Building strategy through play

What might happen if…?

This is a question that can scare most managers into inaction. But it is a powerful question that, when treated the right way, can lead to deep insights and an ability to prepare multiple strategies, uniquely formed for a specific scenario.

Praemonitus, praemunitus.

To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Let’s play games

What if we could find deep insights by playing some games. We can all do this, we are Homo Ludens, we are born to play and it helps us to learn our first language by learning to use our mouths, throats and diaphragm to make sounds and words. There is no barrier to entry and we can concentrate on offering our unique insights.

Playing games allows us to level the playing field of our organisational structures in order to gain the maximum amount of insight. We can use game structures to:

  • Hear from everyone in the room;
  • Uncover deep insights that might not be obvious to everyone;
  • Explore concepts, ideas and scenarios;
  • Develop plans for varying eventualities;
  • Stand outside our roles, organisations and environments to gain other perspectives;
  • Break out of our habitual thinking and find truly new ideas and new structures to best support them.

Would you like to play a game?

– Joshua – War Games – 1983

License to wander

Games give us the license to allow our minds to wander into spaces we might not ordinarily go. As mentioned above we can break out of our habitual thinking and encourage scenarios to be explored that might not occur to us in our day to day work mindset. Further to this, we can test our assumptions in an environment where failure does not cost us too much.

There is a reason the military play out war games. Testing assumptions and scenarios allow strategies to be created to rectify poor assumptions and mitigate against scenarios that could cost us dearly if we are blind to them before they occur.

This article in the Boston Globe details how a group of political operatives, former government and military officials, and academics got together to play out various scenarios for the upcoming US election. According to the journalist who wrote the article, the games did not go well. According to Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor and former Defense Department official who co-organised the group of 80 contributors to the games:

All of our scenarios ended in both street-level violence and political impasse

Admittedly this does suggest looming disaster, but the games can only be considered a success as by understanding the possible scenarios ahead of any one of them occurring we can begin to shape strategies to mitigate against them. We can develop a playbook or better understand the future of our products or services this way and use this knowledge and insight and the strategies to improve them.

Imagine being seen as the most prescient organisation within your industry or sector. Using games we can be seen as the Steve Jobs and Apple of whatever we do by gaining all of the advantages listed above.

Human minds are plug-and-play devices. They’re not meant to be used alone. They’re meant to be used in networks.

– Professor James Gee – American researcher

Get in touch with us and we can co-create new strategies that can help your organisation be ready for whatever the world throws at it. Let’s play!

Building mental health with fun and play

It is a joke as old as time.

Four people meet on a Zoom call. One from Brighton, one from Athlone, one from the Netherlands and one from Liverpool. Much laughter ensues.

They all leave in a better state of mind ready to tackle their day.

On Tuesday the 24th of March 2020, I was joined by three people from remote parts of Europe including one person from the Netherlands, one from Brighton UK and one from Athlone in the Republic of Ireland for a Zoom call. The call was aimed at uniting the team in having some fun and laughter using games (mainly from the Improv world). This was an experiment in whether we could find a moment to play even in our isolation.

There is a lot of research into the effects of fun and laughter on the brain. It has been found in the work of Dr Lee S Berk that laughter can help suppress the stress hormones Cortisol, Epinephrine and Dopac. These hormones are responsible for those feelings of anxiety we may feel, especially in times like this. There is also a positive effect in the creation of HGH (Human Growth Hormone) which helps to boost the immune system. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080407114617.htm]

The power of laughter to decrease stress and anxiety

We had some fun and laughter with particular high points being the discovery of Annette as the Warrior Queen of a Diamond Mountain and the shared wisdom on changing a bike tyre that brought us the phrase “Never, ever do not attempt to play with yourself”. I’m still puzzling over the logic in that.

The moment I loved the most was when the phrase “Playing is all I want to do everyday” emerged from a shared moment.

Thanks Martin and the team. It was the best fun I had in a long time

– Annette Josephine Mulvihill

Get in touch with us and we can help your teams build social capital and release stress whilst also exercising new ways of collaborating, listening with intent and relating to one another in a distributed workplace.

21 methods for finding game-changing ideas

Where do ideas come from? How does someone have an idea that seems so original that it seems like a gift from the gods?

To be frank there is no one sure-fire recipe for having a great and game-changing idea; but there are things we can do to increase the ease of our idea creation and also to increase the quality and quantity of the ideas we have. These techniques are really about habit forming and can help to enrich your output.

Download our guide to methods for finding game-changing ideas here.

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