3 Ways Board Games Can Help You Run Your Business, Department or Team

Thank you to the over 10,000+ wonderful folks who have subscribed to?L&D Easter Eggs. Why don't you join them and become one of the first to know when a new post is available, subscribe to?L&D Easter Eggs?by selecting the Subscribe button on this Newsletter and take a minute to forward this to a friend. You'll make their day!

Please note this newsletter was in NO PART written with any help from ChatGPT. All mistakes, inaccuracies, and leaps of logic were made by a human.

Introduction

A board game or, really any game, creates its own world with its own rules, own trade-offs and own relationships and this is often called the “Magic Circle”. But, if that world or Magic Circle is grounded in sound real-world models of behavior and outcomes, the lessons learned and experiences obtained can translate to making better everyday decisions, trade-offs, and investments within any organization.

Crafting a board game to reflect the reality of a sales landscape, difficult but routine leadership decisions, and enterprise wide challenges can be a worthwhile and engaging method of preparing employees for success.

Now, before you dismiss a board game as a childish endeavor not to be undertaken by serious business leaders, understand that the use of carefully crafted table top simulations (i.e. board games) has a rich history going back to at least the 1600s and for endeavors as serious as armed conflict.

In fact, the United States Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who was the Commander in Chief of US Pacific Fleet in World War II, stated that games had been a large part of preparation for both tactical and strategic initiatives before and during the war. Admiral Nimitz has been quoted as saying, “the war with Japan had been enacted in the game rooms at the War College by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise—absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war. We had not visualized these.”

The games minimized surprise and helped to solidify certain tactics, approaches, and, even, victories. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do the same thing for the introduction of a new product, strategizing how to handle changes in government regulations, or determining the best approach to close a difficult sales prospect?

What lessons can we take from the use of games for learning? Plenty. Sometimes just the mere focus and attention on critical issues can help us see larger patterns, hidden trends, and undiscovered opportunities. Board games help with all of those.

How? Well here are three ways that using board games in corporate settings improves how a business, department, or team functions.

Seeing the “Big Picture”

The board that is used as the framework for the board game is often literally the “big picture” of the situation, landscape, or ecosystem you are portraying in the learning situation. It tangibly provides the context in which the learning environment unfolds.

Do not to underestimate the power of that visual. In many corporate situations, employees toil away in isolation and have little to no understanding of how their actions directly or indirectly impact others. Does sales really understand what they are doing to operations? Or visa versa?

When creating a serious learning game, I often consider what overall view of the landscape we want the players/learners to observe? What do we want them to think about as they progress through the game? What do we want them to view as they contemplate their next move?

In the Total (re)Call game board shown here, the idea was that the sales representatives needed to understand how the entire office functioned. They needed to know the flow of patients through the various aspects of the office and how important it was to “see” and understand the workings of the entire office, not just of the physician. The game board reflects that goal.?

Highlight Relationships???????????????????????????????????????

The board itself highlights relationships as indicated above but so do the other elements of a well-crafted board game. Specifically, in most board games, cards serve as a way of highlighting, building, and underscoring key relationships. Cards can even introduce the concept of surprise or unpredictability that strikes many industries.

As an example, to show the relationship of investing in an asset to secure future wealth development, many games have the idea of investing in assets such as equipment or training, and receiving a return later in the game for that investment. The game can often highlight relationships and dependencies in a much shorter period of time than real-life returns.

An example using a well-known game is Monopoly. In that game, once you buy a hotel, rather than wait months for a return on your investment as you may need to do in an actual business transaction of buying a rental property, the player collects rent as soon as the next person lands on a space containing the new hotel. This immediately shows the relationship between investing and receiving income (minus taxes, property improvements, development costs, etc.). ?

Another way of showing relationships is use a technique that is included in the well-known game, Catan. In that game, you must collect resources which are represented on cards to build roads and settlements. You then turn in (or trade) several of those cards for the item you desire.

In a game about project management, for example, a person may need to collect cards related to “Positive Relationship” and “Skill Level” and then trade them to assign a task to a particular player. This type of collection activity highlights how best to coach and mentor a person on your team and highlights what resources the team needs to achieve project success.?

Underscores the Nuances of Trade-offs

Typically, in an organization, one cannot collect or amass all the resources desired because of natural time and money constraints. This leads to the need for trade-offs. Often, the ability to make reasoned and intelligent trade-offs is a key element in being an effective leader, supervisor, sales representative, etc.

Board games effectively mimic this process. As an example, I once created a board game where the players had to choose an appropriate investment based on factors impacting the organization.

Each team playing the game started out with a set amount of chips which they could spend on various investments. The teams need to decide how many chips they were willing to invest into various corporate items represented on 25 cards. The investment included items such as “Basic Cyber Security” or “Upgrade Customer Ordering System” or “Employee Wellness Program.”

The teams couldn’t afford to invest in all 25 cards. Instead, they had to read through the investment cards and decided which investments to make given the current environment of the game. ?Of course, investments have both costs and potential value.

It costs chips to make an investment but if a team chose the right investment cards, the team avoided catastrophes and had the opportunity to earn more chips during the course of the game. If they chose incorrectly, they faced costly catastrophes head on and, possibly, lost even more chips and, eventually, the game.

The game was constructed in such a way that the players were forced to make a trade-off without one clear right answer. Just like actual leadership situations. The investment cards and other aspects of the game reinforced the need to view a decision from multiple angles and underscores the reality that trade-offs need to be made whether you want to make them or not.

Conclusion

Hopefully, next time someone mentions the idea of using a board game to teach a complicated topic and relationship, you’ll take them seriously and consider how you can create an experience that highlights relationships, underscores the elements of the big picture and shows the parameters for making an effective trade-off among competing resources.

We can learn a great deal from board games for both creating games and making your learning design more interactive and memorable.

To learn even more about games for learning, check out my YouTube playlist called “The Unofficial, Unauthorized History of Learning Games” where I explore how board games and other types of games can be used to create effective and engaging instruction (and we have a little fun eating candy, drinking beer and wine, and contemplating the role of games in learning and history).?

Bio

Karl Kapp is a professor at Commonwealth University (formerly Bloomsburg University). He is a learning experience designer and a learning game designer who works around the global helping organizations create engaging and meaningful learning experiences using an evidence-based approach. He is founder of the?L&D Mentor Academy, a members only group that explores the technology, business acumen and concepts required to take L&D professional's careers to the next level and help all members to become a bit wiser.

Additionally, Karl is co-founder of?Enterprise Game Stack, a serious games company that creates digitized card games for learning ranging from interactive role-play games to sorting activities and everything in-between. Find out more at?Enterprise Game Stack.

He is also the author of the “The Unofficial, Unauthorized History of Learning Games”