Learning by Escaping – Part III
Leadership and the Escape Game
Their progress had stalled and the team were becoming restless. The clock continued to count down and the tension in the room was rising, along with the volume of the voices. Then cutting through the chatter came a single clear and calm voice. “What if we look at this problem from a different direction. Let’s step away from it for a second and see what we know and what we’re trying to achieve.” In an instant the team’s demeanor changed, they had found their leader and they each knew that success would surely follow.
We love escape games and playing them is fun, but they can also play a role in learning and development. In this series of articles we’re looking at how business challenges can be overcome using the immersive learning techniques that you find in escape games. If you missed the other parts of this series you can find both part I and II right here on Medium.
This time we’re looking at something that’s critical to every business, Leadership.
We’ll begin our journey in the heat of the action of an escape game. It has been 10 minutes since the last progress was made by the team and frustration has now replaced the early sense of optimism. Pressure is causing negative behaviours to emerge.
Anyone who has played an escape game will likely have observed these, they can include anything from raised voices through to complete disengagement with the game.
I’m sure you’d agree that in a perfect world they are behaviours we’d like to avoid. But if we fast forward to the end of the game and the team have achieved their desired outcome by “escaping”, do they really matter?
After all, if we’re solely focused on outcomes and the impact of the negative behaviours is low then we could rightly argue that they are just part of the team’s “journey”. But unsurprisingly, our observations have clearly shown us that we can closely correlate them to the overall effectiveness of the team.
As discussed in part II of our series of articles we measure this effectiveness in terms of whether the team “escaped”. But more specifically we observe that both negative behaviours and success rate are closely linked to the “L” word, yes Leadership!
But going from the assertion that successfully escaping is directly linked to the effectiveness of leadership is a big leap, so let’s break this down and look at it in more detail.
We observe that teams who work well together find the challenges in escape games much easier to complete than those where the individuals in their team operate more independently from each other.
In practical terms working well together typically means the group self-organise and have team members who know to assume various roles at appropriate points in the game. When we observe this it is often without much verbal direction from other team members so it would be easy to assume that it’s just random behaviour and not directly linked to any external factors.
Conversely the worst groups will have team members who operate independently. Trust between team members breaks down and everyone will try and do everything for themselves, with blame and excuses being the vocal sign that this is happening.
So if we observe our team is more like the latter than the former, is it a lost cause? No, not at all. But we do need a structured approach to reviewing what happened and finding a way to change the negative behaviours.
One approach to addressing them after the game has finished would be to use the “did well, could do better” concept to look to get into the detail. In doing so it allows the negatives to be framed in the context of the game situation and will allow you to find their root causes.
This is certainly a worthwhile activity whether we’re doing it in response to our team’s experience in an escape game or when delivering a key project for our business. But what does good look like in this respect?
When talking to the teams after their experience we find that it’s no accident that the behaviour of those that escaped is as we observe it to be, it has been learned. Learning of this type also typically wont have been done in a classroom, its been facilitated outside the game by a leader using real-world experience.
So it’s not a big leap to make the assertion that the best teams are those with the best Leadership. Although that doesn’t always mean that they always have a clearly visible leader inside the escape game.
As in your business, leadership in an escape room can come in many forms. Our observations are that the type of leadership in the context of the game does not generally matter, but its effectiveness does. But what are the types of leadership that we observe most often?
Visible Leaders
Some teams have a clear leader who operates by delegating responsibility for individual tasks while maintaining a view of the bigger picture.
This is typically the best approach to complete an escape game as efficiently as possible. There are always many puzzles to be completed, typically of different types and usually requiring different skills. So the resources needed to solve them all need to be deployed and redeployed throughout the game.
Often these visible leaders also operate as the focal point for communication across the team. This is important as individual puzzles often require multiple pieces of information or equipment to solve and need individual findings to be shared, interpreted and applied back into the wider context of the game.
In our experiences the visible leader is observed in two types of escape game team. The first is when the team is made of colleagues from the same business and more specifically from the same function or group within it. In this scenario the leader typically has the support and respect of the team in their business context or alternatively has a leadership style that relies heavily on “position power”. In the latter the outcome is typically the same although more direction of team members is typically observed when the pressure or the complexity of the puzzles increases.
The other type of group with a visible leader is a team of friends who have played a lot of escape games together. In this scenario the leader has usually been elected or has naturally evolved but is supported by the wider team. Their visibility as a leader will generally be an explicit tactic to aid the team’s gameplay that they use to escape quickly and efficiently.
Hidden Leaders
In what is potentially a more surprising observation there are many teams that achieve success without a clear leader being visible during the game.
In this situation you’d be forgiven for thinking that it is the random chance mentioned earlier and there is no leadership in action. However, in reality there usually is, but it takes a trained eye to spot it.
Digging a little deeper we’ve found that these are actually very effective teams. In most cases the team has worked together in a business environment and in all cases their effectiveness has been influenced by strong management and leadership outside the escape game.
What this means inside the escape game is that everyone is clear on what they need to achieve, what their role is and that they understand and trust their team.
If this is the behaviour you observe from your team then please take a bow, this isn’t an easy thing to achieve and you are doing great things!
At this point it’s also worth saying that from our observations the type of leader, whether “visible” or “hidden”, has little impact on the success of the team.
What we do observe though is that having neither has a negative impact on their success. But if that’s the case in our team then is all lost?
Emerging Leaders
In the previous two leadership styles the leader has been selected or elected prior to the game. But teams can also achieve success when this isn’t the case and often this is when a leader emerges during the game. This clearly has an impact on the success rate of the team and we observe failure in these situations as much as success. After all, we shouldn’t be expecting miracles from these emerging leaders.
This emergence of leadership is observed in many teams of casual or first-time players, and maybe surprisingly, those made up of work colleagues who are already part of a hierarchy within their business.
In the latter case there will often be an “appointed” leader in the team, usually the team’s current manager. But in this situation they are not effective in that leadership role and their failure will leave a vacuum for the emerging leader to fill.
This shift of leadership within the game is primarily believed to be as a result of the game environment being a new one for the participants. In new and challenging circumstances, assumed constraints can often be set aside and new behaviours can be observed.
When this emergence of a new leader happens in a team from a business it can be a contentious but also very valuable outcome. Identifying and supporting emerging leaders within our business is critical for success although it’s not always easy to do. But we have observed on many occasions that an escape game has all the elements for allowing us to identify them.
So do you give yourself the time and opportunity to spot your emerging leaders?
Applying this to our business
The value of leadership in any business can be understood using the escape game as the viewing lens. The challenges faced by our teams in the workplace are similar to those encountered at a macro level within the game. If we believe observations from an escape game map directly to our own business, then “escaping” is a good measure of the effectiveness of our team.
When teams are observed playing multiple escape games, a team’s approach will develop when its leadership facilitates learning from the experience and actively nurtures the implementation of the relevant skills.
The value that leadership plays is therefore clearly visible within an escape game. It should also be clear when our team’s effectiveness is as a result of poor leadership.
Unfortunately, the challenges we face in our business can often feel a little less fun to overcome than those in the escape game. But at least playing an escape game to identify if we are equipped to face them by can be fun.
So next time you play an escape game with your team, take a moment to step back from the action and look around you for clues about your own team’s leadership. Then when you get back to the office take another look and compare it to what you saw in the game.
If in both scenarios you observed a well functioning team with an understanding of what they need to achieve and a clear sense of their direction of travel, then you can be sure that there is strong leadership.
If on the other hand you see confusion, disengagement and arguing over the best approach then you can probably take a good guess at what is missing.
Unfortunately, your escape game experiences won’t solve all of your leadership problems. However, they will allow you to measure where you are with your team and may also help you find an emerging leader within your team. If you are in the place where confusion and discord reign then this person could also be a key part of the solution.
You should also not be afraid to admit that your leadership might not be up to the mark. There are always ways to improve, but that as they say is another story!
Martyn is a founder of chronyko who have over 10 years experience building and running escape games and many other types of immersive training and skills development events. We’ll be sharing lots more of our thoughts and insights on the subject of immersive learning and development in our upcoming articles.
