Mentorship as co-labor: play a video game with your mentee

Over the last few years, I’ve done thousands of office hours: first-come-first-served blocks that mentees set the goals for. And this is the dominant model for how mentorship is viewed in the workplace today: a 1:1 meeting, set on a calendar, with an explicit agenda.

I’m also the dad of a wonderful, quirky nine-year-old. He does not schedule his growth around my calendar and follows no agenda. Guidance happens spontaneously, as part of the context of our time together.

And this used to be the dominant model of work mentorship, against the backdrop of co-labor: a more experienced worker paired with a less experienced worker, doing a task together, with the knowledge transfer occurring contextually. As work became increasingly differentiated, the meeting model became the norm.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

My son is nine and finally old enough to play video games designed for adults. Our first outing has been Valehim, a Viking-themed sandbox survival game, and it has created a context for conversations that I cannot imagine having outside of co-labor.

This week, my partner decided she wants to play with us. But in order for her to not die immediately, she needs armor that matches our level. Which means we need troll hide. So my son had to form a plan to collaboratively hunt trolls and then act in a coordinated fashion, with one of us as bait while the other focuses on shooting the monster.We talk as we do this, sometimes about the tasks of the game but also about life and his experiences more generally. Sometimes the mentorship is explicit (I’m teaching about how the meta-game works), sometimes it happens implicitly (I’m listening and nudging as he rambles), but both happen organically.

Contrast that with the modern work environment. Often we do our work alone, because increasing profitability means reducing labor costs means using technology as our co-laborer (this will get worse, not better, with AI). We pop out of this solo labor for meetings, of which mentorship is one.

But what if mentorship reintroduced co-labor? In a perfect world, this would be role-relevant: we would pair code or write a communication together or design an intervention. But it doesn’t have to be. It can be as simple as introducing a quick game, a 60-minute hackathon on an orthogonal business problem, or anything that creates a context within which mentorship can happen. To borrow an educational phrase, “guide on the side, rather than sage on the stage.”

This doesn’t mean returning to the office. But it does mean being more deliberate about planning for context, which is the third participant in any mentorship experience. Because if the goal of mentorship is to encourage growth, we need much better soil than we have today.