Game Design + Pedagogy + Leadership = Experiential Leadership

Another Eternal Golden Braid.

One of my favorite books as a teenager was Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. The premise was simple. Well, simple-ish. The mathematics of Gödel, the drawings of Escher, and the music of Bach all used many of the same patterns, from recursion to emergence. And each could help you understand the others and underlying ideas. ¹

You know where I am going with this.

Consider game design, pedagogy, and leadership.

Game design is the challenge of creating fun, engaging, interactive experiences.

Pedagogy (Instructional design) is the challenge of structuring content and events to help learners get smarter.

Leadership is the challenge of inspiring and guiding others toward a shared goal, while giving them the tools to grow along the way.

And each of three have different perspectives.

Game designers know from day one that it has to be fun. Leaders know from day one that they have to deal with the real world. And instructional designers know from day one that they have to help people learn.

But all of them need to know all of it.

My chart below is what all three disciplines ought know, and when in their career they typically architect it into what they deliver.

Some of the key concepts, and the traditional place in a career when the importance of it traditionally is understood and rigorously applied by that profession.

One hopeful sign is that we already seeing examples of the commingling of the three.

• Serious Games is a discipline dedicated to the cross over of game design and pedagogy.

• Many games put players in leadership and management situations.²

• Many leaders today increasingly use various game mechanics such as competition between employees.³

• Some of the best known leaders hailed by the business community—such as Vince Lombardi and Bill Walsh—were sports coaches helping their teams get better at playing a game. One reason so many CEOs watch professional sports is that it is a ballet of real-time leadership.

Yet, these only hint at a manifest destiny. There may be a convergence of the three. Let’s call the resulting discipline Experiential Leadership.

Experiential Leadership is the art of architecting experiences that cultivate increasingly good judgement. Games, teaching, and leading are but three applications.

The first five commandments of Experiential Leaders:

1. Decisions, not content, are the atomic unit design.

2. A foundational role is to architect “sandboxes” with goals, boundaries, resources, and consequences.

3. Let consequences, not explanations, do the teaching.

4. Sandboxes should include the real world. “Go to a conference to give a speech.” “Take this prospective buyer and make a sale.” “Build a new district up.” “Lead a new task force.” “Run an experiment to test the viability of a new technology.”
   And then get more ever challenging.

5. Experiential Leaders should design themselves out of the system. Ultimately, the goal of the experiential leader is to disappear, and ideally, teams shouldn’t even realize when they have moved beyond the domain of their architect.

We are not close to realizing this. Even with the advent of powerful AI tools as enablers, we are probably a decade away from formal Experiential Leadership.

However, regardless of the evolution of the role, practitioners in any of the three can accelerate their maturity by borrowing from the other two. And in those cases, the same five commandments are more critical for each.

1. Gödel, Escher, Bach was also a book that—like the Choose Your Own Adventure books—encouraged you as the reader the participate and prove to yourself many of the ideas. For those of us interested in computer programming and cognitive science, it was a tonic.

Buying Gödel, Escher, Bach at the Bunch of Grapes bookstore in Vineyard Haven started my down a several year journey of reading as many Hofstadter books I could get my hands on, more of a challenge in those days before Amazon. Along the way, at one party outside of Cambridge (Massachusetts, not England), I got into a conversation about Hofstadter. I praised several of his books and articles, including Metagmagical Themas. I was asked what my opinions were of another of his work, The Mind’s I. I shrugged it off as disposable, and not really worthy of his others. It was then that I learned the person to whom I was talking and had asked the question was Hofstadter’s co-author of that book, Daniel Dennett.

2. Perhaps most famously, Sid Meier’s Civilization games ask players to lead growing communities, learning and applying ever more complex strategies and management. Fallout 4 is another game that is also a leadership simulator—one example: players are rewarded not just for accomplishing their goals, but helping their virtual companions make progress on their life goals. Another Fallout 4 example: Players are given the building blocks to physically build their own villages to meet the needs of its inhabitants.

So many games regularly use leadership schemas including fog of war, goal tracking, and complex missions.

3. Managers can use game devices such as leaderboards and other inter-team competitions, maps to show progress, the unlocking new perks, and awards for milestones reached.