This morning you arrived at work at 8:30am. First, you used a time-boxed 60 minutes to draft an update to your board of directors. Then, you met with your CFO to review a discounted cashflow model for a company you are considering acquiring. Finally, you did a dry run for a speech you are delivering to your staff tomorrow and got feedback from your chief of staff.

It’s not even lunchtime, and you have already played three games. This might come as a surprise. Isn’t a game something that lives in a cardboard box under the television? Or something that happens between children at a playground?

In everyday life, a game is a period of structured play undertaken for entertainment.^[1]For a deeper exploration of humans and games, we suggest Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938). In business, a game is somewhat different. In this context, we can define a game as “a pretense that is liberating, transparent, time-bound, and useful.” It’s a definition that encompasses activities you may not consciously register as being playful. To see how, let’s replay your morning.

First, you pretended that you only had 60 minutes to write a document, when you knew that this wasn’t true. The pretense was useful because it forced you to write all the way to the end, rather than getting stuck in the middle. Then, you pretended to know the future revenues and costs of a company when you really can’t be sure. The pretense helped you decide whether to buy the company. (You didn’t.) Finally, you pretended that the entire workforce of your company was listening to your speech, rather than just your chief of staff. This game simulated the stress of public speaking, which raised the likelihood of a good performance during the real event.

In all cases, the pretense was liberating (it freed you from a challenging reality), transparent (no one was being tricked) and time-limited (it didn’t go on forever).

A higher purpose for games in organizations

These ordinary games represent only a fraction of the games that business leaders can choose to play, and only a fraction of their potential value.

For decades, academics including Johan Roos, Bart Victor, Michael Schrage, Matt Statler, and Claus Jacobs have written about the power of games in solving more challenging organizational problems.^[2]For a detailed review of foundational literature on ‘serious play,’ we recommend Matt Statler, Loizos Heracleous and Claus D. Jacobs’ “Serious Play as a Practice of Paradox” (2011). We, too, have advocated the use of games and play as a part of strategy development. We’ve described the benefits of games in developing strategy, the essential components of play (improvisation, inspiration, and most importantly, imagination), and examples of games you can use in strategy setting.

Across the literature, the consensus is this: Playing games gives organizations inexpensive, rapid feedback on hard questions, allowing them to learn and adapt quickly. It’s a capability that has never been more important. Top-performing companies find it increasingly difficult to maintain their competitive edge, with the annual decay rate of TSR outperformance having increased several fold in most industries from the comfortable 15% of the 1980s.^[3]Martin Reeves, Kevin Whitaker, and Tom Deegan, “Fighting the Gravity of Average Performance,” MIT Sloan Management Review, January 9, 2020, … Continue reading The use of games can be a powerful differentiator for companies pursuing sustained competitive advantage.

Levelling up your games

How, then, can you get more value out of games in your organization? Our advice: Get more adventurous. The bolder a game feels, the more valuable it is likely to be. For inspiration, here are four ways you can take your games to the next level.

First, play games that are less routine. Non-routine games replenish your teams’ energy through surprise. The science says that imagination is driven by surprise, and that breaking from the routine can foster curiosity and engagement. For example, imagine you are running a full-day workshop with your executive team on the six areas of your ongoing transformation program. Long discussions of this kind are hard work, and sometimes boring. To be effective, they need to maintain a very high level of energy.

The game: To keep people engaged, randomize the order in which you discuss the six areas by rolling a die at the start of each session. This simple injection of surprise and humor often has a material effect on a room’s energy, with negligible costs. (We’ve tried it, and it works.)

Second, play games that are less constrained. Unconstrained games allow your teams to clarify what they want to see in an ideal world, providing a helpful point of reference for the real world. For example, imagine that your recruiting team is planning its annual campaign to reach prospective entry-level employees. In your first meeting, you sense that the team is thinking much more about the costs of their various advertising channels than the effectiveness of those channels.

The game: Pose a question to your team. “For a moment, I want us to imagine that we tripled the budget for this campaign. What would you do then?” This game temporarily releases the team from its primary financial constraint. In doing so, it gives people permission to think less about what looks like a good deal, and more about who their ideal candidates are, and which channels are best suited to reaching them. Once the financial constraint is reintroduced, they will be in a better position to make informed trade-offs between cost and effectiveness.

Third, play games that are more counterfactual. Counterfactual games (ones that deliberately depart from current realities) shake your teams out of their ordinary lines of thought, and prompt them to engage their imagination. For example, imagine that you and your marketing team want to develop a novel, provocative advertising campaign for your product.

The game: Give your team a prompt. “I’d like you to send me twenty pitches for the most obvious, boring campaigns you can imagine. Then, let’s agree to avoid them at all costs.” For members of your team, developing intentionally boring campaigns should feel deeply counterintuitive. But the game will gently expose the conceits and narratives they reach for most easily and prompt their imaginations to create something truly different.

Finally, play games that are more explicit. In explicitly framing an activity as a game, you lower the perceived risk of that activity for participants. Using the “g” word signals that exploration is safe, and that things said inside the game aren’t necessarily tied to courses of action outside the game.

The game: Imagine you are running a strategy process for your business with your executive team. “Team, I want to spend the next hour playing a game. Let’s pretend that we have all formed a new company to disrupt our own business. What should its business model be?”^[4]This game features in BCG’s 2019 article “Free Up Your Mind to Free Up Your Strategy.” The invocation of the word game gives participants permission to consider how they might exploit critical vulnerabilities in their own business without the usual risks, including the risk of offending fellow executives, or worse, the risk of being assigned unwelcome remedial actions.

We began our story with the ordinary games you play every day in your business. Don’t stop playing them, but if you want to see real value from your games, play more adventurously. More rewarding games tend to be non-routine, unconstrained, counterfactual, or explicit. Our advice: Turn up the dial.

To support your contemplation of business and games, we offer a themed crossword.