Board Games in the Boardroom
For the young at heart, living in the professional world can reduce you to a shell of your playful, cheeky, smiling self. Workplace etiquette, the bottom line, and burnout can make workers feel more like a machine than their best selves.
Industry leaders recognize this and routinely cite intangible skills like “creativity,” “flexibility,” and “empathy” as the most desired skill sets in employees and leaders today and in the future.
LinkedIn has found Creativity to be the most desired skill in the world.
Fortune states empathy is the go-to leadership skill of the moment.
A new EY Consulting survey confirms that 90% of US workers believe empathetic leadership leads to higher job satisfaction and 79% agree it decreases employee turnover.
In a large organization, shareholder and customer demands for “empathy” and “diversity” are often answered with PowerPoint lectures and online training modules, with little lasting effect or impact. From personal experience, the government sector is no different. The number of “death-by-PowerPoint” trainings I have received on topics such as empathy, resilience, diversity, and other “soft skills” is innumerable...and terribly ironic.
“If you want to energize your people, and you are serious about cultivating the organic creative capital within your organization, rather than shelling out vast sums of money to ‘outsource’ creativity to a specialized group, start with some old-fashioned board games.”
As a master’s candidate in Creativity and Change Leadership, I became increasingly interested in exploring this dichotomy. How might we create engaging, interactive training sessions on “squishy skillsets” like empathy, creativity, and social-emotional skills in a way that actually works? Furthermore, what is needed to help people actually understand how to develop and apply those skills after exploring them? My approach is simple: games.
I want to be perfectly clear, here: I’m not talking about gamification of training in the trendy way, focusing on creating bespoke digital solutions and virtual training environments that require thousands of dollars in development, testing, and annual refreshment. I’m not talking about simple facilitation techniques such as brief role-playing exercises around a boardroom table or in a classroom. I’m talking about good, old-fashioned board games…you know, the kind you can buy at Walmart, your local hobby store, or online.
Everyone likes to play games. If they say they don’t, then I’d wager they just haven’t found their game yet. The universal love of games is why shows like Jeopardy have and continue to experience such consistent viewership. It's why things like Escape Rooms have become such an overnight sensation among groups of friends and even complete strangers, and in some cases by small teams looking for a way to further build their cohesion and unity. Humans are naturally designed for and inclined to play. If you doubt me, head over to TED.com and watch Dr. Stuart Brown’s presentation on play…it’s in our nature!
Unfortunately, in the post-industrial era society we live in today, the word “play” is associated with childishness, simple games, and immaturity. It's true, children experience and live out play in very different ways than adults do, but the core principles remain the same: playfulness and humor allow us to experiment with new ideas, roles, concepts, and relationships that are otherwise impossible to engage with. For children, role-playing a game of “house” or pretending to be wild animals in the forest are experiential learning in action, an active application of a different perspective or lens.
Board games offer leaders and trainers a unique and incredibly affordable opportunity to reinvigorate their teams and organizations with a fun, engaging tool that allows them to “try on” new skills in a low-risk environment. In fact, Albert Einstein himself agreed, stating, “games are the most elevated form of investigation.”
Board games can offer a simple, accessible solution, as long as the trainer(s) are willing to put in a bit of extra legwork on the front end. For starters, getting teams around a table to play a game is a very unifying experience, and in most cases, there is little impact due to “generational gaps” unlike digital gamification. The learning curve is gentle, and oftentimes everyone is starting on equal footing, learning the game together*.
*Pro-Tip: I would recommend the trainer and/or facilitator(s) already be well-versed in the rules of the game…it helps with adjudicating disagreements on the rules and allows for a smoother application of the training takeaways. Ask me how I know! :-P
In addition to being accessible to almost everyone on the team, board games offer a variety of ways to highlight soft skills in a training environment. It’s important to note that every game highlights different skills, and in different ways, which is where that leg work comes in: a trainer has to take the time to find the right game for the occasion, and develop an engaging way to highlight the skill (whether during or after play). Once a game and a skill (or 2) have been identified, and a highlighting mechanism has been determined, the trainer can work the gameplay into the training however is most appropriate for their team or organization.
I’ll provide an example: during a workshop I hosted in March of 2022 demonstrating this concept, one table group was using the game “Snake Oil.” Snake Oil is an easy-to-learn game, not too far off from popular voting card games like Apples to Apples, Cards Against Humanity, and others. The twist is this: in Snake Oil, the “judge” is given a choice of 2 random personas to pick from, and once they select it, the participants must select 2 random cards (usually nouns) to combine into a unique “product” to sell to that persona.
Snake Oil presented easy and highly engaging ways to explore empathy (how might I sell to this persona? What might this persona need most?), perspective-shifting/taking (how do I judge these products as this persona?), creative fluency (rapidly “creating” a unique product and improvising a sales pitch within 30-60 seconds), playfulness and humor (the products ranged from the feasible to the incredibly ridiculous), and tolerance of risk (if I say this or act this way, will people embrace it and laugh, or will I be embarrassed?).
At the end of the workshop, participants had a list of affective skills associated with creativity and divergence (selected from the Torrance Incubation Model “beyonder skills”). Moreover, all of the different games used in the workshop offered learning value, whether as a practical application tool or a mechanism to highlight the importance of a certain skill.
I offer this up to reinforce that, for the price of $15.00, a group of 4 strangers was able to easily explore and conceptualize a variety of affective skills that are often thought of as “difficult to effectively train.” The environment, the “task” of playing a board game, and the way the skills were brought up and explored after the fact (in open dialogue, not in a lecture) made this feel like a fun break from the daily grind and not just another “training session.” Months later, I still get feedback from participants about how they have started trying to find games and tools to incorporate into training to empower their employees to discover and explore these skills experientially.
If you want to energize your people, and you are serious about cultivating the organic creative capital within your organization, rather than shelling out vast sums of money to “outsource” creativity to a specialized group, start with some old-fashioned board games. You’ll begin to see people come out of their shells and explore new concepts in a safe and low-risk way. You’ll also begin to introduce the psychological and emotional reassurance that exploring creativity and innovation is culturally acceptable, encouraged, and essential.
This was guest written by Ryan Hill, founder and principal of ChangeLead Creative Solutions.
Watch the webinar The Importance of Play for Creativity: A Chat with Ryan Hill to learn more.