[This offer has expired. But I’m leaving it up as inspiration – does this suggest a fun experiment you’d like to do together?]
Let’s make believe we work in an office! We’ll pretend to be a manager and a direct report (or, if several players want to play together, a manager and their team). The Pretend Office is a way to get real work done, get or give real management and accountability support, while laughing, playing, not taking anything too seriously, and practicing being someone else.
Characters: We’ll be pretending to be other people. I’ll develop character sheets with some good and bad qualities, drawing from my extensive reading of the Ask A Manager advice column. You’ll tweak the character and add whatever backstory you like. We’ll finetune the characters together, for maximum fun and mayhem. If we are playing the ‘team’ option, we’ll also pre-establish relationships among the players, so you’ll know who is your work bff and who is your sworn enemy, who is competing with you for that promotion, and who is a slacker who secretly leaves early every day.
Tasks: If you want to work on your management or coaching skills, or just find it more fun, you can choose to be the manager. If you want me to coach and manage you, you can choose to be the direct report. Game play will last for a month, and in either role you’ll have to decide on a task that you expect will take about a month. This task can be anything you want, and you will really do it: could be writing a chapter of your book, learning a dance routine, deep cleaning your home, reading ten books…
How We’ll Play: Make believe play is consensual and changes as we go – we can always re-evaluate the rules and course of play to make it more fun. We’ll start with a quick out-of-character phone call to establish characters and general rules. Then we’ll start to play. I’ll set up a Slack workspace where we’ll do most of our communication. We’ll have weekly 30-minute meetings to discuss your progress. These one-on-ones will include actual advice and support on your task, as well as weird office politics and hilarious overuse of jargon and buzzwords. Between meetings, we’ll communicate as needed on Slack. As the month goes on, any player can introduce unexpected events that change gameplay – the big boss moves up a deadline, a sudden budget crisis appears, you are forced to waste time on inappropriate and irrelevant team-building exercises, your coworker won’t stop interrupting you to talk about their marital problems..
Cost to play is $500 USD for one month of play. Email hello@daydreamsandassociates.com if you are interested!