09: Game on
R&D as exploration and games as professional development
Earlier this year, I wondered if games, with their structured rules and objectives, could be a tool for practicing the kind of thinking needed for the decision-making of practical life. While reading C. Thi Nguyen’s “Games: Agency as Art” this summer, I imagined that if I had grown up playing strategy games, I would have been more adept at navigating office politics out-of-the-gate! Moreover, after reading Alex Hutchinson’s “The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map”, I’m thinking about how games might encourage and develop the tools needed for exploration in the workplace.1
I’ve spent my career in R&D—technical research and development, where progress includes coming up with (and chasing down) new ideas that may be embodied as patents, solutions to problems, or new directions for a company. This kind of exploration necessitates a willingness to learn from a place of relative personal and group ignorance; it is not repeating the same task over and over. More than that, for big rewards, exploration requires, as Hutchinson details, stepping away even from the edges of what we know into the entirely unmapped interior. Indeed, much of the work I have done with teams can be considered a process of map-making2: seeking and recording the boundaries, pathways, and opportunities in a new space, for the sake of shared learning, future progress, and (yes) profit.
Hutchinson gives one definition of exploring: “it’s what happens when you step outside the borders of an existing cognitive map and start forming a new one.” A noted mark of that success, he says, is the ability to find shortcuts. And finding shortcuts is a good way to summarize what companies are seeking when they say “innovation”.
At every place I have worked, there have been structured ways that the company has tried to encourage fruitful exploration for the sake of innovation:
Bonuses for filing patents
Brainstorming sessions
Group outings to expensive events
Invention-harvesting sessions
Additionally, I’ve seen teams grow by sharing:
Board game nights
Pick-up soccer games
Foot races along with trash-talking across org chart lines
Cooking dinner together at company outings.
Hutchinson describes exploration as inherently challenging and more joyful because of the challenge. Similarly, Nguyen speaks of “a harmony between self and challenge, between the practical self and the obstacles of its world” that can be realized in games. I know and seek this joy from both solving technical problems and from playing sports or board games! Building on this, I’d argue that exercises, including games, meant to develop the tools for innovation are most effective if they challenge and stretch people. The point is to get out of the comfort zone; that is a bravery that exploration demands.
Additionally, to encourage adults to have more of a child’s sense of exploration and to explore actively (better than passively, Hutchinson says), I’d guess that the games that are more effective for this professional development are ones that shield players from consequences in the practical world. For a “good sport”, as Nguyen describes, the beauty is that in the context of the game, the player strives for success and appreciates the process. And outside of the game, the win or loss is put aside. In a workplace setting, this can be most easily encouraged if it is trusted that the consequences of the win or loss stay “on the field”. It has to be ok for me to steal the ball from my boss; to make a bad pass or miss a shot; to throw out a genuinely silly idea without being shut up; to throw out a really excellent idea without being shut up. In the workplace, useful game-playing, like exploration, demands psychological safety. While planning team-building exercises at one company, we chose games with no obvious connection to the technical skills that we used each day at work. No math games, no bridge-building competitions. We wanted to make it easier for people to commit fully to the games, without the ego or politics of the office.
In the context of psychological safety, games with colleagues up and down the org chart can be a great way to practice different forms of agency. By allowing us to experience different forms of agency, Nguyen argues that games “help build our inventory of ways of being practical”. With that greater inventory, we are more likely to be able to deploy the useful ways of being when called upon in the real world.
In this way, pickup soccer games and even the collegial running competition between the CEO and a junior employee can be really constructive for a company. The board games and sports give people the opportunity to collaborate with or compete against their colleagues in modes that are different from what the org chart might dictate. When I am playing a game with someone, I might listen to them (or be heard by them) in a new way; I might get to see someone more confident and successful (or more humble and curious) than in the office; I might have the chance to make choices with people that are not part of my normal work day. From Nguyen: “Multiplayer games, it turns out, are a kind of social technology. They reconfigure their players’ social relationships.” And that reconfiguration can teach people new ways of communicating and being with each other that they may productively take back to work.
Once, I learned about colleagues as we planned a menu, shopped for groceries, and cooked a meal together for the team. At another place, a colleague orchestrated cooking competitions, in which we ranked each other’s cookies or salsa over lunch. The reward in each of these was that we saw each other in new frames of reference. Nguyen says: “Playing a variety of games gives me a broader menu of agential modes to choose from. They can also familiarize me with how those modes work in a variety of practical contexts, so that I can better recognize when a particular situation might need a particular mode.”
Brainstorming sessions, in which participants are given a company problem to solve, can also be structured to give us practice being with and seeing each other in new modes of agency. At one company, I chose people randomly across the org chart to brainstorm solutions to challenges that their colleagues faced. The junior employees got face time with their executives and each had the opportunity to learn or model the openness and curiosity of exploration; engineers and folks in administrative roles equally had the chance to say “what if”.
Brainstorming sessions can also fail (I have led some of these!) for several reasons:
Lack of psychological safety
Lack of shared context for the problem across the participants. (It is important that everyone knows the rules!)
Lack of support and prioritization from the participants’ managers.
Most of all, brainstorming sessions fail when the ideas have nowhere to go, when it is no one’s job to down-select and then run with the best ones. A game is best when it is clearly only a game. Similarly, work is best when it is clear that it is not just a game. And thus when brainstorming is for real, even as it is engenders a sense of play, it has to be connected to company priorities and resources.
Notably, games, in Nguyen’s definition, are not the same as free play. Nguyen is quite clear that the rules and structure of games are tools for communication that make games both useful and enjoyable. Speaking of yoga, he says: “Strictness is a technique for surmounting one’s natural impulses and learned routines. Most people tend to move in habitual patterns and hold habitual postures. Strict, precise, demanding instruction help to break you out of the trap of your own nature.” Though often I’ve seen leaders bristle at the idea of structure, Nguyen argues that choosing to yield to a game’s rules and constraints enables one’s own autonomy and others’. While this is the part of the book that was the most challenging for me to read, the conclusion rings true: “the absolute, unyielding resistance to ever submitting oneself to another’s rules turns out to be, not some proud victory for autonomy, but a symptom of profound distrust.”
Similarly, I have learned that brainstorming sessions without structure are frustrating and unproductive. I remember floundering in my first invention-harvesting session (a version of brainstorming directed at generating ideas that could be patented), which was entirely open-ended. To make such sessions more productive, I now ask for a team to gather at a time that is natural for self-reflection (such as after meeting a major milestone) to record their recent inventions from a particular project. Such invention-harvesting sessions are absolutely for the success of the company and they are most fruitful when people come with an open-mindedness, a sense of exploration and play so that they riff on each other’s ideas and build a larger world of possibility. That sense of exploration and play does not happen with a mandate like “now you will laugh and be creative”. I most readily access that headspace when I am well-rested and fed, have a sense of psychological safety, receive a sense of curiosity, or am moving my body (like biking home). I also feel particularly creative when I get to build on others’ ideas (“yes and”). Creativity is encouraged in a space that is separate from the rush and rigor of execution. Building such a space for a team requires care and trust. Little games, like ice-breakers, can help as an on-ramp.
I have seen others struggle as I did as a novice with the expectation of creating in a given moment; it can be a learned skill to step out of execution mode. This learning can be best facilitated in a bounded environment that has high psychological safety and where folks who are more comfortable clearly model the process of throwing out ideas and listening to others. Games, again, can be environments that help people build the comfort and communication tools that will serve them in a brainstorming session. I appreciate a lesson in creating that I learned from the game Bananagrams: to be successful, you have to be able to see when you are stuck and be willing to clean-sheet everything.
While game nights and pickup sports seem really useful as opportunities to practice and build the skills for exploration, group outings to do expensive forms of play (such as racing go-karts, visiting a shooting range, watching a performance, eating a fancy meal) can point in a different direction. These can be a lovely way for a company to share its financial success and give folks opportunities to build relationships. However, these activities can be more passive and less collaborative, thus less likely to develop the “library” of agencies that are useful for innovation in the workplace.
Additionally, when the “game” aspect is taken too far from the game, it can be counter-productive; Nguyen draws a sharp distinction between gamification and games. Bonuses for filing patents could fall in the category of gamification. The risk that Nguyen highlights is that one focuses on the simplified and quantified value of the reward (some version of points) rather than the more “rich, subtle” value of innovation. I have advocated in the past for these bonuses as a means for a company to show its values; Nguyen’s book has given me a tool to think critically about reward structures and simple, quantified indicators of value.
One way a company can show its values and develop a culture of exploration is through hiring. Hutchinson cites studies of academic papers and patents showing that the real breakthroughs come when people can make connections across fields or larger cognitive distances. “In a sense, bridging the gap between two distant fields is the conceptual equivalent of looking for a new route between Europe and India, or crossing the uncharted interior of a continent.” With this in mind, if I was hiring for exploration, I would look for people who have worked in enough areas to draw connections (ie generalists) and in the interview I would seek to give candidates opportunities to demonstrate non-linear thinking. Maybe I would ask them to play a round of Codenames with me.
Many companies seek to hire people who are comfortable with ambiguity. Hutchinson’s book helped me think through this a bit more and understand that I want to hire differently. In the study of exploration, it turns out that humans are much less comfortable with ambiguity (when relative risk is unknown) than with quantified risk. Hutchinson cites several studies that demonstrate this and moreover show that the possibility of learning for the future motivates people to explore more even when faced with ambiguity. With this framing, I read the imperative—to hire people who are comfortable with ambiguity—perhaps as laziness on the part of executives who find it easier to hire people who will not ask for accountability; and as setting the hiring team up to choose based on bias. This is not what I need in an explorer. This is not what I want from my team.
If my team is in exploration mode, indeed I do want someone who can take on the risks and ambiguity that is necessary in any project that is venturing into the unknown. The explorers should be supported by a company that exhibits discipline in enumerating risks so as to reduce ambiguity; provides clear motivation for the exploration framed as learning for the future; works to reduce any unnecessary ambiguity (like in politics, management) as the R&D has enough of it inherently. In hiring explorers, I would look for people who are unafraid of open-ended questions; who are generalists with broad technical toolkits; who are smart, humble, thoughtful, and disciplined in their approach to risk; who are willing to play a new game in which they might not at first win.
Nguyen says “Games, I am suggesting, are another form of experiment in living; they are quickest rough-sketch version. When we interact under an[sic] disposable end, we are exploring how social life will go under an alternative conception of the good.” For a company that is exploring, inventing, prototyping, games then offer practice in how to do this as a team. They can offer safe spaces for trying, failing, and succeeding—similar to how things might go in R&D. For the striving player (I recommend reading Nguyen’s text more to understand what this ideal is), a game is a chance to practice the focus and dedication that is needed also to accomplish a practical goal. If R&D is exploration, then games can be chances to develop the necessary skills.
Both the books I have cited here are rich texts, full of personal and historical examples and grounded in research. I’ll end by noting two other books that have been impactful to me on the topic of exploration. Kate Harris’s “Land of Lost Borders” was an inspiration and my first motivation to articulate R&D as exploration. More recently, “The Endurance” by Caroline Alexander (one of several histories of the famous Shackleton expedition, in which survival supplanted exploration as the goal) impressed me with the story’s easy parallels to what I have seen in Silicon Valley: the pitching to raise money for the journey; the importance of photos and diaries (documentation!!) in ultimately keeping funders happy and presenting material from which others can learn; the hubris of many of these entrepreneurs (horses in Antartica?!); the suggestion that a leader bristled at a teammate merely because the teammate was “eminently capable”; the perceived dependence, on a single charismatic leader, of the team’s success; the explorer who flounders after having one defining adventure; the team (diverse and well-managed) as the key to success across many valleys (or seas) of death. Moreover, this story shows that beyond the charisma of the leader, in fact skill and discipline of the entire team won the day: “They had not merely endured; they had exhibited the grace of expertise under ungodly pressure.”
This topic builds on one from my professional discussion group, which is where I first learned of Nguyen’s work. Though these two books are very different, Hutchinson and Nguyen cite some of the same works and they share a concern for the impacts of modern technology, which can narrow our worlds / world views and make it easier to go through life passively.
This map-making analogy is part of why and how I talk about the necessity of documentation in R&D and I was tickled to see that Hutchinson (a friend of mine and a fellow physics PhD) also uses map-making to describe the kind of exploration that I do for work. For me, the document of the map (not just the one in my head) is critical: this is what enables the company, the USPTO, investors, or even a future version of myself to learn from the exploration that I did in the past. Hutchinson says something almost identical to the exhortation I gave to a team once at an All-Hands: “To decide where to go next, you need to have some concept of where you’ve come from and where you currently are.”