Cross-Contamination

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across this blog post, in which the author discusses the ways in which GMing and leading raids in WoW prepared him for a project management career.

So much resonance.

I've joked before about the crossover between full-scale disaster exercises and LARPs. At least, a lot of people who've heard that have thought I was joking. A smaller subset knows I'm not.

A lot of what we do in emergency management involves constructing hypothetical scenarios that have to be plausible and internally consistent, and then figuring out how to respond to them. Whether we're doing that on our own in the office or pulling together a cross-functional team from both the expected and the unlikely response agencies, we do a lot of forward-looking problem-solving. What we call a "tabletop exercise," most gamers would recognize immediately as a rules-light gaming session. There aren't polyhedral dice or (usually) character sheets because most of the participants are in play as themselves or their agencies, but the flow of discussion between players and the exercise controllers (read: GMs) is pretty much what I've been doing in this hobby for decades.

I'm not exactly getting paid to participate in my hobby but a surprising amount of the skill set is applicable...