In a time when the pace of change seems to be accelerating, companies need to change faster than ever before. This means cascading new ways of thinking and behaving throughout the organization and making them work within a very short time span. And this is a task that should never be underestimated.
It is relatively easy to teach bright people new insights; to make them understand how they should think and act under ideal circumstances.
The hard part is ensuring that the “academic understanding” is actually transformed into “changed behavior” when everyone returns to daily worklife the following Monday.
The challenge with most Mondays – and other days for that matter – is that they are usually far removed from the ideal world.
A real business day is filled with dilemmas and prioritizations. And time is always a critical factor.
To be effective in a challenging business day we depend on tried-and-tested patterns that allow us to make a lot of decisions in a very short space of time – with almost no real thinking involved.
This method generally works fine as it allows us to process a large number of decisions and to focus our real thinking process on a few key issues.
But this – deeply human – way of acting also comes at a price: It makes it hard for us to change our “habitual behavior.”
When we have found a way of acting that generally gets us reasonably well through the day, we stop thinking about it as our habits become almost invisible to ourselves. This unconscious behavior is very hard to influence.
It takes more than just sharing information or crafting powerful arguments to change behavior.
Instead you need to put people into a simulated working environment that gives them a chance to stop and analyze their behaviors.
Good business games reach parts of the brain that other learning methods cannot reach.
In a business game we can create a realistic scenario where the situations we manage and the people we relate to are similiar to our own experiences.
We put people in situations where their habitual way of thinking and acting is challenged. This allows them to experiment without any real risk.
But the business game in itself is usually only a part of the experience.
The key to learning and changing behavior comes during the debrief. Each participant is given individual feedback and a chance to relate the game experience to their own worklife.
Having these discussions and reflections AFTER involvement in a game experience is much more effective.
These games engage our habitual patterns. In this way they reach a much deeper level of understanding and acceptance of the need for change (if we have designed the games intelligently).
The games help participants to reach a deeper level of understanding of the need to change.
This is also why participants remember a powerful business game experience five or even ten years after – because it has challenged them on a much deeper level then can otherwise be achieved.
In a business game each participant becomes personally involved.