Back in my youth, I played role-playing games like Star Frontiers and Dungeons and Dragons. Whenever you had a character in those games, the character had “attributes” that specified his or her skills in various areas. The higher the number, the more skilled the character was. A score of 18 was pretty much godlike. A particularly handy person might have things like:
Intelligence : 15
Dexterity : 14
Charisma : 16
Constitution : 14
Lately I’ve been dealing with some people who would have attributes like this:
Intelligence : 14
Initiative : 2
Adaptability : 3
Really smart, but completely lacking in initiative and adaptability. They were unable to take a situation that wasn’t quite what they expected and do anything at all with it, which meant I had to pick up the slack. Whee.
So I was thinking how nice it would be if, when you had to work with someone, you exchanged your attribute scores. That would help manage expectations (to use corporate jargon) and let other people know what they might expect. If you have no initiative, fine, but that would’ve been nice to know before you completely dropped the ball on that project…