Alright, so the other day, we had this thing, right? We needed to get some team names. And of course, someone pipes up, “Hey, let’s do Game of Thrones themed names!” Sounds fun, initially. Initially being the key word here.
So, we started brainstorming. Or, what some people call brainstorming. I call it a slow descent into madness. First, you get the super obvious ones. “Team Stark!” “Team Lannister!” Yeah, groundbreaking. We really dug deep for those, didn’t we? Then you get the folks who try too hard, suggesting House Manderly or something equally obscure that half the room wouldn’t even recognize. What’s the point then, eh?
It reminded me of this one time, years ago, at a previous gig. We were launching a new internal software. Nothing fancy, just a tool to make some boring task slightly less boring. But the naming! Oh, the naming. We spent, and I kid you not, three solid weeks arguing about the name. Three weeks! People were drawing up presentations for their name suggestions. We had debates. Actual, heated debates. About a name for a tool that probably only fifty people would ever use.
I remember this one guy, let’s call him Bob. Bob was obsessed with “Project Phoenix.” He thought it symbolized rebirth for our outdated processes. Another one, Susan, was all in on “Synergy Hub.” Gag me. I just wanted to call it “The Time Sheet Thingy” and be done with it. But no. It became this whole political football. Departments were taking sides. My manager actually told me to “just pick a side and look enthusiastic” because upper management was starting to think our team couldn’t agree on anything, so how could we deliver a project?
It was a total mess. Productive work just ground to a halt. All because of a name. We eventually went with something bland like “Workflow Optimizer 2.0” after some senior VP just got fed up and picked one himself. All that drama for nothing.
So, back to these Game of Thrones team names. I’m sitting there, listening to people argue if “The Unsullied” is too aggressive or if “Dothraki Screamers” is HR-appropriate (it’s not, by the way, definitely not). And all I could think about was Bob and Susan and those three wasted weeks of my life.
You know what we ended up with for the GoT names? After an hour of back and forth?
- Dragons
- Wolves
- Lions
Yep. That was it. After all that, we landed on the animal mascots. Someone just sighed and said, “Look, can we just pick something simple so we can get on with the actual task?” And that’s what happened. It was fine. Nobody really cared in the end. But man, the journey to get there. Sometimes, getting a simple thing like “team names” feels like you’re trying to broker peace in Westeros itself. What a palaver.
