Where The Dragons Roam: How Small Changes Can Have Huge Effects On Your Team

Like many people, House of the Dragons has been my favourite show of the year and the recent season finale has left me wanting more. The fact that the filming of the next series is not happening until mid-next year is creating a lot of frustration for all the fans. 

House of the Dragons is the prequel to the hugely successful HBO series, Game Of Thrones, based on the book series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R Martin.

Game of Thrones introduced main viewers to the political greyness of shows like The Wire. Where good people do bad things, bad people do good things, and everyone exists on a moral continuum depending on the situation.

Specifically, it felt real. It wasn’t good vs bad, even though there were people everyone loved to hate, you could see why they were doing it.

Martin is not known for his speed of writing and many readers are terrified he might not live long enough to complete the epic series. 

Compounding this issue is the book series only gave enough material to get to season 5 of the TV show. Post-season 5, many fans and critics thought the quality of the storytelling went downhill and finished in an unsatisfactory way compared to the quality of the previous seasons. 

The Lore and the Flow-on Effect

Some fans have been annoyed with the writing on season 2 of House of the Dragons. 

One of these people is the author of the books himself, George R.R Martin. He wrote a blog post about how one little change could have a huge effect on the world.

The post talks about the design of his world and how he tried to ground it in realism even though there is magic and dragons. “I wanted Westeros to feel real,” Martin said.

The main frustration he had was from a small but important choice. Are dragons nomadic?

Who cares right? It is a fantasy show, if a dragon flies over a hill or stays on this side of the hill, magic, blood, backstabbing, incest, it still all happens.

Martin argues no.

“If dragons were nomadic, they would have overrun half of Essos… after three hundred years, we would have dragons all over the realm and every noble house would have a few.”

Decision Process

The world feels real because decisions matter and there is an internal consistency to everything. Dragons are the nuclear bomb of the Game of Thrones universe and if they flew everywhere then dragons would be everywhere.

This would change the entire world.

The logic of how the dragons move around matters because there are flow-on effects to that decision.

Discipline

So what does where dragons fly in a make-believe world matter to your team and your day-to-day work life?

The standards and processes are the same as the dragons, if they aren’t expressed consistently the work experience will be completely different.

If you talk about a set of values you want your team to live by or you set certain standards and then you let them slip. You show that they don’t matter and so the team’s behaviour can change to match those new standards.

If a team value is respecting other’s time which means you come early and prepared for meetings then you routinely arrive late to meetings you are showing that this is not a value for you and so it is not a value for your team.

Yes, a dragon roaming further away from a castle sounds inconsequential to a story that covers thousands of years and sprawls over a whole planet, but it is the details that change and inform that story.

The same is true with how you respond to the values you say you have and the values that are upheld within your team.