Revenge of the gamers: World of Warcraft is honing tomorrow's leaders
Why play games?
Byron Reeves and his co-authors contend that massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- MMORPGs -- can be useful simulators for modern business training. Here are a few of the reasons:
Pace: Leaders often have to make hundreds of strategic decisions during an hour of game play.
Risk: The relatively mild consequences of failure allow players to test a variety of strategies.
Revolving leadership: The temporary nature of many leadership roles allows people who tend to be real-world followers to try leadership opportunities and those who tend to be real-world leaders to get experience as followers.
Scope: One World of Warcraft game leader, a former
U.S. Army officer with a master's degree in human resource management, likened the leadership of an 80-person raiding guild to managing a midsize business.
May 12, 2008 (Computerworld) MMORPGs -- massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- like World of Warcraft, Eve and EverQuest may be the best simulators
of tomorrow's business environment. So say Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone and Tony O'Driscoll in this month's Harvard Business Review. The authors found that these games closely mirror the evolving world of business: distributed decision-making, rapid response, ad hoc teams, and leadership through collaboration rather than authority. Reeves, the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford University and a co-founder of Seriosity Inc., a company that develops enterprise software inspired by online games, told Kathleen Melymuka that smart companies should be playing.
Tell me about the Seriosity study commissioned by IBM. They asked us to study collaboration and leadership in these [game] guilds. Moreover, these games are getting popular enough that, even if we don't want to take lessons from them, the people we're hiring are steeped in them, so we need to at least know what's shaping their lives and contributing to their expectations for software when they get to work.What were some of the study's conclusions? The most interesting one is that leadership in these
games has less to do with the special qualities of the person doing the leading than with the environment itself. Tom Malone and I had looked at the leadership literature, and it's very biased toward leadership as a quality of an individual: Leaders are born, and you have to find them and nurture them. Gamers were saying in many ways just the opposite: A lot of people can be leaders when there's an environment that's conducive to making it happen. Maybe they're not the most socially extroverted communicators; maybe they just know what's going on. A lot of gamers told us, "I could [lead in a game], and it wouldn't happen at IBM."What can you do with what you learned? A lot of information work is dull and boring, and there are productivity and retention problems that come from that. These games are engaging, compelling and just the opposite. So can we marry the juiciness of these experiences with the productivity needs of business contexts and get people more engaged in their work?
A sales team meeting in World of Warcraft is not the first thing that's going to happen. But when you think about it, it's suggestive of how much fun it could be to be a guild in a game with goals and avatars and synthetic currency systems: I'll give you 10 pieces of gold for that PowerPoint I need tomorrow.
How are game players' challenges similar to those of business leaders? Recruiting, evaluating, retaining, persuading, compensating -- all those things are really the same. If you're a guild leader, you're looking for new players; you're looking for the best before you "hire" them; you need to figure out what they want and compensate them in the right way to keep them. And "I know we need 30 players on this raid, but [I] have to go put the kids to bed" -- how do you deal with that?
And in today's work environments, so much is about persuading people to help you rather than having authority over them.Exactly. Decentralized work really means that coordinating people is much more important than commanding them. How are the game and business environments different? On the very legitimate issue of the consequences of failure. When something bad happens in a game, you're not taking down millions of people invested in a company. Some of the psychological feelings may be the same, but in terms of the actual stakes, the consequences are broader in business.
What would it feel like in World of Warcraft if the future of the company were on the line? It would feel different. But businesses say they don't want the seriousness of the consequences to be handcuffs for innovation and risk taking. And there are other differences. One is the whole notion of transparency. In games, there's a lot more transparency in the culture as well as the rules. You know a lot in the games. You see what gear people have, what level they've achieved, and you know a lot about their status. You're a priest or a dwarf, and people know what you bring. You can make inferences at work, but there's not as much transparency of expertise. There are laws about transparency in business -- privacy rights.You note certain distinctive characteristics of leadership in online games that point toward skills tomorrow's leaders will need. Can we discuss speed? Certainly, things can happen more quickly in games. In a game, you might congregate with five people you've just met; you've got one minute to decide who will lead and what the strategy will be, and then the gate opens. So there's a lot more opportunity to do things quickly. Iteration is an important part of this. In business, we're not going to go to Step 2 until we know we won't fail on Step 5. The default strategy in games is, "That's a good idea; let's try that." Then, wham! "All right, we all die. Let's go left instead of right next time." There's a lot of opportunity to try things a lot of times, and there's
value in that: A lot of small failures add up to global success rather than being so careful about each step.Are gamers less risk-averse in business? Tony O'Driscoll has studied several hundred gamers at IBM. It occurs to a majority of them that things happening in these games are similar to and different from real work and useful to think about in real work. People volunteer that they have made that connection.
Tell me about the honesty that the use of avatars engenders. In games, they are signals of your role and expertise. In respect to representing expertise, the games keep you honest in ways real life doesn't. You can't say you are a Level 50 when you're only 40, whereas you can probably do that at work, where expertise is more objective. That's one reason people like these games: because they're fair. It's not about who you know and how well you do in the hallway conversation; it's what level
you've achieved.Finally, you note that leadership roles are often temporary in games. To some extent, people with competence rise to the top, but there is a lot of temporary leadership: I've been in this dungeon, so I'll just take over. A corollary is that leaders get experience being followers and that's useful also, because people who know a lot are being directed by people who know less, but for whatever reason, it's their turn to take over.
Getting back to the conclusion that the right environment may matter more than the right leader --
how can companies benefit from that insight? Build better environments, and leadership will emerge. There's a real interest in analytics in business now. You can have a lot of data about how things are going. Dashboard and analytics is a good example. They provide a leader board and a score card like games have, and they're right up there for everybody to see. It's very gamelike.
Watching NBC, I learned of a T-shirt business that supports a camp for traumatized children with their signature theme of "Life is good". What I garner from their mission is the importance of play for children who don't have the processes nor language to communicate their experiences which then they're unable to foster an understanding and remain in a locked fearful stance. Hence play lets them distract, put a story to what they went through and let them see it in a safe environemt.
