The Harvard Business Review published earlier this
week a must read article by Martin Reeves and Georg Wittenburg titled Games Can
Make You a Better Strategist.
Martin is the Director of the Bruce Henderson
Institute at The Boston Consulting Group and lead author of the new book Your
Strategy Needs a Strategy (HBR Press, 2015). Georg was the main
architect of the companion iPad game, Your
Strategy Needs a Strategy, and is now CEO and co-founder of
Insightfully, an automated analytics start-up based in Berlin.
Leveraging on their work with executives and
strategy games, the authors explore in depth five distinct benefits of using
games for enhancing strategy formulation and execution skills: games provide
inexpensive real-time feedback, games allow managers to deeply engage with
ideas by incorporating interactivity, they also allow structured analysis of an
executive’s behavior as well as different scenarios to be tested, and can be
rolled out easily to many managers.
This is how the article opens: “Play has long
infused the language of business: we talk of players, moves, end games, play
books and so on. Even so, actual games are still taboo in most organizations. And
the corporate executive playing games to improve his or her strategy-making
skills is still rare.”
The authors regret the underlying paradox as they believe
that games have an important place in cultivating good strategists, and that
now more than ever games can give executives an edge over their competition.
They explain why:
“First, there has never been a greater need for
companies to learn new ways of doing things in response to a complex and
dynamic business environment. And second, the sophistication and effectiveness
of strategy games at our disposal has risen tremendously. In the past two
decades, strategy games have evolved from dull monochrome dialogs to
well-designed AI-based apps.”
“We think that the next generation strategy apps
will finally be able to prove a real business case. Just consider some the
advantages games have over more traditional approaches in strategy
education. Books are great to foster intellectual understanding but are not
interactive and do not reflect the reality of busy schedules and declining
attention spans. Live pilots are highly realistic but costly, time consuming
and risky. And coaching or mentoring approaches have great merits for personal
development, but are hard to scale.”
“Games on the other hand can create an
experiential, interactive and tailored understanding of strategy at low cost
and in a scalable manner. They allow managers to suspend normal rules in an
acceptable way and they provide an effective audiovisual medium for absorbing
ideas.”
The articles also covers the Your
Strategy Needs A Strategy game, available on the App Store.
The Serious Game was created by The Boston Consulting
Group and Neofonie, a Berlin-based mobile computing company, to allow users to
develop a hands on appreciation of the importance of choosing the right
approach to strategy and execution in each business environment.
It was released at the same time as the
book with the same name. It features short rounds of game play in
different environments and provides a running commentary on how the player is
performing. A leader board allows comparison across players and identifies
“best-in-class” strategists. Post action replay allows players to understand
the consequences of their action (see the IPad screenshots below). And contextualized
links to relevant content allows players to deepen their understanding of what
happened and why.
Your Strategy Needs a
Strategy is a hands on learning tool for business
executives, students, and curious strategists of any kind to experience strategic
environments and understand how to choose and execute the right approach to
strategy. Using the simplest of businesses - selling lemonade, players must
adapt their strategic approach to the various business environments of New York
City's five boroughs. Based on the insights of the book Your Strategy Needs a
Strategy, this app brings to life the different strategic approaches necessary
to survive and thrive in today's dynamic and diverse business environments.