Game Based Organization Design

New tools for complex organizational systems

Kenneth A. Loparo, Jeroen van Bree

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137351470
• eBook ISBN: 9781137351487
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

There is a widening gap between the current organizational reality and the tools and methods available to managers for addressing its challenges. Game Based Organization Design shows that one of the ways to bridge this gap is to introduce insights and approaches from video game design into the design of organizational systems.

1

Introduction

In the spring of 2006, I was invited to attend a business seminar on video games. It sounded entertaining enough, so I went. I did not really consider myself a gamer. Sure, I had a PlayStation 2 at home, but it was mostly gathering dust. My nights of guiding Lara Croft through the jungle were behind me, let alone my days of International Karate on my Commodore 64. But as I sat in the audience and listened to a speaker talk about so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), something happened. I saw a fascinating glimpse of a world that had been invisible to me until then. Millions of people were apparently leading parallel lives in these virtual worlds of Everquest¹ and World of Warcraft.² They had even established an economic system that could rival a small nation. I felt I had seen the future. This needed to be studied. Organizations had to draw lessons from this. The vague idea of combining my work as a management consultant with research that had been in the back of my head for years took shape there and then.

In the course of the years that followed, I have explored different aspects of the question that was the starting point for my project: what is the managerial relevance of video games? A big part of my journey has been looking for connections between this research question and existing fields of academic enquiry. I presented papers at seminars for video-game scholars, at academic conferences about computer-supported collaboration, and at colloquia for organization scientists. Each of these occasions gave me new insights, but each of those communities also had their doubts about what to do with this subject. Video-game scholars had a deep-rooted dislike for anything to do with ‘management’. Academics in the organization sciences sometimes discarded video games as ‘Skinner boxes’ that are based on simple, addictive mechanics and have nothing to add to the organizational landscape. However, over the course of the years I have seen the intersection of organizations and video games grow in relevance. The initial skepticism has given way to fascination and to new buzzwords such as ‘gamification’. For me, it has been an intriguing journey to get to the bottom of the potential that video games have for organizations. I gradually discovered that these new forms of teamwork and leadership that were revealed to me in the spring of 2006 are built into these games by the way they are designed. That is one of the central ideas that I developed in the course of my research: exploring the potential that video-game design has to enrich organizational design.

It seems that the time has come for these ideas about games and organizations to take hold in the business world. I hope this book can be a constructive contribution to this development. I have made an effort to be as interdisciplinary as my resources would allow. And I am fully aware that an interdisciplinary research project is vulnerable to criticism from each of the disciplines that it draws from. That is a risk I have willingly taken, because I strongly believe a full understanding of the subject at hand is only possible if one works from exactly this intersection. That is what I have tried to do, and it has made my journey so much more interesting.

This book is based on my PhD thesis,³ and the fruit of work that took place over seven years. But we are not there yet. I consider this book to be an intermediate result, a stopover on my journey. I have set a course, explored the terrain, and am now ready to make some serious progress. I hope some of you will join me.

1.1 The research that forms the basis of this book

To increase the accessibility of the text, I have decided not to include an extensive description of the research methodology. I refer the interested reader to the PhD thesis itself.⁴ What I will do in this section is give a brief overview of the core of the fieldwork that was conducted.

The fieldwork consisted of two action research projects that formed two cycles in which the theoretical ideas developed during the first part of the study were applied, evaluated, adjusted, and then re-applied. The first project was the Elective Care Center (ECC)⁵ (described in Chapter 4) and the second project was We Beat The Mountain (WBTM)⁶ (described in Chapter 5). Both case studies were conducted using a ‘research-oriented action research’ approach (RO-AR).⁷ The primary reason for the action orientation of this research is that it was concerned with a theoretical notion on which too little work had been done to formulate definitive hypotheses. To the best of my knowledge, there were and are no instances of organizations applying the video-game design process as a tool for organizational design and strategy formulation. Therefore, an exploratory study was appropriate. Both case studies should be considered testing grounds for applying a new type of organizational intervention, modeled after the video-game design process. The focus in both cases lay with evaluating the process of the interventions rather than the outcomes. My co-researchers and I performed the interventions ourselves, based on our theoretical insights. We followed the RO-AR cyclical process of ‘extending theory-to-action-to-critical reflection-to-developing theory’.⁸

To counteract some of the problems of the action-oriented approach both on the practical level (performing and intervention and observing its effects) and the level of research rigor, an external researcher was invited to join the team. He had had no prior involvement with this work. His primary task was to make observations during the workshops, which involved a written report as well as taking photographs and recording short movies. The amount of information he received beforehand was more or less comparable to the information that the workshop participants received. Next to the observations recorded by the external researcher, other sources of data were interviews conducted by the author,⁹ an online questionnaire, reflections by the research team, feedback sessions with the client team, and documents about the organizations in question and about the interventions.

1.2 Extension of the research

Since the time when I finished the first draft of my work in the summer of 2012, my thinking on the subjects discussed in it has continued to evolve. That shift in thinking is reflected in this book. There are two main reasons for it, one theoretical and the other practical.

First of all, I found that reengaging with the text and its subject matter led to a reappraisal of some of the things I had grown to take as assumptions in the course of my research work. I found I needed to challenge some of these assumptions or I needed to elaborate on the thinking that lay at its foundation. Especially the latter was an important part of the writing process for this book. In that sense, it should be much more accessible to the uninitiated reader than was my original text. Challenging my assumptions was also caused by being exposed to new sources that resonated with my ideas. Some of these sources are very recent, because work on the intersection of organizations and games continues at an accelerating pace. There were also some older sources that I had previously overlooked. Especially with regard to the recent work that is being published, I can of course make no guarantees that I am being complete. I integrated new sources into the text until the very last week of writing, but I am convinced that as I type these words there are researchers somewhere doing valuable work that is closely related to the themes discussed in this book. Let us keep the conversation going.

There have also been additions to the text that stem from practice. After the two action research projects that I discussed earlier in this section were completed, I began applying the ideas developed in this research more broadly, in consultancy projects over the past year. These projects were not accompanied by data collection and analysis in the manner of an RO-AR project, but they were nevertheless sources of valuable new insights based on reflections together with colleagues and clients. I have included examples from these projects in this text as well, most notably in the final chapter.

With these new insights, both from theory and from practice, I have taken the ideas presented in my PhD thesis a step further. In most cases, this has led to a refinement and strengthening of those ideas. In other cases – especially in the final chapter of the book – it could be considered an extension or conceptual extrapolation, which may still need further empirical evaluation. But I believe this broadening was vital to form a bridge to practitioners and to secure the connections not just to organizational design but also to the study of organizational strategy.

1.3 How to read this book

As I stated before in this introduction, I have tried to make this book as accessible as possible. I see two general ways in which the reader can approach it. The first is to read it as an introduction to a number of new ideas that revolve around the application of games, play, and rules to organizational endeavors. The chapters each deal with one core concept and in that sense can be read independently, although you will encounter quite a few cross-references to other chapters. This is unavoidable because the ideas presented progressively build on those of previous chapters. The notes supply plenty of material for further reading, for those who want to dive further into the subjects covered.

The second way to read this book is as a guide for a new approach to organizational design and strategy formulation. It describes a new set of tools for managers involved in those activities. If you are reading the book with that purpose, I recommend you read it from start to finish. Alternatively, if you are short of time, you can focus on the final two chapters. But that will require either substantial prior knowledge of games and play, or the willingness to refer frequently to previous chapters.

As a guide to the reader, the remainder of this introduction will give an outline of the chapters to follow.

1.4 Chapter outline

Chapter 2 describes how organizations are increasingly embedded in complex systems and how organizational leaders are struggling to address this complexity. Traditional modeling approaches to get a handle on those systems – such as systems dynamics and operations research – are briefly described, with a focus on their shortcomings when applied to social systems. A tendency to study successful organizations and to attempt to derive best practices is regarded as problematic because of the way these social mechanisms for success are tied to a specific organizational system. The chapter concludes with the identification of a gap between the complexity of the current organizational landscape on the one hand and the tools available for describing, understanding, and reconfiguring organizational systems on the other.

Chapter 3 starts with a brief history of video games and goes on to focus on a specific genre, Massively Multiplayer Online Games or MMOGs. The history of MMOGs is discussed as well as an examination of one of those games by the author. The attraction from a business perspective of the skills and behaviors witnessed in MMOGs is explored, as well as the barriers that exist to transferring these to organizations. Gamification is another attempt to introduce game elements in an organizational context. Criticism of gamification is examined, primarily in the context of the motivating factors of video games that this trend may not draw on. To conclude the discussion on games in an organizational context, the long-standing tradition of simulation gaming is described.

Chapter 4 describes the concept of play with the help of authors such as Johan Huizinga, Bernard Suits, and Brian Sutton-Smith. The basic qualities of play are covered, such as the fact that it is free and voluntary, and that it is carefully separated from the rest of life. The changing view of play from an organizational perspective is explored, as well as concrete attempts to link organizational play to learning and creativity. The concept of ‘lusory space’ is introduced as an isolated and temporary context in which organizational play can take place. A project is described in which lusory spaces are created, which leads to a number of practical recommendations.

In Chapter 5, the concept of rules is explored. The different ways of challenging the rules of games and other systems are explored in terms of the differences between being a spoilsport, cheating, and gaming the system. The latter is discussed in relation to the unintended consequences that often blight rule systems. The way in which games allow complex patterns to emerge from simple rules is examined in relation to approaches such as game theory and complex adaptive systems. The difference is then discussed between prescriptive rules (most common in organization theory), descriptive rules, and circumscriptive rules (as seen in games). The chapter closes with the description of a project in which organizational rules played a pivotal role.

The evolution of organizational design is discussed in Chapter 6, from viewing the organization as a formalized machine to a realization that design decisions are contingent on context, and to a current turn towards equipping managers with a unique mindset and approach to problem solving called a design attitude. The origin and essence of this design attitude are examined as well as their consequences for the appropriate organizational design process. The connection is then explored between this new form of organizational design and the video-game design process, characterized by prototyping involving the players, and the rule set as the object of design. This leads to a description of how this process could be applied to an organization, which is labeled game based organization design. This process is further explored in terms of the role of the organizational designer, the attributes of the design attitude it embodies, and the way it compares to similar approaches.

A brief introduction of strategy is given in Chapter 7, and the connection is shown between strategy formulation and organizational design. The traditional view of strategic management is then broadened by also looking at strategies for public and not-for-profit organizations, and by looking at strategy-making by other entities than just the corporate center. This extension fits the strategy-as-practice perspective. The organizational system is then discussed as a goal-driven configuration of environment, strategy, and structures and processes. The ways in which this organizational system can be redesigned in the context of game based organization design are explored. In addition, the boundary between the design process and the process of implementation and change management is examined. Finally, a description is given of a project in which game based organization design was used in the manner described in this chapter.

2

Systems

On September 16, 2008, President Bush sat down in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Chairman of the Federal Reserve System Ben Bernanke. They discussed the events of the previous days. Lehman Brothers had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection the day before. In and of itself, the largest bankruptcy in US history was a dramatic event. But the unanticipated ripple effects were what really worried Paulson and Bernanke and led them to propose measures to the president that were previously unthinkable. The Lehman bankruptcy had led to the failure of a money-market fund that owned large sums of Lehman debt securities. This in turn had led to a general collapse of trust and a money-market run, which meant many large (non-financial) companies became anxious because they used this source of finance to fund their day-to-day operating expenses, such as paying their employees and their suppliers. The entire economy threatened to come to a standstill. After he had listened to the men, agreed to the proposed measures, and was concluding the meeting, President Bush put into words the precise perplexi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Systems
• 3 Games
• 4 Play
• 5 Rules
• 6 Design
• 7 Strategy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index