In July, Oliver Chiang of Forbes published a piece about how playing video games can boost your career. The article included a colorful slide show of the 10 reasons why this is so. Most of the examples are from World of Warcraft. We are happy to see Forbes, picking up on the relevance of WoW when it comes to leadership and management.
This story draws on the important work of our friends, John Hagel and John Seely Brown at Delloitt’s Center for Edge Innovation and Ross Smith at Microsoft.
The focus of this article is on the transferability of skills honed in a game into the real world of work. We are very much in agreement.
The emphasis in our thinking is that these ideas and tools are way too good to be reserved for practicing to work. We think the elements of great games should be introduced into real everyday work.
Some work is too hard: productivity suffers because goals are in conflict or difficult to define. Pg 8
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Some work is too hard: productivity suffers because goals are in conflict or difficult to define. Sometimes it’s hard because the learning curve is too steep, or success takes a long time to achieve, or it’s not easy to measure and thus celebrate intermediate steps. Sometimes work is too hard because of interruptions and information overload. Sometimes work is too hard because other people make it that way. Good game design can fix poor work design and bring new life to well-designed jobs that are still too difficult to be satisfying. In these situations, game designs will offer new tools to clarify objectives that adapt to external challenges and will give immediate and intermediate reinforcement for progress accompanied by intrinsic training to ensure personal growth. These design principles are all mainstays of successful interactive games.
Some work is too easy: productivity can’t be maintained because people become bored or tired by prolonged and tedious attention to detail. Pg 8
By embedding easy work into story lines and quests that are part of an extended multilevel game, workers will be more engaged… Pg 8
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Some work is too easy: productivity can’t be maintained because people become bored or tired by prolonged and tedious attention to detail. Turnover is high in these jobs. By embedding easy work into story lines and quests that are part of an extended multilevel game, workers will be more engaged, leading to increased productivity and enthusiasm for the job. Games can create aspirations that are concrete, observable, and transferable to others.
Recently, Byron and Leighton gave a keynote address at the LOGIN conference. Watch their speech about how businesses can and are using games to increase leadership and productivity among employees.
Have you watched Jesse Schell’s legendary DICE speech on the gamification of everyday life? If you haven’t, you should. And I mean really, all 28 minutes of it.
There are two main points that really hit home for me. The first because it deals with the thesis of Total Engagement (the Seriosity founders’ book on gaming in the corporate world), and the other because it is just so astounding. I’ll break them down below.
Point #1: Back to Reality. Schell points out that the recent major technological hits (WII, Farmville, Webkins, Guitar Hero) all have a few things in common. Paramount among these is the ability to break through to reality. Yes, these are games, but they all somehow bring us back to reality (WII=the physical body, Farmville=real friends on Facebook, Webkins=real stuffed animal, Guitar Hero= real guitar). This trend is also explored in the movie Avatar, for which we’ve already professed our admiration. Schell shows us that Avatar is all about how we can use technology to get back to nature—something ultimately real and genuine.
This is where the tie-in to serious gaming clicked for me. Employees can use games to cut through all of the corporate garbage that muddles up real achievement. Instead of PowerPoints and buzzwords, games allow people to focus on the task itself, and they are rewarded for doing so. By going virtual, real results are accomplished.
Point #2: Everything will be a game. Starting at about minute 21 of the video, Schell takes us through a day in the life of what he claims is the not so distant future. It’s absolutely riddled with games and bonus points and leveling up, and also full of advertisements for all of the companies that make these games possible. Just about when you’re sickened by the commercialization of it, he talks about how these games are making a living record of everything thing you do. For instance, your grandchildren will know every book you read because of the Kindle/Amazon game you played throughout your life. And then he brings up the ultimate question. Because of these games, and because of the everlasting record they create, will we make different choices and become better people? Or, could it drive unhealthy behavior, as we’ve talked about before?
Occasionally we’ll tweet excerpts from our book, Total Engagement, and then give more context here on our blog:
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When workers are engaged by rewards that are intrinsic to their task rather than controlled by bosses, organizations can better decentralize. Pg 8
Well designed game environments can define work via loose hierarchies, where self-organizing behavior by player-workers is productive. Pg 8
Work can have a more compelling purpose, allowing people to be continuously reminded how their efforts contribute to something worthwhile. Pg 8
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When workers are engaged by rewards that are intrinsic to their task rather than controlled by bosses, organizations can better decentralize, allowing people to live where they want but play in the same game. Well designed game environments can define work via loose hierarchies, where self-organizing behavior by player-workers is productive. Work can be democratized, allowing people to choose the tasks they take on and to have influence on how and when the work is completed. Work can have a more compelling purpose, allowing people to be continuously reminded how their efforts contribute to something worthwhile and larger than themselves. Teams will convene, often on their own initiative, across organizational levels, departments, and cultures. Internal motivation will become more important than external persuasion, encouraging people’s best efforts.
Occasionally we’ll tweet excerpts from our book, Total Engagement, and then give more context here on our blog:
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The future of work is about engaging workers more than commanding them. Pg 6
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Two trends—one concerning the future of work and one concerning the current state of digital play—are converging to make game technology a valuable business platform and an inevitable presence in the future of work. Regardless of whether we are on the way into or out of an economic downturn, the future of work is about engaging workers more than commanding them. This is certainly true in tough economic times, when innovation and collaboration are jeopardized by employees who are fearful or disappointed. People want to be engaged in work with a purpose, and they want insight into how their work is linked to larger organizational and societal goals. They want to know where they fit in. Competing in an upturn also demands a highly engaged workforce.
Occasionally we’ll tweet excerpts from our book, Total Engagement, and then give more context here on our blog:
Twitter Tidbit #8:
Game design offers an unprecedented tool for workflow engineering, but bad stuff as well as good stuff can happen. Pg 6
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Games are certainly engaging, but the psychological tools we are talking about here are so powerful they are also dangerous. Game design offers an unprecedented tool for workflow engineering, but bad stuff can (and probably will) happen. Exquisitely paced feedback delivered perfectly by algorithm could drive unhealthy behavior, resulting in everything from repetitive stress syndromes to aggressive behavior. If game design principles are not applied with due regard for workers, we could see the digital equivalent of the degrading and dangerous work that characterized the early industrial era.
Gamers already perform every category of information work imaginable, from grind-it-out drudgery to sophisticated analysis and team building, all in the course of digital play. We found evidence of every category of serious work we examined, even though the gamers were doing the work merely because they thought it was fun. Gamers organize, categorize, analyze, evaluate, diagnose, invent, buy, sell, lead, and follow. We found gamers who were manufacturing pharmaceuticals to sell to doctors who healed warriors, roleplaying CEOs who were negotiating financing packages for spaceship leases, guild officers conducting performance reviews for probationary players seeking admission to top teams, and hundreds of people performing jobs that were far less glamorous—casting a fishing pole in a lake hoping to catch (by mere random chance) a prize worth a few gold pieces, searching for hidden
Last week, the Washington Post published a video interview with me discussing how games build leaders. I received a very thoughtful response from one viewer, Matt Lincoln, and would like to share it with you here:
You hit the nail on the head: the complex challenges inherent in a game like WoW put a premium on both individual skill and cooperation, but harnessing the best out of 25 people (most of whom have never met, are wildly different ages and from different backgrounds, and are scattered across the globe) takes real leadership. On a personal level, I’ve been invested with a mantle of responsibility and authority in my virtual “guild” that, so far anyway, eclipses what I’ve been exposed to at the professional level. But over the course of many, many raids, in weekly officer meetings, and on our heavily populated guild forums, WoW has offered me a crucible for the development of my leadership skills. As a result, I’m now confident that (1) I truly love to lead and to mentor, and (2) when I’m eventually given the chance to do so in a professional setting, I’ll have the confidence to lead with conviction and humility.
I’ve always been curious what sets apart good guilds from the great ones, and I suspect much of it comes in how raid leaders handle all that instant feedback you talked about in the video clip (in other words, the strength of their leadership).
One final anecdote … about two and a half years ago we had a young man in our guild describe how he’d recently been on a job interview in the IT field. He was a new college graduate without a lot of work experience. He got the job. But he told us that his interviewer later made it known to him that one of the things that made him attractive was that he was an officer in a successful raiding guild. To them that demonstrated both teamwork and leadership skills. That was when I began to wonder, not for the last time … how long will it take before that kind of recognition arrives in the mainstream?
Byron is the Paul C. Edwards Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and Co-Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the H-STAR Institute and Media X.
J. Leighton Read, M.D., is a General Partner in four Alloy Ventures funds from 2001-2007 and a successful entrepreneur and CEO.
Total Engagement
A book on using games and virtual worlds to change the way that people work and businesses compete.
