Our clients often come to us with questions like, “How do we engage our people in our strategy?” or “How do we get people to understand the Big Picture, and where they fit?” or “How do we get our different business groups working together to produce greater results?”
Do these questions sound familiar?
Creating a culture that promotes synergy, collaboration, clear expectations, accountability, excitement, and systems thinking is no easy task. Consulting firms make billions of dollars creating complex models, charters, and tools to help with this very thing. In the work that we do, we seldom hear Game Theory come up as a change management agent for organizations to achieve such a culture. Many people think of Game Theory as the introduction of video games in the workplace (I recently cringed when someone told me that the Nintendo Wii was the future of training), and they are usually shocked to hear that it has been around since the 1930’s…long before Atari, Nintendo, and Farmville.
When used properly, Game Theory enables the culture described earlier by focusing on systems thinking. As you watch this video from the NY Times that describes the use of video games in school, try to find the concepts that are relevant to business. Hopefully, it will prompt you to research Game Theory a bit more and help reshape your view of play in the workplace.
