SQUIRCLE: A Serious Game
This is the second installment of our SQUIRCLE blog series, a 2020 interview of SQUIRCLE Founder Francis Cholle, conducted by Adélaïde Barbier.
If you haven’t already, visit Part I of this series.
In Part I, “SQUIRCLE: A New Way to Think for A New World,” we introduced you to the definitions and principles of our work and philosophy.
In Part II, we will explore The SQUIRCLE Game and the reasons it is so essential to be playful in business.
How do you implement this methodology inside the companies with which you work?
Companies facing a complex problem often fail to solve it with conventional tools. In such cases, leaders need to change their mindset and approach their way of doing business with a new way of being (“façon d’être”). That’s when using SQUIRCLE is game-changing.
Here, it is useful to distinguish between “complication” and “complexity.” In his book Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux explains it very well through two examples.
First, he talks about a Boeing aircraft, which he describes as a complicated system; although there are tens of thousands of components to it, they come together following a linear logic. If you were to pull out any single piece and give it to an engineer,, they would be able to tell you whether the missing piece has an impact on the functioning of the aircraft, and if yes, which one.
Second, Laloux gives the example of a plate of spaghetti as a complex system. It contains only a dozen ingredients, but if you pull on a single noodle, no computer — not even the most powerful one in the world — will be able to predict exactly what will happen.
What companies face in our VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) world is a ceaseless succession of complex problems and they need to develop a new skill set to adapt and succeed. And maybe this will sound strange, but it all starts with the SQUIRCLE game, a “serious game.”
A serious game? You start your business practice with a game. Why?
To get to the mindset of letting go and allowing a new form of intelligence to emerge (the CIRCLE), being playful is essential.
As Einstein would say, “Play is the highest form of research.”
Play is magical and profound. It’s essential to our growth and development when we are children but it’s also a key factor in creativity and agility in the workplace. I have used play to help people be more creative, deal with emotions and regain enthusiasm when their company was going through difficult times.
I propose a game that demonstrates through experience our innate ability to adapt and solve complex problems. This game makes it possible to reach a state of “flow.” In other words, a state in which one disconnects from the conscious by the simple pleasure of being in the moment. From then on emerges a form of rhythm shared by all.
Neuroscience has proven that play connects us with the deeper layers of our brain that are only accessible in this way, or even through meditation, sleep, and dreams, or psychotropic drugs. Even if the game requires some logical thinking, it allows us to realize the power of undoing the dominance of rational thinking. When we play, we are less in “self-control.” We are more open, more inspired, and more willing to take risks.
“I wasn’t working, I was playing. I was letting things take shape before my eyes, and deep down I knew I was about to find something that was going to be Nobel Prize-winning… and that’s what happened.”
–– Kary Mullis, 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The National Institute for Play defines play as “a state of being that is intensely pleasurable. It energizes and enlivens us. It eases our burdens, renews a natural sense of optimism, and opens us up to new possibilities. (…) Scientists — neuroscientists, developmental biologists, psychologists… — have recently begun viewing play as a profound biological process.”
What is the SQUIRCLE game? And what is its purpose?
The SQUIRCLE Game (described in Chapter 6 of the SQUIRCLE book) mirrors very faithfully what business is about today. The objective of the game is to help executives develop a new skill set to adapt and succeed in a VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) environment.
In a few words, during the SQUIRCLE Game, a group of people recites the alphabet. But not just in any way. The group must recreate the alphabet, from A to Z, with their eyes closed, one letter at a time, following the alphabetic order, but with random participation from each member of the group. Participants do not have the right to agree on a prior roadmap. No one knows who is going to speak. If two people speak at the same time or if the usual order of the alphabet is not respected, it is necessary to start again from the beginning.
The group is thus faced with a complex situation, for which there is no preconceived solution and no possible intellectual strategy. A logical mind is not able to resolve this situation. And at the same time, the members of the group must keep their logic since it is necessary to respect the order of the alphabet, but show instinct to adapt. It is a way of recreating a time and a space in which people function by being connected universally, without worrying about differences of opinion or emotions, to achieve a form of unanimity.
The objective is to demonstrate to the participants that in the face of complexity we must not necessarily go through operating modes. Strategic, logical thinking is not only not enough, but allowing it to dominate bans us from having access to our natural capacity for solving complex problems.
Simply put, regardless of their backgrounds, when SQUIRCLE Game participants give up the urge to win, they get in touch with their intuition and tune into more subtle perceptions necessary for creative adaptation. Paradoxically, they win the game.
You deployed this “game” in several companies with teams that I imagine had never been exposed to this form of their own intelligence before. What is the success rate of this game experiment?
Without exception, the group ends up getting there. I have facilitated the SQUIRCLE Game in hundreds of groups across five continents, a variety of industries and sizes of companies, non-profit organizations, conferences with mixed audiences, graduate programs, and high schools. I have never seen participants not able to eventually complete the game successfully.
Out of all the groups with which I have worked, only one so far was able to complete the SQUIRCLE Game in one go the very first time they tried. It was in Tokyo. All participants were Japanese. Eager to understand, in the end, I asked participants how they felt during the game and how they explained their success.
Two factors emerged: social discretion is paramount in Japanese society, and it is best demonstrated through silence. Japanese people value silence highly as a fundamental form of nonverbal communication and associate it with truthfulness. For them, even more than language, silence conveys information, emotions, and rich and ambiguous subtleties, which in turn forces attentive listening and makes space for another type of interpersonal communication. In my many years of doing business in Japan, I often had meetings where the CEO would listen quietly while his team members talked about the details of a transaction or even things unrelated to business.
In the West, it’s usually the opposite: the lower you are in the hierarchy, the less you are expected to talk in meetings, and for the sake of efficiency, small talk is rather limited because we value the intellect over the senses.
What the SQUIRCLE Game makes explicit in less than 20 minutes is the following. For the human mind to overcome a complex challenge like this serious game, thinking linearly is not operative. The act of exhaustively mapping out all scenarios, comparing them, and choosing the optimum path simply is not possible. The context changes constantly and depends on multiple people who all act interdependently. And even if it were possible, it would require computing too much data at once. As a point of reference, computers had to study 30 million scenarios to win over world champions of Go Game, which involves only two players. But the more important point here is that this is not how the human mind works in complex situations. When time is limited, information is unreliable, and the future is uncertain, our minds use a heuristic to adapt to circumstances, make decisions and solve problems.
Can you detail what you mean by “heuristics”?
In contrast to logic and probability, heuristics are processes that partially ignore information and enable fast decisions. The classical idea about heuristic is two-fold:
I) Because of their cognitive limitations, humans are unable to perform rational computation.
II) When people can optimize, they often rely on heuristics to save effort at the price of sacrificing accuracy.
This translates into the idea that the less information, computation, or time that one uses, the less accurate one’s judgments will be. This accuracy-effort trade-off is believed to be one of the few general laws of the mind.
However, their in-depth research concludes quite differently from this classical view. Their results show that less effort can lead to better or worse accuracy, depending on the environment in which a heuristic is used. In a simple well-defined microcosm, in which all relevant alternatives, consequences, and probability distribution are known, and no surprises are allowed, computation and optimization models work. But in an uncertain world, heuristics can be more accurate than methods that use more information and computation, including optimization methods.
Attempting secured deduction through fact gathering and computing is not only ineffective in the SQUIRCLE Game, but it is also disabling participants from fully accessing a deeper intelligence. By definition, the logical mind tends to exclude anything ambiguous by nature based on the binary measuring system with which it works (true or false, higher or lower, thicker or thinner, etc.). In doing so, it shuts down our capacity for noticing non-binary information and all subtleties that come with it. To illustrate this point, what comes to mind are classical computers and quantum computers. The first group manipulates ones and zeroes to crunch through operations, but quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits. Just like classical computers, quantum computers use ones and zeros, but qubits have a third state called “superposition” that allows them to represent a one or a zero at the same time. If you stick to classical machine computation you ban superposition and other quantum mechanical phenomena like entanglement.
On the other hand, in the SQUIRCLE Game, once participants give up a domineering command control mode and shift away from binary thinking, they immediately regain access to their natural ability for creative adaptation.
Is there some scientific research available on this topic?
I have not conducted a scientific experiment to observe what’s happening in the brains of participants although I seriously thought of it, it is too costly given the exorbitant price of this type of brain imagery equipment. However, in Chapter 6 of my SQUIRCLE book, I mention the research of neuroscientists Alejandro Perez and Manuel Carreiras published in 2013. They showed the spontaneous neuronal synchronization that occurs between brains when people who had never met before, engage in a conversation. They explained that this natural interbrain communion happens beyond language.
All the more interested in this research, I found out that eventually all groups systematically succeed at the SQUIRCLE Game once they have been advised to — individually and collectively — surrender control over the process and give up their attachment to the outcomes.
This is exactly what happened to Philipp, the Unilever executive and experienced marathon runner that I mention in Chapter 1 of my SQUIRCLE book. Philipp accepted to follow his coach who advised him to let go of his goal and focus on the process. He never looked at his watch and observed his breathing throughout the entire race. He reached his best time ever although he had trained the least for that race.
In Part III, “SQUIRCLE: Applied to Business and Leadership” we will demonstrate SQUIRCLE in action by applying our methodology and activities to real-world business problems.
Read the next installment of the SQURICLE blog series here.
