Game Theories: What On-Line Gaming Teaches Us About Talent Development

John Hagel and John Seely Brown are two of the foremost thinkers on innovation and the power of ideas. In this essay in the Economist, they discuss how on-ling gaming is an accurate predictor of useful management skills:

"We met Stephen Gillette when he was fresh out of college a decade ago. He essentially was the “go to” guy for any computer problems we were having in our start-up. Just eight years later he became CIO of Starbucks, the youngest CIO of any Fortune 500 company – ever. When asked for the secret to his meteoric rise, Stephen said, without hesitation, that it was his service as a guild leader for the wildly popular online video game World of Warcraft that enabled him to develop the leadership and management skills that proved so valuable in the corporate world.

In that complex, challenging game he fed his passion for rapid, real-time learning and exploration of constantly changing situations, risk-taking and, ultimately, earning the respect of a committed team that he helped to mobilize.

He also learned to expect penalties and rewards for his choices.
How many workplaces offer that kind of lively, productive, and rewarding environment? Which businesses actually set specific goals yet leave some of the rules of how to attain them up to the workers, the players?
How many treat work as a meaningful game in which many spend a large part of our lives?

Where can our most talented, passionate individuals thrive through accelerated learning, sharing, self-managed teams, transparent and mutual accountability, clear markers for merit and the opportunity to volunteer for work that involves their best talents and strongest interests so they stay passionately involved?

Thankfully, we have discovered that seven game-like conditions can be adapted to the workplace to accelerate talent development. As competitive and economic pressures mount, companies will need to find ways to transform the workplace into an environment that helps talent to develop faster.

Here is a brief description of this addictive game that attracts over 12 million people around the world and the practical pointers that can be gleaned from it.

Players can start out as individuals but to advance rapidly to higher levels they soon find that they must participate in teams, called guilds, to embark on increasingly challenging quests. The game changes with the players’ actions and game developers add new levels of quests as players become more proficient. There are no set rules for winning or for forming a guild.

Yet the constant need for members of guilds to rely on each other and invent as they go keeps them increasingly engaged. And, as many war soldiers and operating room medical teams know, with increased engagement, comes greater skill and commitment to the team.

Consequently, World of Warcraft players are in constant invention mode – together. They have created and use massive numbers of discussion forums, wikis, databases, and instructional videos. In the U.S. alone, forums hosted by Blizzard Entertainment contain tens of millions of postings.
Imagine the level of innovation and performance your firm could achieve with just a fraction of that kind of action.

One fascinating finding is that people of extremely different temperaments and talents, who might not get along in a traditional workplace, enjoy camaraderie in an engrossing game.

In A New Culture of Learning the authors describe two “hard-core gamers.” “Ambitious and risk-taking” Nick has “fast reflexes” when playing. Yet he enjoys working with his guild mate Becky who “relies on patience, careful strategy, and knowledge of the game.” What makes this even more fascinating is that Becky is Nick’s mother.
In our increasingly diverse world we often must team up with people unlike us to solve problems and learn faster. And diverse teams can produce some of the smartest solutions, found Scott E. Page, author of The Difference, so gaming our way to getting along better can generate big pay-offs for our organization.

Here are the seven game-like performance-improving pointers:
1. Provide ways for individuals to quickly join a team where success hinges on working closely, with increasingly complex tasks that requires deeper collaboration.
2. Maintain just the right level of challenge to engage and excite participants – not so challenging as to be overwhelming and not so easy as to become boring. Constantly evolve the challenges so that participants do not become complacent or bored once they have attained certain levels of performance.
3. Encourage people to form self-managed teams, based on work need. Instill the desire to participate in teams. Tie that team participation to reputation for skill and willingness to work well with others, the key traits cited by Morton Hansen in Collaboration. Do this by enabling teams to accept or reject applicants.
4. Support two kinds of online collaboration; one kind within a team to invent or problem solve and another to accelerate performance and learning across the organization through discussion boards and other tools, and where the resultant knowledge becomes stored and easily searchable.
5. Encourage teams to use devices for real-time performance feedback, to the team and to individual members of the teams. Also enable players to design and evolve customized, individualized performance dashboards to monitor the dimensions of performance that they find personally most useful.
6. Provide clear, quantifiable performance metrics that match the goals the business sets.
7. Call for “After Action Reviews” after key challenges in a project and at its conclusion. During these sessions teams explicitly reflect on lessons learned and what they can do better, going forward. Every member of the team gets feedback from every other member of the team in open discussion.

With these seven design principles your business encourages two very human dispositions – the desire to seek out increasingly challenging quests and to connect with others in embarking on these quests. Together they characterize the passion of explorers – those most likely to be motivated to learn fastest and to seek out others to join them in their learning quests.

This is precisely what the design of World of Warcraft does – it takes curious players who join the game and rapidly instills these two dispositions to motivate the players to get better and faster by working together. In this increasingly uncertain, changeable and competitive world, encouraging the development of these two dispositions can bring your workers together on a shared quest that enables your company to stay ahead of the competition.

Where can our most talented, passionate individuals thrive through accelerated learning, sharing, self-managed teams, transparent and mutual accountability, clear markers for merit and the opportunity to volunteer for work that involves their best talents and strongest interests so they stay passionately involved?

The answer is vital. Our Shift Index research shows that only about 20% of workers are passionate about their jobs yet most of the World of Warcraft players are deeply passionate about their involvement.

With these surprising lessons learned from how World of Warcraft accelerates talent development, companies can move beyond formal training programs. Instead they can redesign whole work places for rapid, day to day job talent development, tied to meaningful challenges and tacit learning.