There's No Substitute for Good GMing

I used to work at a startup. The founder of the company was very much into applying what he had learned doing an MBA, and one of his big interests was translating tacit knowledge and know-how into formal rules, processes, "playbooks" and so on. Because I was deemed to be "good at what I do", I was his test case, and we spent many a long afternoon sitting down trying to transform my know-how into a series of documents that others within the company could use to improve. That experience, I can see now in retrospect, sparked a long-standing skepticism of mine towards all such attempts to formalise the knowledge and skills that professionals develop through practice. Let me put it another way: if you're good at a profession or craft, most of what makes you good is learned unconsciously and practiced without deliberate thought. And the exercise of trying to extract all of that and transform it into a set of procedures, guidelines, processes and so in is not only largely doomed to failure but actually can very frequently be detrimental to the practitioner himself - it certainly made me second-guess myself a lot more than I had done when I was just blissfully being good at my job.

(This is why most books on "How to Write/Draw/Write Songs" and so on completely suck, by the way, with the only useful information ever imparted being "practice a lot" - something which one day I will write a blog post about in itself.)

Nothing new here if you've read your Polanyi or Oakeshott or for that matter ever watched a genuine craftsman (using the term broadly to include teachers, doctors, engineers and so on) do anything. But an important observation for me at that time.

It applies very strongly to GMing. You can learn to be a good GM. And there are certain rules of thumb which will help. But by and large you get good at it from experience, and the know-how of a good GM tends to be tacit and untheorized. Good GMs don't think about what makes a good GM and put that into practice. They just do it. What skills they learn they learn "on the job" - and, it's worth adding, from social interactions as they go through life, GMing being a social activity.

It is important, of course, not to confuse the necessary and the causal. It is necessary to wear a suit to a job interview, but that won't cause you to get the job. Likewise, it's necessary to study medicine if you are going to be a doctor, but that won't make you a good one. You need to know some rules if you are going to be a GM, but they won't make you good at it.

And it's important, too, not to discount the je ne sais quois of talent; some people do have natural gifts (and natural disadvantages). But I very much believe that good GMing comes from just going ahead and doing it - frequently - and letting your brain's natural propensity for trial and error and unconscious learning to get into gear.