Serious Games Go Offline: Bringing the Board Game to the Board Room

Workz

In a digital age where everybody worships technology, a growing number of companies are going in the opposite direction. Instead of e-learning, apps or social media, they use physical simulations inspired by board games to accelerate the organization’s ability to learn and adapt to change.

This trend is especially accelerating in Scandinavia, where business leaders within sectors including pharmaceuticals, service, shipping and biotech are using this approach to gain an advantage on their competitors. Inspired by the old Prussian tradition of Kriegsspiel (war games) the companies use the simulations as a training ground, where leadership skills, business understanding and key strategies can be tested and fine-tuned before implementation in real life.

Change is hard, and most scholars within change management agree with John Kotter’s estimate from 1995 (in his bestselling book Leading Change) that only around 30% of major change initiatives succeed. Why are the odds so bad?

One key explanation could be lack of adequate preparations. How do you prepare to deliver your best when it really counts? In sports the professional approach is to fine-tune team performance and collaboration on the training court before playing the real match. You try to leave behind the worst mistakes and misunderstandings.

What do we do to prepare ourselves when it really matters in big organizations? How often do we gather the team for a training or warm-up session before launching a new strategy or implementing a strategic change project? In most organizations it rarely or never happens. There are no test matches or training sessions before the game starts. And therefore we make too many unnecessary rookie mistakes when it really counts.

Lack of team preparation and change management training is one of the reasons why most companies struggle when it comes to organizational change. Board game based leadership simulations offer a highly efficient way to facilitate a “training environment” where team alignment and performance can be improved. The physical tools are tangible “talking pieces” that allow the participants to share concerns and experiences face-to-face in a trustful environment where mistakes are paid in monopoly money, and game pieces instead of real dollars, customers, or colleagues. It is about elevating the organizational change capability with a focus on “just in time training” instead of the traditional “just in case” approach to leadership development.

Last month, the Danish Innovation Center in Palo Alto hosted an open seminar on the Scandinavian approach to change management and game-based training. A number of American corporations participated in the event to get new insights and inspiration from Scandinavian business leaders, and it will be interesting to follow how the trend of taking serious games offline will be received in the States.

Ask Agger is CEO of the Copenhagen-based change agency Workz.