Although gamers hardly needed another reason to log long hours left-clicking, this month’s Harvard Business Review has a compelling justification regardless: they point out that MMO gaming teaches the same skills and includes valuable systems that tomorrow’s business leaders need to succeed.
After painting a picture of the future business landscape as a place where “important decision making will be distributed throughout the organization,” where diverse individuals are “assembled for a single project and then disbanded” and where these interactions will take place primarily through digital channels of communication (the internet), the authors of “Leadership’s Online Labs” ask a rhetorical question:
What on earth will leadership look like in such a world—a world whose features have already begun to transform business?
But unlike many of the suits who might read the Business Review, you already know the answer (especially if you read my headline). The leaders of tomorrow will look like you or me — well-mannered, hastily groomed, muscular thumbs… but I digress.
While the authors admit that games’ rigidly defined rulesets, their relative lack of real-life risk and the disinhibitions of internet anonymity make MMOs “more akin to warfare than to business,” they believe that the environment is quite similar on the whole, and over several pages that would flatter even the most egotistical power leveler, they describe these similarities in some detail. Players are encouraged to make quick decisions; to take risks; to take initiative. In short, they are being trained to lead, even if they don’t realize it…
“My guild was struggling to merge with another,” one experienced and successful guild leader, a 27-year-old man, recalled in an interview. “When things didn’t work out to plan, our guild leader called it quits. No one volunteered to take over, so I stepped up to the plate. It wasn’t my desire to lead, but I knew if I didn’t, everything we had worked so hard to build would crumble.”
…and the confidence these individuals build can carry over into the real world.
A 46-year-old woman, unsure of her fitness to lead a guild when friends recruited her, said, “Follow-up and assertiveness now feel more natural to me, even in real life. It has been an amazing opportunity to push myself beyond my boundaries.”
Taking all this into account while noting gaming’s growing mainstream acceptance, Massively’s Cameron Sorden has an interesting suggestion: Why not put raiding on your resume? He explains:
As an officer in a raiding guild, you’re performing many activities on a daily basis which are directly applicable to a business environment: conflict resolution, organizational tasks, data tracking, long-term planning, and managerial decision-making in a fast-paced and dynamic environment. You might not even think of it that way, but it’s true. In case you’re not seeing the parallels, I just described the following activities: settling an argument between two guild members, planning the group composition for a raid, maintaining the DKP spreadsheet, making class recruitment decisions, and giving out orders that require a change in strategy when something goes wrong during a boss fight.
While you do have to take the proper tone and use appropriate language (i.e. stay away from l33t and roleplay if you want to be taken seriously) one can certainly see the value if studies like the Harvard Business Review’s find enough corporate eyeballs to change hiring practices.
But if this particular study does reach those eyeballs, it may not just be resumes that undergo revision. The second half of “Leadership’s Online Labs” describes something potentially even more exciting: the possibility that workplaces will “gamify” themselves to better suit productive leadership.
The notion arose from the experienced gamers on our research team, who were puzzled by our initial preoccupation with the individual qualities of game leaders. “If you want better leadership,” they asked, “why not change the game instead of trying to change the leaders?”
First, looking at nonmonetary incentives like DKP and virtual currency, the authors noted that immediate rewards for favorable performance, as well as a transparent system by which these rewards are doled out, created “a strong connection between effort and reward” and motivated players. There’s no reason these findings couldn’t be applied to a corporate environment:
Companies might devise ways to shorten the lag time between successful outcomes and the monetary compensation for those who contribute to them. For instance, instead of getting an end-of-year bonus, people in certain businesses could be rewarded for their contributions to a project as soon as it was completed—a prospect likely to galvanize their efforts. Also, before the launch of a group project such as a prolonged cross-functional sales effort, people might be given a breakdown of how rewards for a successful outcome will be divvied up.
Less likely in my mind, but also potentially valuable is the transparency of information. According to the authors, if leaders and subordinates could immediately access detailed information about one anothers’ potential and instantly communicate shared goals like they can in a number of MMOs, delegation and even shared control of operations becomes easier. Imagine if the mishmash of instant messaging, email, teleconferencing and face-to-face interaction was supplemented with up-to-the-second statistics and automatically generated reports on each employee’s progress, then filtered down into one unified HUD? Useful, no?
I’m curious: how could gaming better shape your workplace? Let us know in the comments.
Thanks to Massively for the link, and Crazy Gear for the image and a hilarious collection of sound byte mashups.
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