Gaming for leadership

As you might have read earlier in this blog, I think that we can learn a lot from games and gaming about how to be productive in our work life. So I have been reading a lot about games, gaming (and gamification lately, and it has truck me that what characterizes a good game is also what characterizes good leadership.

It was while reading Jane McGonical's book “Reality is Broken” that it started to fall into place for me. She defines a game as sharing 4 common traits - a goal, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation. Playing a game is fun, because as we try to reach the goal, certain constraints apply (the rules) offering resistance to reaching the goal, we gain feedback along the way on whether or not we have reached the goal, and since it is a game, nobody is forcing you to do this.

Ideally that is how good leadership should be as well – the goal is set either by the leader or the team as a whole and in come cases by outside forces. Certain constraints apply such as time, materials, and resources available. And while we work to reach the goal feedback should be coming back to us in a multitude of forms from our leadership, from customers and vendors, and other parties involved in the business. It is also a voluntary commitment, because we can in most cases quit the job, if we do not like it.

The problem is off course that things are seldom ideal and hence work is often not as fun as it could be. What is strange is off course that there is really nothing stopping us from trying to reach an ideal state. We have control of almost all the parameters and the ones we do not have control over, we can get feedback on and adjust to. Let look at the 4 traits one at a time.

A game has a clearly defined goal. In in reality projects often have vague goals or conflicting goals from stakeholder to stakeholder. But it does not have to be that way. Practically all books I have read about leadership and management states that having a clear and measurable goal is paramount if you want to succeed. So if we want to make work more fun by making them more like games we need to focus on making good goals – which is something we can do something about.

A game has clearly defined rules - reality do not. However the constraints of a project act somewhat like rules. Things like we cant go over budget, we cant get more members on the team, and we need to finish by a certain deadline can all be considered the rule of the project – the constraints we have to act within. These are usually the things that are hardest to change and hence we feel blocked by them. But if we accept them just as we accept rule sin a game, we can enable faster and easier decision making. Its all about focusing on the goal and how to reach it within the constraints instead of focusing on the constraints and how to get around them.

Feedback is easier if we have clearly defined goals. But we have already established that if we do not feel that the goals are clear we should start by clarifying them. However even when we have good goals to measure against good feedback does not automatically follow. Good feedback requires rules and methods and diligence to achieve it. Most agile methods have lots of feedback procedures in the form of burn down charts, sprint demo's, code reviews and sprint reviews. For some reason I have often experienced, that the first things that are sacrificed when time are about to run out are the feedback routines because the do not seem to add value in themselves. But they are essential as they are what allows us to measure the value of the work we do against the goals.

Voluntary participation might seem something that only really applies to games and not work. Because realistically how many of us wants to quit our job because of one bad project. But this is where the leadership part really should shine. I think this quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower put that very well in perspective: “ Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.". And I think that if you focus on getting the first 3 thngs right (goals, rules, feedback) then you are much more likely to get people to want to work for you and having more fun doing so.