The Last Word Comment
You have to roll with it
Can board games help us to navigate complex change-management issues?
Jonathan Berry European practice director, Expressworks
With board games becoming a regular activity in many UK households, we should look at the lessons we can learn from them. When we cannot be together physically it
is much more difficult to communicate and discuss complex ideas effectively. We lose the benefit of being able to read body language, which accounts for more than half of all communication. So how do we have effective conversations
about complex ideas when we are in lockdown? Assuming we do not have the time or inclination to read or write white papers, we have to think of something else. As we enter the second month of lockdown,
more and more families, including mine, are dusting off their old board games. And it occurs to me board games are incredibly powerful representations of complex, dynamic situations. Could they provide an answer?
Beautifully designed Firstly, they are often beautifully designed and are, therefore, visually compelling. They can represent a huge range of competing forces, trade-offs, trends and possible choices. And because they are games, we willingly
engage with them in ways we probably do not with a spreadsheet. People have been using gamification as a
means of motivating changes in behaviour for years – and it is easy to see why when you stop to think about it. When playing games, we are challenged
to make decisions in an uncertain, complex and changing environment; in much the same way as we have to do on a daily basis in business.
Which is best? So which games are the best for helping us to interpret and work through the sorts of complexities we see in modern organisations? The test of how well a game communicates
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www.CCRMagazine.com June 2020
a situation is how much you can glean about what is going on just from walking past the board. For example, one look at a game of Risk
and you will be able to see who is winning and where the key conflict areas are. Similarly, with Monopoly it is easy to see
which streets are the most built up and who has the most resources. The old classics like Chess and Snakes and
Ladders are not so useful. Chess requires too much decoding and interpretation to make sense of the situation at hand. Snakes and ladders on the other hand is easy to understand but too simplistic.
When playing games, we are challenged to make decisions in an uncertain, complex and changing environment; in much the same way as we have to do on a daily basis in business
Intriguing What I find most intriguing is the latest generation of games, such as Scythe. It uses several boards, hundreds of pieces and multiple objectives. This sounds incredibly complex, but it
can be understood quickly. Once you have mastered it, it can be used to communicate a hugely complex dynamic situation. As lockdown continues, and we look forward to a new normal emerging, can we find ways to include what we can learn from games to inform our change management processes and help us to communicate difficult decisions? CCR
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