
Storage on the Space Shuttle is a luxury, you will give up comforts taken for granted here on Earth
You can only take 3 items with you, what are you keeping?

and off you go to Space

some of you start chatting with people close by, what are you guys saying? What do you think this is?

Until you can see through the window getting closer to the ship, you have made it inside with some help from Scott, a regular crew member doing his job, he looks OK, he doesn't seem that happy to see you, he says

Scott: so you are the team that so supposedly is going to get us out of this mess.

He starts walking you to the bridge to meet A, the captain. On our way there, the ship does some unfamiliar sounds and something feels odd.

Scott: don't worry about this, they come and go in a few minutes. It doesn't seem to cause any damages so why bother, you know the good old saying if it ain't broke don't fix it.

A: Thanks Scott, there was a small explosion on the second propulsor and your team needs you there ASAP.
Scott: on my way
A--
This is the 3rd time this week
How can we get back on track to Mars if we can't even keep a steady course
I need help. This can’t continue this way
I have granted you permission to do whatever you need to get the ship back in course

A leaves to attend another emergency