What strategy, stories, and games have in common

We dive deep into the definition of strategy, and explore different trends in how strategy is made. From there, we discuss resonances between strategy-making and gameplay, and opportunities to apply games in real world strategy-making processes.

Links to resources

Microscope, a story game by Ben Robbins
http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/

Ben Robbins on Twitter
https://twitter.com/lamemage

Fiasco, a story game by Jason Morningstar
https://bullypulpitgames.com/games/fiasco/

Follow, a story game by Ben Robbins
http://www.lamemage.com/follow/

Mark Elliott, Hailey’s friend and collaboration expert
https://mark-elliott.net/

Etymology of “strategy”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/strategy

Taylorism / scientific management
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management

VUCA: Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatility,_uncertainty,_complexity_and_ambiguity

“The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning” by Henry Mintzberg
https://hbr.org/1994/01/the-fall-and-rise-of-strategic-planning

Lean Startup methodology
http://theleanstartup.com/

Agile methodology (from “What is Agile?” by Atlassian)
https://www.atlassian.com/agile

Check-in, a practice for collaborative groups
https://checkinsuccess.com/

Magic the Gathering
https://magic.wizards.com/

Michael Porter, business strategy thought leader
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Porter

Tempo, a book about strategy by Venkatesh Rao
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/tempo/

World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG)
https://worldofwarcraft.com/

Jane McGonigal, a thought leader and designer in games for human development
https://janemcgonigal.com/

Pete Williams, Deloitte Center for the Edge, who did some research into high performance development through video games
https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/profiles/peter-williams.html

“How World of Warcraft Could Save Your Business and The Economy”, video by John Seely Brown, also Deloitte Center for the Edge
https://bigthink.com/videos/how-world-of-warcraft-could-save-your-business-and-the-economy-2

Ludology podcast episode with designer Phil Eklund: Games vs. Simulations
https://ludology.libsyn.com/episode-22-games-vs-simulations

High Frontier, board game by Phil Eklund
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47055/high-frontier

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hailey: This is Amble, the podcast where we take a disciplined wander through the borderlands between collaboration, innovation, new ways of working generally, and games! Tabletop games, video games, really anything fun and playful.    Because we believe there’s something undiscovered about how those things come together and make both of them better so people can achieve their dreams, their goals, their desired new reality.

I’m one of your hosts, Hailey Cooperrider.

Jason: And I’m Jason Tampake.     

Hailey: Hey Jase, how’s the week going?

Jason: It’s going okay. It’s real nice to be here. And in conversation with you, it’s something I’ve definitely been looking forward to this week. Work’s been reasonably hectic, but it’s always nice to be involved in kind of dialogue that you get a real kick out of.

So thanks for having me along.

Hailey: Yeah. Yeah. Similarly been [00:01:00] in a somewhat intense week actually doing strategy with some other folks around trying to put some of these Amble ideas into practice and strategy is our topic today. So it’s timely. It’s good to have at top of mind and to experience what it’s like to be in that uncertainty , when anything and everything sort of seems available and possible.

How do you even begin to decide or know what to do, which direction to go? So hoping maybe I can learn something useful out of today as well.

Jason: Nice. I guess we were going to start with the, you know, a bit of a segment around a game or a technique or something like that introduces the concept that we’re talking about.

This is going to be one of the things that helps frame up our conversation a little bit. Do you have anything top of mind that you want to bring in around strategy? Like a game you’ve been playing or something like that?

Hailey: Yeah. I gave this some thought and I think I want to bring in the game ‘Microscope’ and, you’ve played that right?

[00:02:00] Jason: I’m going to be honest and say, no.

This is one for you Hails haha! Tell me

about it.

Hailey: So Microscope is a story game by Ben Robbins. Who’s an independent designer out of Seattle, I think. Otherwise known as Lame Mage. I think that’s where you can find him on Twitter and he makes these games that are very story forward. So a lot of gamers might not necessarily even recognize that it’s a game it’s maybe closer to what you think about for a role-playing game.

But even without the game master, without the miniatures, without the tactical board, it’s really a guideline for constructing a narrative together.    Maybe if you’ve played something like Fiasco where you’re creating , almost generating a movie procedurally through your collaboration, it’s more

in that kind of scene. And the way it works is what you’re creating is an epic scifi or fantasy history and an alternate world history , [00:03:00] together with maybe four or five other people at the table. And it’s an open, endless infinite game potentially. So there’s not really a time limit on it, but you probably want a good sort of three or four hours to really get into making this game.

And the way it works is the game puts some guidelines around ‘you can create’. On your turn, you have total authorial power over what you’re contributing to the story. So we decide together roughly    the broad scope, say the broad narrative of the story, which is ‘humanity leaves the earth and gets into a generation spaceship that they’re going to slowly float through the galaxy until they find a new home’.

And you acknowledge that this story is probably going to take place over multiple generations. That’s the kind of story that microscope is best for. So it’d be a really good game say, if you were starting to build the entire star wars mythology from scratch. You know, you want to build a big sweeping narrative of lots of history and lots of things going [00:04:00] on, but you don’t want to do it just out of the mind of one creator.

So on your turn, you’re invited to create a period- which is something like a span of    a hundred years,    longer than one person’s life- an event, or a scene. And describe what happens in that period. And you might say, okay, we know how this begins and ends. We’ve decided that in advance begins with, you know, the period of building the ship and leaving earth.

And it ends with a period of finally finding a new home among the stars. What else happens in between and on my turn, I can just put down, okay, there’s the war with the Zargs. You know, at some point in this journey, we actually run into another species called the Zargs. That’s going to happen. In this period we have to find ways to overcome and maybe become diplomatic.

I’m not really sure how it resolves. On your turn, Jase, you can play a turn. And you might add another big sweeping period. And as long as you’re not logically contradicting something that [00:05:00] came before, like if your period says ‘it turns out there never was another species on the planet’ then you’re not allowed to, you’re not allowed to do that    in the universe, I should say.

But beyond that you have full control over the narrative. But if you don’t want to do a big sweeping period, actually you want to explore the war with the Zargs,    you can say, ‘okay, I want to do an event’, you know, ‘first encounter with the Zargs’. And then you can drill down even further into that. ‘I want to do a scene’.

What happened, you know, in that first conversation between the Zarg overlord and the captain of the generation ship. And then we might actually even go into role play. So it’s got rules about how to have a, a role play around that. And because everyone has control on their turn, there’s this really interesting energy to it and actually downplays negotiation over whether something should fit or not.

As long as the person is clear and doesn’t break the logical consistency of the story, they can do anything. And through that, as long as you want to go, you can [00:06:00] generate a really, really rich world and grand epic arc in the course of a few hours.

Jason: Nice. Well, also it sounds like, you know, if the energy and focus of a group is around a particular scene or something you can drill right into it and explore that as much as you like. So it has that zoom effect or something.

So, yeah.

Hailey: Yeah. It’s that kind of zooming in and zooming out capability. And I think that’s why it’s called ‘Microscope’ because you can drill down to each moment, but you can also back way out to look at the total picture.

Jason: Hmm. So how do you see that relating to strategy and what we’re talking about today?

Hailey: Well, yeah, I think how it relates is that there’s different ways that people think about strategy so , in the past, I think when we’ve talked about this, we’ve used the metaphor of a wave and a particle. You know, so    in physics there’s this idea that matter can simultaneously express itself as either a [00:07:00] wave, like a wave of light, or a particle, like a photon, and strategy is a bit like that.

It kind of has two sides. One side, which I think of as the wave, is the vision, the story, the narrative, you know, where are we going as a group? What are we trying to become? What are our values?    What do we all agree is good and a goal that we believe in and what are some broad pathways for how to get there?

And in some ways, the only way to really express that side of strategy is through story. The other side, the particle, is sort of, ‘um, okay. So we think we know where we want to go. How much resources do we need?    What are the steps? What are the critical dependencies? You know, what’s A that has to be done before B, so that C can happen?’

And very much the specifics of how you arrange yourselves to complete the story that you want to tell . And I think Microscope is just quite good as a way of really staying with the wave. Staying in the [00:08:00] story and also doing so in a way that gives everybody who’s at the table a way to get their ideas in.

So if I get really specific about    times that I’ve used it in a workshop; If I’m with, you know, say 10 or 12 people, and it’s been, you know, three or four hours of really bashing out. We’ve got this idea about this change we want to make in the world, and we think we know how we want to do it. We’ve built up a huge amount of shared understanding about the complexity of it.

And now it’s time to figure out what some next steps are. The struggle in that kind of converging period of the workshop is often that , how do you kind of get everybody’s complicated thoughts all out and together, somewhat quickly in a way that they all feel like    their concerns have been acknowledged and included.

A lot of what I see happen in those conversations, especially when time is running out is you start going down a thread and we come really close to kind of landing something. And then someone raises something [00:09:00] else. And that creates a whole new tangent and a whole new rabbit hole and we never kind of circle back.

And a lot of people are left feeling like ‘I didn’t get my piece in’, but by finding ways to externalize everybody’s contribution onto these, because when you play microscope and I didn’t say this, you literally write these things down on an index card, you know, your period, your event, your scene, and you put it onto the table and it’s all there laid out in front of you.

So that it’s very easy for anyone to see what’s already out there and how they can fit their piece in.    And so what I’ll do is I’ll get a bunch of pieces of    A4 paper and I’ll have everyone stand up at this point cause they usually kind of    need an energy boost and their head is buzzing and they’re tired. And we’ll actually, instead of it being an epic history for the next 10,000 years, we’ll put the next couple quarters.

And the next few years, you know, and the few years after that. And we’ll start laying everybody’s different things that they think need to get done into these different columns and then create the cross streams. So it looks a [00:10:00] little bit more like a Gantt chart at the end, but they have fun doing it.

And I try to bring in some of that expressiveness about what’s the story and what’s the outcome here.

Jason: Fantastic. So the idea of using narrative to build a coherent shared story around what it is that we’re going to do.    The other thing that kind of popped up then is I understand why you mentioned Ben’s work the ‘Microscope’ in relation to me because we’ve played another one of Ben’s games, ‘Follow’, which uses a very similar mechanic in terms of giving autonomy to individuals within the context of the game to set various parts of the story , and use s index cards.

Et cetera

Hailey: Yeah.

And I think that idea of, sort of spreading out the authorship is important, especially in a multi-stakeholder initiative where you’ve got representatives from different organizations, trying to agree on a pathway forward when there’s no one in the room who’s essentially the ultimate decision maker, the way you might have in an organization where there’s a boss who [00:11:00] ultimately is going to make the call. Even if they’re trying to be more participatory temporarily, I think you could use it in that context as well.

But I think it really shines when authority is less clear .

Jason: The thing that I’d like to sort of pick up and hold for later, if we could, is this idea of, to what degree is there complete autonomy over a strategic narrative versus to what degree is it constrained via various things. And this is the inherent sort of tension

in strategy. To what degree does strategy tell us the right way to go about doing something versus to what degree does it just enable us to act coherently towards a shared goal.

Hailey: Because people’s opinions and needs and agendas are not the only constraints, you know, there’s also the world around you and the resources available and the shape of the terrain, so to speak.

Jason: Yeah.

And story doesn’t happen , is not completely disembodied of that in many ways. You [00:12:00] know, even when I’m engaging in story, there was a very simple constraint that was put in there that anything that, uh, if we were to take on a new section of that story, we’re not going to contravene. We’re going to agree not to run over the top of the segment of the story that had come beforehand

for instance. It’s interesting. I’d love to explore that more with you and learn more about how that works.

Hailey: Cool. Well, you know, maybe that’s good as an initial example of how games and strategy might converge, but let’s, let’s take it back. Take a step back and answer our first question, which is ‘What is strategy?’

Jason: I’d love to make the observation that we started, in terms of finding parallels between gaming and,    collaboration, or gaming and innovation, or gaming and teaching, learning group sense-making, et cetera. We picked a big one to kick off with. This is , it’s a very, very deep rabbit hole that we could go down here. A very worthwile one.

Hailey: And I think it’s central to maybe what we’re on about with Amble. That [00:13:00] it’s not just games that incentivize people to predetermined behaviors, it’s games that help people deal with uncertainty. Strategy in one sense, what a strategy is this sort of suitcase, where that when you open it up, contains all of these different activities and things you do and attitudes you take towards problem solving.

Jason: Yeah. Actually, that’s probably a really nice segue Hails. And I know you’ve done a lot of work and thinking in terms of what strategy is and its function it’d be interesting to hear from you.    How do you characterize what strategy is and what its function is? And I understand that there’s going to be a difference between possibly the way it initially emerged and what it is now.

Hailey: Yeah. Well, I think how it initially emerged is probably a good place to go.    It’s a slippery concept. It’s really hard to grasp onto. And when you look for definitions about it or, you know, clarity around, ‘what is it really?’, you tend to find that you get definitions that are [00:14:00] specific to business or military.

Or other, you know, other domain specific definitions. So finding a transdisciplinary definition was tricky when I went looking for this a few years ago.    One trick that I learned from my friend Mark Elliot was: go to the etymology and see what that tells you. And the word strategy comes from ‘strategos’.

I don’t remember if it was the Latin or the Greek, but it means a general. And one way of looking at it, that strategy is the way of being of the general. It’s what they do.    They have a sense of what their outcomes are,    what winning and losing looks like. You know is defeating the army opposite us enough of a goal,

or do I also need to bear in mind that I don’t destroy the, you know, the crops of our, our home region in the process of defeating that other army. They have a battle in front of them or a series of battles and they have a sense of the terrain and [00:15:00] the available resources. And they’re comprehending, you know, holding together all of these different aspects of the reality that they’re facing.

You know, how the morale of their troops, the morale of the opposing troops, the theory of mind of the opposing general, all of these different layers. And it ultimately comes back to the general to build that mental model and then to make decisions, to give utterances out to the people down the chain of command, and then that results in people taking actions that work or don’t work towards the eventual goal.

And I think that in a sense tells us a lot. If we don’t worry too much about it being a military thing, but instead focus on the phenomenology, you know, the internal world of the general’s mind and all the different things that are going on as they kind of assemble it. I think that tells us a lot about what strategy is .

They’re making models of reality, they’re understanding their constraints and their goals and what good looks [00:16:00] like. And they’re telling a story about how they think events could unfold.    And then they’re giving directives that people act on.

Jason: That’s a little bit different to what some folks might run into at business school.

Hailey: Tell me more about that.

Jason: Well, I’m just saying, I guess post-sixties rationalization of how organizations work or how strategy gets done, or the function of strategy would suggest that, in a classical sense, I’m talking, Taylorist sense, strategy is about outlining the steps to get something done.

It’s about a rational sequence of actions in order to generate an outcome. And that seems very different to what you’re characterizing there with the phenomena that a general is marshaling in order to pursue an outcome.

[00:17:00] Hailey: Yeah, I suppose it’s different. I mean, imagine somewhere in there that, you know, the general is imagining those steps.

But I guess what that brings to mind is the question of how much uncertainty there is in the world.    So in the fog of war that’s volatile, uncertain…    so with that analogy, Foucault, maybe you remember it.    A good general knows that when the

when the people who are actually implementing those orders go out into the field, they’re going to encounter all sorts of things that they didn’t expect. Right,    no plan survives first encounter with the enemy.    So the plan might fall apart the steps in the sequence. But if the strategy says, well, you know, you’ve got to get control of that base so that we can establish a new front so that then they can improvise within that frame to find a different way to get control of the base that didn’t maybe follow the plan.

I think that’s part of the conversation that we’ve been having around what makes this balance between    the very [00:18:00] formal plan- heavy strategizing and the very informal, improvisational, which is focused more on the story and the outcome than on the tactical specifics.

Jason: Yeah. The thing that evoked it to me pointed me to the HBR article, the Mintzberg article about the fall and rise of strategic planning. Yeah. And the Mintzberg article’s really explicit in saying that, you know, this sort of 1960s version of strategy that finds its way or that found its way into sort of traditional business is something that we really need to revise in this sort of concept.

Do you want to outline sort of more about that?

Hailey: Do you want to outline more about that? You read it more carefully than I did.

Jason: Well, I think the thing that’s interesting in that sort of space for me is that it seeks to move us away from this really purely rational idea of strategy as something [00:19:00] that’s

a definite rational pursuit that’s held in the mind, that’s about known outcomes and known steps towards a definite goal state. And the Mintzberg article talks about the fallacies that are associated with that. So, and it’s similar to a lot of the rationalist fallacies that you find in a lot of social sciences that move into a scientific mode of thinking by way of trying to justify their position.

And this is not, explicitly speaking, I understand that this is not a critique of the engine of science and how good it is at working out evidence. But it’s to say that in some spaces, this idea of strategy providing predictability, strategy providing me as a general, am detached from a whole bunch of things.

And I can understand at a sweeping glance exactly what’s going on out there, um, that I can then formalize it in a way that makes sense to the various components of my army, and [00:20:00] then communicate it effectively so that the will sort of happens. In many ways that’s the view of the omnipotent kind of business manager who sits back and surveys the terrain of business and understands perfectly what needs to happen and then puts into play these strategic planning guides that allow the organization to function effectively towards an outcome.

What we know from practice is that it’s not really like that that’s, that’s not how stuff gets done. And I think in your observation, in an increasingly complex world in fact, we need to bring in multiple voices. We need to understand the multiplicity of an environment, things are difficult in that space.

Hailey: Thanks for breaking us into that, because now I’m starting to remember some of my thoughts on, on reviewing that article. And I want to push back a little bit on some of what you said that we know that’s not how things get done with the sort of the hero leader who absorbs everything. Because you know, when I’ve been a huge fan of, yes, we need to make strategy more [00:21:00] participatory and we need to, you know, co-create policy and involve all the minds in the creation of the eventual plan.

But there’s nuance to that.    And different ways that you can involve people and that, I think that takes us kind of, we’re starting to move into our second topic here is, you know, how does strategy get made? There’s something about the amount of time that leaders, at least as currently constructed in hierarchical organizations, the amount of time they spend understanding and surveying the landscape and that people who are further down in the pyramid, so to speak, don’t spend as much time on that.

They have maybe a version of that for the domain that they’ve been given oversight over.    But for them to kind of bootstrap themselves into the level of understanding of the complexity of the situation that the leader sees, they just need to do a lot , they have a lot of catching up to do when it comes strategy time. But a lot of people have said it’s a CEO’s job to do 90% of the time.

They should be [00:22:00] understanding strategy and 10% doing things. And then for most everyone else in the organization that’s flipped. To be 90% doing things and 10% strategy. So it can kind of trouble things.    Where I think we’ve started to see an interesting new approach to strategy emerge is in startups because the teams are so small that it’s more possible.

They’re so small and they need to be able to move and pivot and, quickly zigzag, that there’s more expectation and more possibility that everyone has sort of an equal view on the picture and on where we can be going and on the complexity in front of them. So small high-performing teams working with a high degree of shared coherence .And yeah, reading the Mintzberg piece

I was reflecting where he was saying, “oh, you know, the data is old by the time it gets to the decision maker”. And “really the value of data-driven decision making is overplayed”. I think with things like lean startup and agile, we’ve kind of seen the return in a better [00:23:00] form of the data-driven decision-making because it has built in the rapid cyclical learning cycles.

So you can get the intuition about, let’s just try this. We need to make a leap. We need to make a decision, form a hypothesis and build an experiment to see if this works. But we’re going to try to get real validated data out of that. That’s going to tell us whether that experiment is pointing at a useful direction or not.

I think that’s a new synthesis of kind of those two sides. And that’s maybe why that’s so promising and why it’s so big now, but also it’s really hard to do.

Jason: I’m with you. There is something exceptionally promising in that kind of space where , in contemporary environments, we do have access to large data sets.

We do have access to information at a scale that’s required to make some of those really difficult sort of decisions. I’d be interested to see if what your perspective is on why this [00:24:00] type of strategy seems to work exceptionally well within the context of startups or small kind of operational units versus, you know, large organizations.

Hailey: Yeah. I think it may this, uh, there’s obviously the smaller number of people that are responsible to the decision, right? So it’s the founders, the people on the team, those are often initially quite, quite small, less than 10. And probably also the people investing in them, the venture capital.

There’s another dimension to that though, which is if the primary outcome is profit or business sustainability I think that collapses a lot of the complexity. Most of what you can and can’t do, or what you’re worried about in terms of how the world will be different if we’re successful. As long as you’re staying within the limits of what’s legal, the rules of the game that have been laid out by the [00:25:00] current legal and economic and political structure, as well as sort of social license about, you know, how much you can cause problems out there, break things as they often say,    move fast and break things-

it just reduces the amount of things you need to consider. But when you, when you get into multi-stakeholder situations or social impact, or you’re trying to move the whole of society forward, or the whole of human civilization in a positive direction without harming too many people or, or the environment as a by-product, it just becomes orders of magnitude more complex. And the mental computing you need to do to get that right just starts to go way up. But I’ve forgotten what your actual question was.I’m not sure I answered it.

Jason: No, I think we’re definitely, this is really interesting to me because it sort of brings back that idea of when you were talking about when    acting within definite guidelines or definite constraints around something like budget, profit, et [00:26:00] cetera is there, it collapses a lot of the complexity. When operating within an environment where the legal tolerances are known, where the policy tolerances are known. Where the sort of actions that you can take are well-defined this makes strategy really, really simple.

I think that’s sort of a, the physical dynamic boundaries that sit around strategy. There’s also that point- I think the point that I was asking was- why does it work with groups of 10 folks like with startups, et cetera, versus big organizations. And that I think the thing that I was trying to get to was that, you know, we know that with small groups of folks, you can have binary, one-to-one conversations and communicate a shared understanding really effectively.

There are 10 parts. You can all have one conversation and be in the same room. And to your point, when you’re dealing with systems that are large, complex when you’re dealing with spaces, like collective impact policy intervention, you know it requires bringing together folks that are [00:27:00] a lot- well, domains that are a lot more diverse, that have different languages, that have different understanding that are bigger than groups of 10 people.

So the sorts of sense-making that you can do with a small group in terms of aligning around what a strategy is and what that means for us is very, very different to how you might go    about doing that with a larger group of folk. And the sorts of stuff, sorts of sense-making that gets done naturally amongst small groups of folks doesn’t scale up to larger collections or convening larger groups.

And this is, this is the interesting bit, like to what degree does convening play in bringing together a, I don’t know, a shared understanding of goal states. How does it help folks do better strategy when they’re working in this kind of complex environment.

Hailey: Yeah. Good, good. So maybe to set up the sort of next round of inquiry around how does strategy get made, [00:28:00] um, first just sense-making right.

This is making sense we’re trying to take all of those, you know, many hundreds of different dimensions and facts and aspects of the situation we’re in. So the example of the general, again, the territory and the soldiers and the morale and all the things that they’re thinking of. How are we pulling that together into a picture that we sort of all share and understand so that we know that if we try to do something, we’re going to get the outcome we expect more or less. And how that the act of sense-making or the work of sense-making looks different at different numbers of participants.

I wonder if maybe even just sort of walking our way up from two to three to five and you know, talking about some of the different things that start to come in.

Jason: Lovely.

Hailey: Starting with, with two people, we can rely on a lot on, um, just social norms and conversational norms and, um, people know how to talk, right.

They know how [00:29:00] to take turns or interrupt or kind of flow and they get into flow. Um, I’ve had a friend who likens it to a game of tennis. You know,    hitting the ball back and forth over the net. And we kind of push each other in different directions and it’s very emergent. Um, and there’s this sense that if you just start talking with a vague destination in mind, you’ll get there.

But even just adding a third really changes that. Right.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, because you’re dealing with another set of worldviews, another set of understandings. I think the other piece about two people in conversation is that especially friends who’ve known each other for a while, you begin to do things like share similar experiences. When you talk about metaphors, you have the same bank of metaphors that you can rely on.

Um, if you’re from the same country, you’ve come from a similar cultural context. If you’ve grown up in the same neighborhood, you’ve experienced similar things,. You know, that sort of, um, and so in many ways, your [00:30:00] worldviews are very, very aligned. So when you’re seeing something like, Hey, we’re standing on top of this hill and we want to get across to that other hill, but that river down there,    looks dangerous.

Well, if we’re both from the same context, we can really quickly come to that agreement. And chances are, we’ll agree to get across there with the same sorts of assumptions in mind. If there’s a third person who for instance, may not have grown up with us, may not have been to that terrain before may not have seen this particular hill or had experience with the danger of the river.

Then we have to spend time saying, “oh no, it looks really calm, but it’s actually really turbulent just under the surface. So if we try and wade through it we’re likely to get pulled downstream. Trust us, you know, when we were five, we tried playing in it and it wasn’t such a good idea.” There’s, sorry-

Hailey: What are some of the, the practices or protocols you’ve seen start to enter as you go sort of from two into three, four and five?

Jason: Well, again, in these sorts of small group [00:31:00] numbers, again, the act of just working through it, it’s like, let’s bring it to gaming. When you’re in a gaming group and you agree, when you sit back and agree the scenario that you’re playing or the game that you’re playing and the rules that you’re playing. These sorts of scaffolds make it a lot easier for people to meet each other in a particular space.

These areas get really well-defined. The sorts of moves I can make on a chess board are really constrained. The things that we’re agreeing that we’re going to play chess. And this is how we go about doing it, right. So I can play chess with even strangers, random strangers that don’t speak my language that haven’t come from the same country as me that I share no kind of cultural background with except, uh, chess.

And we can have a really productive game. It’s one of the beauties of Magic the Gathering, conventions, et cetera. We are bound together by a shared understanding of a common game. Language, all these things don’t matter.

Hailey: Yeah. I have    an example of that with, um, I work with [00:32:00] a community of people who have this shared practice of check-in. So when we start a    meeting, we quite formally take turns on how’s everyone doing. Maybe if we’ve been working together all day, or, you know, we’ve seen each other a lot, we, we can kind of skip over it. But if it’s the first meeting after even a few days or a week, we do a round of checking in, um, and we might limit that to a number of minutes, but that person gets uninterrupted speaking into the circle about how they’re feeling and what’s on top for them, what’s in their life.

And that’s based on a set of norms around, ‘we let emotions and personal issues be present’ because we believe that if you try to artificially separate them from the process of working together, that they just sort of sneak in anyway, as drama or attention or misunderstanding. And it’s to the point where people who are kind of from this broad network of [00:33:00] facilitators and people-geeks, and people interested in new ways of working, all just kind of do this now.

Sometimes we don’t even have to talk about it and I believe it helps us avoid a lot of pitfalls down the road. But that’s the kind of thing that you can do with two. And you often do with two, but you can kind of rely a little bit more with banter and smalltalk with two, but as you get three or four or five, ten, a check-in becomes a really powerful option

Jason: Nice Hailey.

Hailey: And I think that’s also when you start to see things like let’s use workshop activities like sticky notes and whiteboards. Or let’s all take one minute to silently think about our answer to this prompt question that we’ve developed. I know we’ve got three questions we’re going to work through today.

And each time we’re going to, um, you know, each put them on a sticky note or type them into the zoom chat, and then read across the full outputs of what the group did. Those sorts of things make it easier to kind of read the tea leaves of the group mind, I guess.

Jason: Yes. So this idea that [00:34:00] there’s value in understanding each other more effectively. And one mode of doing that for instance is check-in.

And so if we were confronted by an maybe a, a group of two friends just does that very, very naturally. In the same way that a startup company over the coffee table in the kitchen, just through the everyday activity of banter gets to know each other’s language, gets to know what we mean when we say X or what we mean when we say this is what growth is for us.

We know what we mean when we say ‘this is our strategic direction’, but as you scale that, as it becomes more complex, the sorts of tools that we use to generate that kind of shared understanding, the sorts of tools that we use to generate that empathy and leaning into things with one another. Um, the sorts of tools that we use to generate a common language need to be a little more explicit because, [00:35:00] well, why? Why do they need to be more explicit?

Let’s just ask. I mean, I, I have an intuition that it’s…

Hailey: Go, you go.

Jason: Well, the intuition is that, and I think this is sort of borne out in a lot of the research, is that, you know, with a small group of folks, you’re not really time bound in a sense. Because all of those sorts of things can happen implicitly. You can work through it. With a group of friends, for instance, you have a shared history that goes back X amount of years, right?

So all of these things sort of get built in. When you’re talking about coordinating large groups of people, especially when making key strategic decisions, the building of shared understanding, the building of a sense of rapport, the building of all the things that make sense-making work, you need to get that done quickly. Because you can’t form a friendship group with that mob over 10 years.

Well, maybe you can. I mean, [00:36:00] I’m not, I’m not trying to say that it’s impossible to get people from different business units or different organizations, friends, and working together and talking a common language. What I’m saying is that oftentimes when you’re convening these sorts of conversations, it’s because strategy needs to be made to get something done in a specific timeframe.

And because of that, you need to be really explicit about the type of tools that you’re bringing to bear, to enable people to come to that shared understanding, or that shared sense-making a lot quicker.

Hailey: Yeah, a lot of, a lot of what, what we’re doing when we’re trying to facilitate groups to make strategy is just accelerating their trust and their coherence and their shared mental model.

Because once they have all those things kind of figuring out the right pathway or the right next step actually gets quite easy.    If everything else is kind of in place.

We’ve talked a lot about that kind of coherence, shared understanding, getting to know each other, uh, piece of things. Is there anything [00:37:00] else just in the ‘how strategy has made’ that we want to add, or some other examples?

Jason: There’s a piece, um, I would like to return to that idea of the sorts of constraints that affect decision-making. Or shared constraints that affect decision-making because I think there’s definitely something in that which takes away… I don’t want us to, I’m just going to pause…

Because constraints are actually really important in generating coherent action .Strategy isn’t just effective storytelling. While shared narrative and a coherent story enables action to happen and understanding to emerge, constraints also count. I might tell you the best story about, um, acquiring fantastic [00:38:00] technology and deploying, you know, a ground breaking solution into market.

But if I’m bound by the very fact that I’ve got five people with access to total of $2,000 to get the job done, that story is just a story. It’s not a strategic story. It’s not , it doesn’t make any kind of relate, it doesn’t have a relationship to how I might marshal the resources in my current context and work with the actual things around me to get a particular outcome done.

It just becomes a story or fantasy if you will. So the idea of enabling people to understand their shared constraints is also important in terms of getting real action done in the world. So moving something from strategy into an executable sort of plan.

Hailey: Yeah. If we, in a way, strategy is kind of an ongoing push and pull between this imagined future that we [00:39:00] wish existed and the realities of the actual world here and now. And how that is already evolving in this sort of inertia that it has, or the track that it’s on.

And then the things that we believe that we can do to intervene in that world as it is to kind of move it or tilt it in the direction we want it to go.

I was listening to Michael Porter. Who’s one of the, you know, most revered figures in business strategy, you know, and his thing is ‘strategy is not vague’. It’s not theoretical. It’s very specific, you know, it’s, uh, for businesses, it’s about assembling a value chain that allows you to deliver on a unique proposition within a market. You need to really understand the industry that you’re trying to sell into or work within. And the forces that are shaping that industry, as well as be brutally honest about the capabilities that your team brings and how you can actually be different and find a competitive advantage within that industry. And so he really downplays vision [00:40:00] and that sort of thing.

But I think even in those circumstances where you’re really trying to dial in and figure out all these things and create this very specific assembly of activities and structures that Porter’s talking about, you’re usually using the narrative side somewhere in there, as kind of a shorthand. Or maybe it’s inspirational, or maybe it is even functional in that if someone encounters a place where the specifics kind of fall apart, or there’s uncertainty, at least they have the story, the goals, the objectives, the outcomes, the desired future in their mind to help them improvise around.

Jason: Nice.

Hailey: You know, I always thought of something as, um, you know, why do you make strategy together? You do it so that people can be maximally empowered as individuals to go out and separately and entrepreneurially do things in their context or in their zones of influence to make the strategy real.

Um, you know, there’s not this assumption that just because we’re doing strategy collectively, that therefore we’re coordinating every single decision from that point [00:41:00] on. The whole point, in a sense of having a really well done strategy is to reduce the amount of coordination we have to do in an ongoing manner.

I think that also relates to me for this point that it’s not an AB sequence. It’s not like we do strategy, and then we implement. Those two things are always in dialogue. In the past with colleagues, I’ve talked about it as strategy as kind of a fuel that you have in the tank. And you need to do strategic conversations and sense-making and reorienting and re-specifying your strategy to give you more confidence so that you can go out and do things.

But as the world changes and you learn more and your situation changes, the tank starts to deplete, which is really just representative of the clarity that you have, or the certainty that you have, that you really understood the actual facts of reality. Or even that your goal was a good one starts to become more diffuse, um, and, and less something that you feel less you can rely on.

So you have to get back into that [00:42:00] sense-making space to renew the fuel and renew the coherence. And so, in a sense getting that mix right of when we’re doing sort of sense-making and when we’re taking action, based on that, that sort of tempo, you know, between the two is meaningful. And tempo is the name of a book on strategy by Venkatesh Rao. So check that one out too, um, where he talks about some of these ideas.

Okay. Maybe it’s time to talk about games and strategy.

Jason:     Sure.

Hailey: So if we’re exploring this borderland between ways of working and, um, you know, good, well held facilitated processes, or just high performing teams and that games can be part of that, they can elevate that. What are some of the ways that we’ve seen games contribute to better ways of working, specifically around strategy?

Jason: Hmm.

[00:43:00] I think one of the things that’s unique to games is that it allows people to agree on a common language around how they’re going to go about pursuing something. It gives you a common goal. It gives you the ability to understand the domain space of action that you can take towards that goal without prescribing exactly what those steps are.

And it allows you to act in coherence with the other players in that kind of space.    As a consequence, it’s a really useful tool for beginning to explore the potential engagement or for outcomes that you’re trying to achieve. I think for groups of people who are engaged in that kind of activity, it’s a means to begin doing that collective sense-making in a structured way and in a fun way and in an exploratory way. That would be my initial sort of response.

So there’s a couple of different layers that you could bring into that. [00:44:00] One is, well, let’s play a game like Microscope, which allows us to collectively build a shared narrative around what it is that we want to achieve. The other way that you could be doing things is like your traditional scenario planning sort of scenarios.

Where you- or activity, sorry- where you get out and you say, okay, now we’re going to explore this pathway across the river. Now we’re going to explore this pathway across the river. Now we’re going to explore a different pathway across the river. Now we’re going to explore a condition where we don’t go across the river at all, but still try and achieve our goal on the other side.

This sort of activity I think, is really well known. Like scenario planning is a well-known kind of facet of strategic thinking or strategy planning that I think many, many folks out there would be aware of. And games or war gaming for instance is one way that that actually gets done.

Hailey: So let’s talk, [00:45:00] here’s an example of, um, you know, that I’ve, that I’ve heard about uh, World of Warcraft. So, you’re a player, right Jase?

Jason: I’ve played World of Warcraft in my time. I don’t currently play, but I have. I’m familiar with the game.

Hailey: Did you get to the point of joining a clan and going on raids?

Jason: I did get to the point of yes, being part of a guild and joining raids, yes.

Hailey: What happens there? Tell us about that through the lens of a group, you know, preparing for a battle in a sense, and what, what did the collective strategy-making look like?

Jason: So, um, in these sorts of spaces, in the, in the World of Warcraft game space, the positive thing is that the, um, actually…

It’s interesting, Hails, like riffing on this because in traditional game spaces like this, where you’re bringing together, you know, in a massively multiplayer online role-playing sort of scenario, the task is to bring [00:46:00] together a team or a group of folks with different skills that enable you to, you know, defeat a monster, navigate a dungeon, defeat a monster.

The nature of the dungeon is generally known nowadays. And as is the kind of nature of the fight or the boss that you’ll be encountering and have to overcome. How you go about explicitly doing that is up to the group. But it’s generally known that you need to do things like have a certain amount of damage output within the group, have a certain amount of healers available, um, have certain other sorts of skills that enable you to navigate various other interactions within the context of the dungeon. And the idea is when you’re bringing a party together, as a, as a party, you make sure that all of those roles are filled because without all of those roles filled, you can’t get the job done. You won’t, you won’t navigate the dungeon. You won’t defeat the end boss. You don’t get the loot.

And part of the challenge of bringing that group together, is you don’t just bring them together, you have to have a common [00:47:00] understanding of how the run is going to go. How this movement through the challenge is going to go. Everyone needs to be aware of their roles, when their roles kick in, how their role plays with one another.

And when you’re doing it, it’s a little bit, um, yeah. It’s interesting thinking through this Hails. Yeah. Sorry. I guess this was just something I wasn’t ready to talk about.   

Hailey: No, it’s    been really good. I can bring it back to a point, which is, I remember about 10 years ago, learning about some, some research    around people who had played World of Warcraft at this very high level. And that those skills were actually translatable into managerial skills.

And in fact, there was something more impressive about the way that, um, you’re managing-

Jason: Is this the McGonigal work? Is that-?

Hailey: I heard about it through someone more local, Pete Williams. Uh, we talked about it and I got some articles. I’ll have to take them up and put them in the links.

Jason: Yup. That’d be awesome!

[00:48:00] Hailey: It’s almost more impressive than managing within the context of an organization where you have this, uh, well, they have to do it. And you know, they have agreed contractually to respond to the orders from above. But in the case of World of Warcraft, it’s much more autonomous and opt in.    You’re doing it because you’re incentivized by, by the epic win. You know to, to paraphrase McGonigal.    Because you are trying to position yourselves in the, in the clan and your membership there and be a part of a group.

But the folks that actually organize those things could parlay those skills like it was shown into, into successful management, uh, within a traditional organization. I think that’s one of the, the broad categories of the ways that we see games playing into strategy making is that if the game expresses a skillset that’s relevant, um, then, then that might actually play out in the real world, quote unquote.

Jason: Hmm.

Yes. And this is the, the potentially the scenario [00:49:00] building kind of piece. Which is working with, um, using games as a simulation or a modeling tool to then explore potential outcomes.

Hailey: Uh, yeah. So one, one example, I think that I became aware of recently listening to the ludology podcast about games.    Talking about the work of Phil Eklund, who makes these board games that are quite, um, sort of science driven and quite simulation oriented. And apparently, uh, so one of the games was about space travel within the solar system. And Phil was really interested in this question of where are humans most likely to migrate to first within the solar system?

Uh, he had some assumptions that it was going to be a moon of Jupiter or something like that. But what he did was create a board game that, uh, he felt based on all his, his extensive research in the very kind of scientific mindset, modeled the realities of trying to expand to the solar system. The amount of energy it takes to move from [00:50:00] planet to planet and how to acquire resources to sort of support that expansion.

And got, by way of publishing and making a game, got thousands of people to play it over and over and over again. So you had this giant data pool of people running his toy simulation, and he says for him, it was convincing. He changed his mind. And in fact, Mars is the most likely next target.

Jason: Okay!

Hailey: And it’s not some moon of Jupiter. Um, so yeah, I think that’s one of the opportunities that’s most excited me that a lot of strategy making, especially multi-stakeholder strategy-making processes around things like climate or changing the food and agricultural sector or, um, you know, things, whether you’re looking at very large scale complex systems, they try to make, uh, computer simulations.

They make models that can be run on the computer so they can imagine different, uh, how different interventions will deliver different outcomes. Um, and I think [00:51:00] part of where those    can fall down is that they see the model itself as providing the final answer. Well, if the model says that this will work then it will work.

If it says the model says it won’t work, then it won’t work.

Jason: Confusing the map for the territory.

Hailey: They’re confusing the map for the territory. You can never make a model which is good enough to include all of the dimensions. In fact, most models include about 10 dimensions, which throw your computing power-runs out, right? Uh, when, what you would need is millions of different dimensions.

Jason: So this gets interesting to me Hails because again, this talks to the need, or the benefit of, convening or facilitating multi-stakeholder conversations, enabling people to make sense of a challenge. Because in these sorts of scenarios where there’s a whole bunch of unknown variables, or you’re moving into a domain space that isn’t very, very well mapped, we don’t have a lot of data about, we don’t have a lot of information about. Coherent action [00:52:00] and useful action amongst a whole bunch of folks is done more effectively when you share a common narrative where you understand what it is that you’re aiming at and you’re headed towards.

And that in a, um, as complexity increases needs to be enabled because people don’t have a shared history, necessarily. People don’t have a shared language, necessarily. People don’t even share the same, um, knowledge base, necessarily. People don’t have access to the same tools and resources necessarily. The thing that’s going to count is how you bring those people together, help them articulate what it is that we, as the collective, are trying to achieve. What we believe the domain space to be and how we believe we’re best to go about doing it.

And then, you know, taking the Rao cooking thing,    get out there and help them cook coherently towards a, towards a goal. That’s great feedback- sorry.

Hailey: You don’t need necessarily this, this super high fidelity simulation. I [00:53:00] mean that’s helpful as part of your process. Um, but sometimes the toy model, which a game essentially is, is can be a way of simulating something that just lets you bounce your ideas and your assumptions off of each other and explore different possibilities in a, in a more robust way where you get less lost in rabbit holes.

That might be all that’s really needed to kind of move the kind of, collective cooking forward, uh, to, to some confident next steps that actually start to get you somewhere.

Jason: And that’s not to say that data and big data sets and the use of data, coming back to the earlier point that you made, is not necessary, is not useful.

If you have the information, then let’s bring it in. Let’s make the game that we’re playing in as realistic as we can. If you have the processing power, let’s bring all that information in and make better decisions based on it. The key being that we’re aware of the limits of that information. We share a common set of assumptions around how we’re going to use that [00:54:00] information. We’ve agreed on what that means in relation to a goal state and all of those things aren’t given, um, by nature. And they’re certainly not given by the data itself. Those are human or leadership sense-making facets that you actually have to cultivate.

Hailey: That’s, yes, that’s it. And I think we’ve just started to scratch the surface of ways that games can contribute to the sense-making process. You know, we’re not saying that they’re going to, um, replace the hard work of, you know, the detailed research and the hard thinking.

But there’s an opportunity here for them to really compliment and elevate the kind of work that we’re already trying to do. And we’re trying to make sense. And something we’ve explored less in this conversation; to also take some of those advanced capabilities that people who can hire lots of facilitators and, you know, have all the expensive processes, to take some of those capabilities and maybe bring them out to a wider audience. Because games can contain so much [00:55:00] complexity in a beautiful,    well-designed box with, you know, a rule book.

Um, so maybe we’ll leave it there for this week. Uh, you got any plans for gaming next week or played anything interesting this week Jase?

Jason: Sure. The, the one that I’d, I’d really love to bring in is, um, I’ve been doing a lot of as a, I don’t know if I mentioned it earlier, but a lot of solo journaling kind of activity.

Um, and this is something that interests me in this kind of space lately because when talking about how you can, how games can, can create a useful set of constraints that allow you to really effectively do something. And, uh, the game that I’ve been playing sort of for the last week, um, has been Journey Back.

It was, uh, something that I kick-started six or so months ago, um, by Rachel Berdan. And it’s, uh, a game that uses a deck of cards to help [00:56:00] you do self-reflection. The premise of the game is that, um, this is a hero’s journey, but you’re already the hero. All you need to do is find a way to make sense of the, the heroic qualities that are already there in you.

So the idea is you’ve come to the end of the journey and you’re looking backwards at how you got there. And it uses a deck of cards to frame up specific questions for you to answer in a journal. And that very, very simple prompt of going, “Okay, this is a question that you can ask about your journey and how you got to this particular point. Consider this.”

And like, for instance, I’ll give you an, um, give you an example. For instance, if we were to take the five of hearts, five of hearts says,

“You come upon a traveler who is quite different from you. Given the choice between curiosity and judgment, you choose curiosity. What happens next?”

So it says in your engagement, what did, what, what is the value of curiosity or what did [00:57:00] curiosity engender, or how did that play out in an incident in your life that’s enabled you to be the person that you are?

Now it’s a really simple means of setting a context for, I mean, certainly for myself of doing something that I should probably be doing more often. And we’re both philosophers in the, you know… the, the what’s, “the examined life is the one worth living.”?

Right. Like, and, and we know that implicitly, right. It’d be great to spend more time in self-reflection and thinking about stuff that’s important to me. Well, how often do we have that sort of disciplined time to do it. And what the Berdan books sort of done is given me a really simple framework and a really simple question that every night when I turn over a card I can consider and then write into the journal. And that’s a really, really effective way to help me move towards a particular outcome.

It doesn’t mean that every day is going to be revalatory or every kind of [00:58:00] interaction is going to be necessarily completely meaningful to me. But it’s a way that I can use to explore those sorts of questions that are, that are worth um, engaging with in terms of self-reflection. Now that’s the sort of thing that strategic convening or convening does all the time.

We work with people to put some constraints around a problem that allows them to focus on the relevant features of a problem space that are worth focusing on. Games do that exceptionally well by design. And it’s something that I think, again, is worth us exploring as, as this kind of amble goes on.

Hailey: And we’re going to continue to explore that in the next episode. I think that’s all the time we have for this one. But yeah, looking forward to picking up more of that with you Jase next time.

Jason: Thanks Hails. Again, really enjoyed this one, mate. Thank you.

Hailey: Yeah, pleasure.

Jason: Chat to you [00:59:00] in a bit.