Serious Gaming, The Next Frontier for Learning?

In late October I hosted a set of Webinars titled “Serious Gaming – The Next Frontier for Learning?”.

These were very interactive webinars, or as I called them, Socratic Webinars (hat tip to Humberto Schwab). All participants had to agree to the following rules:

This is not a discussion: We are in the process of thinking together, trying to answer a few questions.
You can only speak by changing your feedback status in the online meeting to purple and only when you’ve been given the floor by me.
You can only speak if you are capable of repeating what the person before you has said and can summarize the previous 10 minutes of discussion.

Together we discussed a few questions. Below a reflection on what was discussed.

1. What is a game?

A game is hard to define. There is no single and unique set of characteristics that defines a game. Jesse Schell has listed the following set of things that we thinks a game should be (from the fabulous book The Art of Game Design):

Games are entered willfully
Games have goals
Games have conflict
Games have rules
Games can be won and lost
Games are interactive
Games have challenge
Games can create their own internal value
Games engage players
Games are closed, formal systems

My favourite definition of what a game is comes from Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia:

To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity… playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

I think he is spot-on when he sees gaming as overcoming unnecessary obstacles.

There are (at least) two problems to overcome when we want to apply serious games in a large organization. The first being that games are usually played voluntarily. This is not always the case when people are required to play a game in the learning context. The second problem is that games, by definition, use inefficient means. Inefficiency is not something that commercial enterprises are usually interested in.

Casper Hartevelt tries to untangle these problems in the book Triadic Game Design – Balancing Reality, Meaning and Play of which a lot can be read online.

Now that we are talking about definitions it makes sense to make clear that “gamification” is not really the same thing as serious games. Gamification applies game-principles to things that aren’t games (e.g. getting a badge for filing your expenses) as a way to make those things more compelling.

2. What types of games for learning (i.e. serious games or games with a purpose) exist?

To make it easier to discuss games, we created four (relatively abitrary) groups:

Games to be played by people who are physically together. This can be board games, but also physical games as icebreakers. Examples are games that can be played with the Foresight Cards or many of the activities in the book Gamestorming – A playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers. An interesting game that was mentioned during the webinars is The Accounting Game.
2D Computer Games are very often games that could also have been created as a boardgame. Quite often these games have a model behind them and give people insight into these models by letting them play with it. The 2D game that taught me the most is Hidden Agenda (very old!). An example from the energy industry is OilSim by Simprentis.
3D Computer Games usually try and give a real depiction of a particular location. The player is an agent in the game (either from a first person or a third person perspective). These games are very good to help people practice with skills in a physical world. A nice example is the Virtual Incident Management Training by CATT Lab.
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) bring a game component into the real world, occasionally blurring the distinction between reality and the game. Probably the most famous example is World Without Oil.

In computer games it also makes sense to make a distinction between single player games and multiplayer games. The later can be synchronous (where everybody needs to be online at the same time, like X-Team’s Mission Island) and asynchronous.

Simulation aren’t necessarily games. They allow people to play with the model that is behind the simulation. If we add an “unnecessary obstacle” to the simulation (e.g. you need to finish within 2 minutes), then we have turned it into a game.

3. How can games be used for learning and for what type of learning problems?

The best way to learn is “learning by doing” or work-based learning. Games allow people to practice (more than traditional e-learning and more than most classrooms). In the standard competency progression from Awareness -> Knowledge -> Skill -> Mastery, we think that games can get people to skill and on their first steps towards mastery.

Games are especially suitable in the following situations:

When practicing in real life is too costly (or when mistakes are not acceptable)
When practicing in real life is too dangerous
When you want to practice situations that are extremely rare in real life (once-in-a-career events)
When other ways of learning can’t provide the level of complexity that is necessary (you need to be closer to reality) (see Ender’s Game for some scary science fiction in this area)

There are also people who see games as a way to motivate a younger generation to learn (they might be disconnected from the current learning practices). Games can make something that might not be very interesting more fun. Although there are some theoretical problems with this approach, it is one that is taken more and for educating children. See for example the Institute of Play or ASU’s Center for Games and Impact.

Jane McGonical, a famous game designer has written a whole book about why games can make us better and help us change the world. You can watch her TED talk here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE1DuBesGYM]

Games can truly be creative and transformative experiences and usually require a highly creative and reflective creator to be truly great. Take a look at the work of Kars Alfrink from Hubbub, New Games for Social Change. He has created a set of very interesting games with real social impact:

Beestenbende, a game for families in museums
Code 4, a game to create a different type of mindset in a bureaucratic organization
Pig chase, a game that humans can play with pigs

Closing Session of Elliott Masie’s Learning 2012

The last general session of Learning 2012 started with thanking all the people who were involved in producing the conference and making it happen. I have to commend Elliott Masie and his team for putting together a truly amazing event. He himself does seem to be an incredibly reflective practicioner and thus a great role model for other learning professionals.

The first speaker for the day was Greg Urban (from University of Pennsylvania) via live video connection. As an anthropologist he talked about why culture is important in corporations. Culture in the most modern sense of the word is whatever gets socially learned and socially transmitted. Urban thinks that learning isn’t about individuals. He thinks that from an anthropological perspective it actually is organizations that are learning. Individuals get their notions from the group: every individual is born into a culture. So this can also happen inside organizations. He has come to realize that organizations are “little tribes”. Masie asked Urban how a culture gets created in relatively new organizations. Urban’s main research interest is what forces move cultures. One important force is inertia (the fact that you have been doing it in a particular for a long time), another key force is entropy. An important concept to understand is “meta-culture” or reflexive culture, culture that looks back at other culture. This is important when creating a new company: it will have to come from there. The last force is the force of interest. He does believe that culture can be influenced, but you can’t just pick it up and change it to something else. Urban also gave us a couple of takeaways:

Be a little suspicious about the official statement of the company about what their culture is and compare it to how it really is.
Pay attentions to emotions and to stories (and maybe the rituals).

Next up was Marhall Goldsmith an executive coach who gives a lot of talks and writes a lot of books and articles. Masie and him have created a set of videos which are interesting from a content perspective (basically Marshall makes the same point using Drucker as we did in our DIY Learning session), but also very much from a process or format perspective. The short videos were easy to create and have a huge value.

Next up was Donald H. Taylor to talk about the emerging competencies in the field of learning. He has been in learning and development for 25 years. Anything that describes the skills to do something will need to be simple enough to be usable but complex enough to be useful. He is trying to create a language of skills in our field. The tool is called the LPI Capability Map. The first and most important thing you should be doing is to keep learning. Masie made a case that we need to be ferocious samplers of learning (“Who would eat at a restaurant where the chef doesn’t do a lot of eating and tasting themselves?”). There is so much stuff out there already. Do you really need to make it again? In the new producer role the curation angle should become more obvious. You aren’t creating, you are helping people find what might be useful for them. We have moved from “knowledge is power” to “information is free”. This means our role should change.

The last speaker of the conference was Nigel Paine. What excites him about learning right now is the relationship of learning to everything else. He believes it is moving into the mainstream. Learning organizations have some much impact that companies really can’t do without them anymore. Next, he shared the BBC video story once again. He thinks we should do less learning catalogs, less trying to control and more trying to be open. One tip he gives to everybody in the audience: “Get involved in culture”. From knowing, to doing, to being. There is no chance you can be a learning leader anymore if you don’t understand technology. The most important part though is that you have to be able to relate learning in the language of the business.

Masie added three more important sagely pieces of advice (which I agree fully with):

Engage yourself as a storyteller.
Become experimental: you have to be able to do an experiment without becoming too risky. Don’t do a pilot just as a first step to an implementations, do multiple pilots.
Practice your negotiation skills.

As Masie doesn’t really like feedback, he prefers feedforward, I would like to ask him the following. In the past you asked every single speaker what great book they had read recently. You didn’t do that this year. Would you please do it again next year?

Self Defense: Justifying Your Role

The original title for this session was “how not to get fired”. Nigel Paine talked about strategies you can use that help you stay relevant and create a bit more security for yourself:

If you make yourself more accountable and more visible, then you make yourself more employable. Don’t run and hide. “I know that name” is very important and a good relationship with your line manager is not enough.
Be pro-active. Where things are getting tough, get noticed more instead of less. Make sure you have an impact. Find people who can sponsor you and who can mentor you. Most people are flattered to be asked to become a mentor. You can even have more than one mentor (but don’t play them off against each other).
Build partnerships outside of your team. Don’t self-limit. Every single meeting is an opportunity to have presence. A lot of HR staff is still totally tactical, it is important to frame things correctly: away from operational towards more strategic.
Data is important. You should have the data from your organization and try and get some insights from it. Most people never take the trouble to go through the data.
Focus on yourself a little bit. People take you at the value you set in yourself.
Governance. Nigel talked about the learning board he created at BBC (chaired by the chief executive). He gave his budget to the board to allocate (people thought he was crazy). Find people from outside HR and Learning to give you some governance. They will help you make decisions that are totally business focused.
Go on a listening mission in your organization.

Somebody in the audience referenced this TED talk by Amy Cuddy:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-_Mh1QhMc]

Another person talked about the book Seeing Yourself As Others Do.

I shared my personal strategy for staying in my job: it is to stay fully employable outside of my organization! I was hoping this session would be about the role of the learning organization as a whole (that might also be in need of self defense I would say), unfortunately it came closer to a motivational speech. You can’t have it all!

Do It Yourself Learning at Masie’s Learning 2012

Marcel de Leeuwe and I hosted a session at Elliott Masie’s Learning 2012 about Do It Yourself Learning. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously preparing for the session and created a special website for the conference: doityourselflearning.org.

Why DIY?

There are a few things happening in the corporate learning world:

The business is changing faster than the Learning function can keep up with.
Effectiveness of learning is low with constant questions of the Return on Investment.
Knowledge work (defined by Drucker as that work that can only the knowledge worker themselves can understand) is so complex that no curriculum can be made that can fit the very personal needs of each professional.
There is a high mobility for employees, making it hard to defend investing in them.

At the same time the world is changing:

Much of the world is globally connected.
Effective tools for collaboration are ubiquitous and cheap.

This means that learners will start organizing their own learning. They will become their own designers and the role of the learning function will have to change.

Principles

We thought of five imperatives for the learning function to enable DIY learning and empower their staff:

Devolve responsibility
Be open
Design experiences
Provide scaffolding
Stimulate reflection

Examples

To give people some idea of what DIY could look like we listed a set of examples: Self Organizing Learning Environments (SOLEs), MOOCs, Open Space Technology, a Juggling Convention, Yammer, World Without Oil, Uncollege, a virtual reading group and Livemocha.

We are always looking for new examples.

A DIY Manifesto

Through a very energetic process (first collaborative and then argumentative) the group of participants came up with a tentative set of statements for a Do It Yourself Learning Manifesto:

[vimeo 52056127]

A big you thank you to everybody who participated!

General Session on Tuesday Afternoon at Masie’s Learning 2012

John Abele was the first one on stage. He has a background in medicine, but is now mainly focused on collaboration. He is the founding chairman of First. He shared a taxonomy of collaboration:

Facilitate
Command and control
Self organizing
Adversarial
Mass
Crowd Sourcing
Cascading
Pseudeo

Next he talked about the characteristics of collaboration leaders:

Lead without power (cede control to gain control)
Manage divas
Empower individuals and groups
Understand the power of theater

He applied these characteristics to Masie himself, leading to the following slightly hagiographic list: clothing as a court jester, humble self promoter, sharing learning leader, shameless persistence, interview style, frames, sets agenda, digs under the surface inoffensively, uses the power of theater, produces, curates, personalizes well, effusive complimenter, introverted extrovert, shares self reflection, celebrates political incorrectness, amazing connector, genuine, authentic, inclusive (always uses “we”), optimist and benevolent independent (so not part of the establishment).

Next up on the stage was Kevin Oaks from I4CP (which does the bulk of the research for ASTD). He has looked a lot at the difference between high and low performing organizations. They first discussed performance management and the performance review. Nobody really seems to like them. We know that the annual review is not the most effective way to do performance management. Managers need to do these hard discussions on a continuous basis. He sees companies talking about talent risk in the same way as financial risk. Kevin next references this Vanity Fair article about the Forced Ranking performance system at Microsoft. Next question: How do you manage a virtual workforce? This is a new competency of top leaders and we are still finding out how to really do this well. Kevin thinks we should use technology more here. He mentioned an example of a manager who would put a video station in a shared office and a video station in her home office so that people could just walk over to the station and talk to her in a “normal” way as if she was there.

Any blogpost gets better with a Steve Ballmer picture!

Elliott Masie loves his Apple products so much that he showed a clip of of the new iPad mini. He is once again interested in the affordances of this particular type of device and buys them before he has a real understanding of those.

Martha Soehren is the Chief Learning Officer for ComCast. She received a spotlight award.

John Ryan is the president of the Center for Creative Leadership. What are some of the top challenges of top leaders nowadays? Suddenly all of them need to become global leaders. The CCL has done research into boundary spanning leadership (the whitepaper is here. They’ve come up with a new assessment tool on the basis of this research: the global six (this hasn’t been published yet). These dimensions are not valuable everywhere in the world: it depends on where you are whether they work. Some of the biggest mistakes that leaders make is that they only focus on people’s performance. You should focus on learning agility (innovating, challenging the status quo, taking risks, performance, make sure you never stop listening). John finished by plugging the WorkLife Indicator.

Could we have a realtime learning center in our own businesses?

The last speaker for the day is from the ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement: Lisa Toenniges. The ISPI focuses on performance that allows organizations to reach their best business results. She kicks off by saying how training should usually be the last thing you try to improve performance. Nice. She then lists a set of standard performance consulting things to look at.

This whole session felt a little bet too much like an incrowd talking on stage. A pity…