The Petersen family are looking forward to a family bonding experience of Monopoly. Mum is competitive and ready to win. Dad is happy if no fights break out. Young Alyssa wants to choose the cute little puppy dog and Leonora does too. The game has started before the first roll of the dice. “It’s ok Alyssa, just let your sister be the dog”. “But Muuuuum, she only wants it because I wanted it!”. She concedes defeat and now knows to pick anything but the dog next time.
According to a recent survey*, over half of all Monopoly games end in ‘verbal war’ with the following being the most common arguments:
1. People making up rules
2. People being too cocky when winning
3. Someone buying a property you want, even when they don’t need it
4. People taking too long to take their turn
5. Someone stealing from the bank
6. Someone deliberately miscounting their move
7. Who gets to be the banker
8. The property auction process
9. Choice over tokens
10. What the rules of “Free Parking” are
But what if these battles held more weight than a trivial exchange of hot air between family and friends. What if playing games exposes more of who you really are and what you truly desire?
Steve Claydon and Darcy Smyth, the cofounders of Why Bravo are taking game playing to a new level within corporates and training rooms across Australia and the USA.
“We noticed that how people play games is how they play life,” says Steve/Darcy. “Creating learning environments that took people through immersive games, with higher awareness of the strategies they and others use allowed for staggering insights and opportunities for change and professional growth.”
Andrew Pearce, a business owner and attendee of The Consultative Sales Game event recently held in Melbourne, has invested tens of thousands of dollars into his own personal and professional development, most of which had left him with nothing but a head full of knowledge without immediate feedback on its implementation.
“It’s been incredible,” Andrew said. “It’s stretched my thinking in ways that I didn’t even think was possible. The way that the training has been set up and run; it elicits your behaviours in such an accurate way that the self-certainty that I have in backing myself now is second to none after the training”.
“There is no hiding in this room. The games have given me the exact learning I needed in the moment, to get to the next level in my business.”
With companies spending more than $130 billion on training and development worldwide**, this is no ‘chump change’ area of expenditure. But can HR departments be sure that their outlay is providing a clear return on investment? The current education and training space are still full of PowerPoint presentations, workbooks and pop quizzes creating memory tests as the path to success. Hardly relevant for a fast moving world.
“The future of productive work relies on the development of three core areas simultaneously; intelligence quotient (IQ), emotional quotient (EQ) and adaptability quotient (AQ),” says Steve. “Traditional learning environments mostly focuses on the former but fails to develop the latter. Game play is the perfect way to bring all three together.”
Could future HR departments move away from professional development plans and interview questions that provide a space to hide behind pleasantries, towards playing strategic games? Why Bravo believe it may reveal more than meets the eyes and ears.
“We certainly hope companies are aware of the power of doing something like this”, said Darcy Smyth, Steve’s co-creator of the Consultative Sales Game, “the feedback and opportunities for change they receive is just so instant, they’d be wasting so much time and money not to.”
So what type of Monopoly player are you and what ‘verbal wars’ have you experienced in the past? It may just reveal a little more of who you are and what you really desire. To learn more about gamification in the workplace, visit www.whybravo.com/events
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