The Business Sensei

Using serious games for learning

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

Gamification, or the art of using games in a business setting, is becoming extremely popular. Turning things into games promises to revolutionize productivity, training, and also wash dishes. Okay, maybe the dish washing is wishful thinking. Unfortunately, so is much of the promise of gamification. Fortunately, however, there are also some aspects of using games that are very promising. The key is to use games correctly: highly competitive games are far more likely to do harm than good in organizational settings. Internal competition, within a team or within a business, creates a short-term boost. Over the medium and long-term, however, competition leads to lower productivity, factions, and silos. Schein observes that the damage caused by internal competition can take years to reverse.

The good news, though, is that certain types of games do lend themselves extremely well to training and improving organizational performance. At the most basic level, the “video game” model of points, badges, and leaderboards can create some excitement and increased interest. Without the glitz and action of video games, though, I have serious doubts how long this approach can maintain interest. On the other hand, certain types of serious games can prove extremely beneficial. It should be recognized at this point that the term “serious games” is not synonymous with computer games; the original concept of serious games had, in fact, nothing to do with computers. We will be looking at a variant of that type of interactive, face-to-face game here: while computers might be used to supplement the game, the objective of the game is to maximize human contact and interaction. Particularly in areas such as leadership and team development, person to person interaction is what it’s all about.

How do we apply serious games to business training or organizational development and organizational psychology? We need look no farther than the legend of King Arthur.

What do King Arthur and a modern CEO have in common? Oddly enough, a great deal. Leaving aside the obvious point that King Arthur had Merlin the court wizard, and the modern CEO has his technical wizards, the two are actually facing similar problems. Granted, the modern CEO is somewhat less likely to be hit over the head with a sword or be eaten by fire-breathing dragons. On the other hand, King Arthur didn’t have to worry about lawsuits or crashing computers, so advantage Arthur. When you strip away the scenery, the problems, methods, and solutions aren’t that different. When you put the scenery back in, you have an opportunity to learn a great deal through the experience of being King Arthur. Not only does the story of King Arthur contain numerous lessons for CEOs, how Arthur trained his workforce has lessons for training leaders and team members today. Through appropriately designed serious games, we can learn those lessons without facing the unfortunate consequences that Arthur faced.
The first connection between King Arthur and a CEO is that both of them require a highly skilled workforce in order to accomplish their goals. King Arthur needed to recruit the top knights to sit at the Round Table. The CEO needs to recruit top people to sit around the table and develop the products and services that the company needs to be successful. How does he know what to do? How does he hone his skills? We’ve already discussed what needs to be done to hire effectively; appropriate training games are how people can learn to do it.

As fans of the story will recall, even when Arthur drew the sword from the stone, he still had to fight for his kingdom. As an untested 15 year old, he needed to inspire his troops to go up against some of the toughest, most famous kings in the land. The CEO needs to inspire his company with the full knowledge that the competition ranges from tiny startups to behemoths like IBM or GE. King Arthur couldn’t win through brute force or simply by fencing just a little bit better: his troops were outnumbered. He needed to employ superior battle strategies and tactics. Similarly, most companies are competing against numerous opponents, more than a few of whom have far more resources than they do. Even when you are a behemoth, you can’t take on everyone. Quite simply, you can’t win by doing the same thing only maybe a little cheaper. You need to develop innovative products and services that create both markets and loyalty, possibly displacing an existing competitor along the way. Building an innovative environment doesn’t just happen. It too takes training and practice.

As we all know, King Arthur’s court was not without its share of interpersonal problems and politics, Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere and Mordred’s betrayal being the most famous. Arthur himself handled these situations poorly by not confronting the various parties early and dealing with the situation when it was small and easily managed. That inaction cost Arthur his kingdom and his life. John Gutfreund, CEO of one-time investment bank Salomon Brothers, ignored the actions of a rogue trader and lost his kingdom: he was forced to resign his position at Salomon and the company was nearly destroyed. Unfortunately, it’s not easy dealing with such problems and the natural instinct for many people is to hope the problem will go away. It takes facing such problems regularly to develop the skill and confidence to recognize and deal with them early. Appropriately designed games allow that to happen without creating an unpleasant working environment.

King Arthur also had the problem of training the next generation of leaders. The knight business is a tough one. Getting onto a horse in full armor isn’t easy, and when dismounting involves another knight with a spear, well, there’s going to be some workforce attrition. Even worse, during peacetime, there was the problem of making sure the knights kept their swords, and skills, sharp. King Arthur solved that problem through holding tournaments. The tournaments of the King Arthur stories were the pseudo-battlegrounds in which knights honed their skills and kept themselves ready for war. The skills they practiced, horsemanship, swordplay, archery, gymnastics, were the much in demand skills of the day. Given that the tournaments were often bloody, and people were often injured or even killed during them, one could describe them quite fairly as serious games. Modern sports are the present day incarnation of the serious games of the past: fencing, kendo, judo, gymnastics, and pentathlon, to name but a few. Each of these sports once represented the battlefield skills of the elite warrior. Masters of these sports learn early that success comes from being fully involved and from testing their skills under pressure. In the days of King Arthur, if you weren’t fully involved, you would likely end up fully dead.

Fortunately, in today’s business environment, sword fighting is strongly discouraged and paper cuts are rarely fatal. In the constantly changing environment of today’s competitive landscape, it’s hard to know which skills will be needed when. The serious games of today need to focus on a different set of skills from King Arthur’s time, but skills that are no less critical: leadership, negotiation, teamwork, confronting problems, public speaking, improvisation, persuasion, decision making with incomplete information, and remaining calm under pressure.

The Peter Principle of the Thing

As published in Corp! Magazine

A good many years ago, I was working at a small software company. For various personal reasons, the VP of Engineering abruptly left the company and one of the senior engineers was promptly promoted to take this place. Now, this guy was an excellent engineer and I learned a great deal from him. He was a fun person to work with and someone who was always enthusiastic. He was picked for the job exactly because of those qualities and because of his engineering prowess. However, as a manager of engineering, he never appeared to have the same joy and excitement about his job. Indeed, he often gave the impression that he’d rather be writing code than managing other people who were writing the code. After the company folded, as far as I know, he went back to engineering.

At another company, Jim was a star researcher. He was brilliant. He was the person who came up with idea after idea. He did so well that eventually he was put in charge of the lab. At that point, things went downhill. Working through other people drove Jim up the wall. He wanted to be in the lab, not arguing about the best way to do things. He couldn’t go back, though, without being viewed as a failure. At the same time, he couldn’t get promoted until he “shaped up” and “made his lab more productive.” He was trapped doing a job he didn’t particularly enjoy and wasn’t particularly good at.

Both of these stories are examples of a hypothesis first proposed in the 1960s by psychologist Lawrence J. Peter. Today, the “Peter Principle” is spoken about with a certain amusement and a smug “yeah right” attitude. Unfortunately, “yeah right” is the only construction in the English language in which a double positive makes a negative. In other words, the Peter Principle is popularly seen as a joke. In fact, it’s not. Moreover, it turns out that when you have an environment in which someone can be promoted into a job that is significantly different from what they’ve been doing, the Peter Principle is virtually inevitable. The key point lies in recognizing what constitutes “significantly different.”

Well, as it happens, managing engineers is significantly different from being an excellent engineer. Managing researchers is significantly different from being a top researcher. Managing salesmen is significantly different from being a top salesman. However, being a top engineer, researcher, salesman, or whatever is exactly what brings that person to the attention of senior management. If this isn’t disturbing enough, in the study confirming this phenomenon, authors Pluchino, Rapisarda, and Garofalo also found that the best way to avoid it was to either promote people randomly or promote the best and the worst performers equally.

As Monty Python might say, “This is getting silly!” After all, how can it possibly be true that random promotion would work better than promoting the best performers into management?

Consider how much time, effort, and training is required to become a top engineer, researcher, salesman, doctor, or just about anything else. Nothing in the training these people receive prepares them to manage others. In fact, good management is, in many ways, the antithesis of being a successful solo performer: instead of doing the work yourself, you are now doing it through others. Motivating others is a different experience than motivating yourself. Helping others stay focused and on track is different from keeping yourself focused and on track.

So, without resorting to promoting people randomly, what could be done to prevent the Peter Principle from taking over in your company?

Well, if it were possible for someone to both be a manager and not be a manager at the same time, you would be able to see if they could do the job, and allow them to continue along the track they’re on if they don’t shape up. Unfortunately, literally attempting this is pretty hard on the person and the business; someone who tries to be both a manager and an individual contributor at the same time usually ends up doing one, or usually both, badly.

An alternative, though, is to take a page from sports and provide practice space for people. Just as a sports team might rotate players through different roles before figuring out what each one is best at, companies can use predictive scenario leadership games and exercises not just to train existing leaders, but to find leaders. Quite simply, when people don’t know what to do, they do what they are most comfortable doing. In predictive scenarios, people have the opportunity to demonstrate talents that might not be obvious or which may never come up in their regular jobs. For example, the best managers create order in chaotic or ambiguous situations and know how to build employees’ confidence. When you enable an entire department to participate in a predictive scenario, you can see who is actually doing those things. Rather than promote randomly, you can pick the people who most strongly demonstrate the desired skill set for the position you are looking to fill!

Is this easy? Not necessarily. It takes some serious effort to avoid the Peter Principle. I suspect that many of you reading this are thinking that you simply can’t afford do anything about it. The real question is, can you afford not to?

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead (www.7stepsahead.com), an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.