Are Shoot and Kill Games Your Company's Best Path to Innovation?

You know the ole' HR drill - anything with profanity or violence is bad.  After all, you've got to make sure no one feels threatened or offended, which is a good thing to keep an eye on.

That is, until you've watered down the kool-aid you're serving 11 times.  Try it now.. (too sweet, add more water..)... How about now? (still too sweet, add more water)... And so it goes in the world of HR.  One day you look up and while the kool-aid is offending no one... well... nobody's drinking the kool-aid either..

One area where this is true is video games in the workplace. Most companies don't allow it or provide an environment for it.  Here's the dirty little secret - many of your employees are hooking up online after hours to do it anyway, especially if they are A) technical, and/or B) Gen X or younger...

I'm not an online gamer in the nighttime hours at this point (two kids, three blogs...), but I've always been fascinated to hear our tech folks talk about the latest round of overnight shoot and kill games they've been playing as a team via Xbox.  Hearing the individuals talk about the online teams always sounds like test tubes of teamwork and cooperation to me.  If they're going shock and awe on some bad guys online, that's OK in my books.

Turns out there's even more learning going on during these games in the eyes of the Learning and Development crowd.  More on how "shoot to thrill, play to kill" massages the innovation DNA of your company from BusinessWeek:

"Mention learning to senior executives, and they tend to default immediately to training programs. Here's the problem: Training programs are effective only at transferring what we already know to others. How do we create powerful platforms jointly to innovate and develop new knowledge that no one had before?

For an answer to this question, executives would be well advised to look at World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online game. Few executives have heard of this game, much less participated in it, despite the fact that over 10 million players are active in it around the world. Upon hearing this, most executives are likely to respond that "that's an awful lot of pimply teenagers," falling back on a conventional stereotype about video game players. In fact, the majority of the players are in the 23-39-year-old bracket and are deeply engaged. The average player invests about 23 hours per week playing the game.

In WoW, performance is measured in terms of experience points. Players accumulate these by performing a variety of tasks that become more challenging as the game progresses. As players accumulate experience points, they advance to higher levels in the game, culminating at this point in level 80 (a new add-on recently expanded the number of levels from 70 in order to keep experienced players challenged).

The degree of complexity and challenge increases dramatically as you advance across levels, and the number of experience points needed in order to advance also increases sharply with each level. Yet the number of hours required to get there actually decreases. Experienced players become adept at leveraging the resources available in and around WoW to learn faster and advance faster even as the challenges become more difficult. In contrast to the diminishing returns to learning that we often encounter in business, players in WoW appear to have joined an environment where there are increasing returns to learning.

Companies seeking to thrive in a world of increasing uncertainty and accelerating change will need to foster this disposition among their own executive team and employees. They would be well advised to take a closer look at World of Warcraft, both in terms of the approach taken to foster this disposition and as a potential recruiting ground for employees who can bring this attitude and approach into the company."

That's a summary from a much longer article, so go check it out and think about how you could leverage what's already happening after hours in your company for the greater good.  How can you get folks who need the teamwork/innovation primer involved?  Great question to ponder.

And that building on the horizon? It definitely needs to be blown up...

Comments

[Michael VanDervort]

Nice post, KD. The sources of inspiration are endless, and it is no surprise that WOW would become of innovation. Let's just hope it doesn;t become a leadership training inspiration as well!

[Tracy Tran]

I would add if you're company has a Wii, they can communicate with others and play a round of golf on Tiger Woods 09.

With wifi in most of the areas, it makes companies easier not only to communicate with their company, but with other clients. It's another step that technology is coming in quickly.

[JP]

Great post - I was just turned on to your blog Kris, and I am really enjoying it. At my company we call it a Halover the next morning when you stay up all night gaming.

[Hayli @ RiseSmart]

Upon first read of your headline, I thought you were implying we should eliminate the stick-in-the-muds who stand in the way of innovation. Seriously, someone get me some coffee.

[Wally Bock]

Congratulations! This post was selected as one of the five best business blog posts of the week in my Three Star Leadership Midweek Review of the Business Blogs.

http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2009/02/11/21109-midweek-look-at-the-business-blogs.aspx

Wally Bock

[www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmI5LTGJL1oKNNGV_xHL8cJDoxubrHOszA]

I am a Gen-x guy and a second year HR student and I think it is a great idea to implement games. It is not only fun and relaxing but it can teach great team work skills.