Happy Friday,

Recently, I've signed up on some sites that will hopefully let me get back into one of my favorite pastimes, playing TTRPGS (think Dungeons and Dragons). Anyway, I was signing up for a site, and they had an application process that I thought did a better job than most job applications.

One of the topics you had to spend a while on and write several essay answers to was how do you create psychological safety at a table, and demonstrate your fluency with at least one gaming safety technique.

This is a wild thing to consider when many companies and leaders still struggle with understanding psychological safety or wonder if it's a valid consideration at all.

So I want to describe two techniques from the TTRPG community and how you might use them.

X Card

The X Card is a simple safety technique built to allow people to signal they are no longer comfortable with the content or direction of the game. Since these games are open-ended stories, some topics and situations can be distressing for folks. The X Card is a way to stop that.

The idea is simple, you let folks know that when they feel unsafe, they can hold up a card with an X on it. This signals to the person running the game that they must stop, back up, and choose a different path. There is no discussion about this. It is an emergency stop in the game to prevent distress.

In a business setting a tool like this translates immediately to meetings and discussions where folks experience distress in meetings. The X Card is a potent tool to force a change of course.

Lines and Veils

Lines and veils is a technique used by game organizers to help describe the boundaries of what will be in the game. They describe "Lines" as hard rules about content that they will neither cross nor allow. An example in a game setting might be something like torture. If they describe that as a line, it means that torture crosses the line and will not be in the game or allowed in. Veils, on the other hand, are topics that will show up with limitations. So, going back to the torture example, if this were in the veil, it means it could show up, but now we would say how it will and how it won't. The veil represents content with blurred lines that won't be as explicit.

This is a way to set boundaries within a game and with players so they know what to expect.

In a business setting, we could look at a new project starting, and nobody is sure what decisions are on the table or not. Lines and veils would be a technique a leader could use to help lay out the types of decisions that are out of bounds (Lines), the types that are possible but likely need their involvement (Veils), and decisions that the group can make.

Something like this would, over time, give folks confidence to make decisions without fearing a rebuke for crossing some unknown or imaginary line. A technique like this would help restore trust in groups who would otherwise always wonder if what they're doing is going to earn an unpleasant discussion.

There you go, two techniques that the gaming community uses to build safety! There are dozens of techniques like this, and I sometimes marvel at how seriously folks playing a game take this when many leaders and companies don't.

Sincerely,

Ryan