Unleashing Creative Potential in Business and Gaming
The role of imagination in driving innovation
How do people self-organize to win?
That’s the question I asked myself and my colleagues as I played the new Season of Discovery relaunch of the World of Warcraft Classic MMORPG. Revamped with new abilities for each class, the Rune system has allowed Blizzard developers to experiment with hybrid classes and test the water for new content in their space. And from pre-launch to launch day… well, it was a real success.
So my new question from a training and development perspective would be: How do you create content that people want to play and test themselves against? Because that’s key to the success and viability of being a game development team.
Well, first and foremost, you need a team of developers who play. I can hear you laughing at me, but would it surprise you to know that many developers who create AAA games do not play the games they work on? That somehow the silo-based hierarchy of development can mean that development exists as an arcane science devoid of reality, separate from the business realities and players? I would argue that this mentality exists across many departments that are not in the games world as well. I have run many workshops with cross-functional teams who actually have no idea how their business makes money; no idea apart from vague generalizations of who their end client is and line of sight from their input to the final product.
So, here, the Classic WoW team are to be congratulated, not only on putting on a masterclass on experimenting with a 20-year-old game, but for how they continue to work with the playerbase, making changes to class skills and in-game issues, at speed. From the moment of worldwide launch, the server team dealt with literally 10 000+ player queues looking to start their adventures in SoD; and while there might have been some disgruntled people at the beginning, it was pretty impressive to see so many interested in experiencing a new take on old content.
Upon entering the game, people organized themselves into teams of friends and guild mates from other parts of the WoW ecosystem of games, and went at conquering the new content with gusto. Player, dev, and streamer, enthusiasm was, across the board, the name of the day. Both Blizzard themselves, and players, gave a masterclass in collaboration.
And here’s the lesson for Human Resource teams and senior executives who still operate in hierarchical structures: left to their own devices, your people can conquer content in the business world almost as well as they do in the World of Warcraft; but for some reason, classical organizations seem to disable this capacity in groups from the day of their induction.
How is it possible that literally 100 000 people, including every major WoW personality and content creator, can self-organize around beating very hard group challenges at speed? Remember, they do this without a human resource department or group of senior executives outlining their every move.
They self-organize.
That facility, is just awe-inspiring; it should make senior executives, leaders, and the strategies they use for working with their people.
So the first question that they have to answer is: Do they want to win?
Who answers that?
Err… the senior executives?
Why?
Because, I would argue, they have no notion of winning; they think like a master engineer on a ship: keep the engine turning, and hope for the best.
You think I am joking? The history of business innovation, from Clayton Christensen onwards, shows that business teams are woefully unprepared to deal with change.
Think about winning, instead of snakes and ladders with careers moves, like some Machiavellian game of personal chess, from workplaces built on corporate politics that are toxic to people engagement.
You want to win.
So you need to unlock your people’s inherent capacity to develop shared meaning, purpose, and the collaborative tool sets that they bring with themselves. If you look at the world of video games, you can see actual great content creators: the games themselves are about capturing the imagination of the players — other devs as well, actually —, to keep pushing the boundaries of mastering fascinating multi-player and single-player content that will blow your mind.
What we are talking about is a hierarchy of imagination at work.
You can measure organizations by ranking them in this category as a way of seeing into the future, because, I would argue, it is this facility to design your own future that will be the superpower of the future. If literally 100s of thousand players can do that on a 20-year-old revamped game, it should be a no-brainer for business executives to unleash this inherent capacity of their people.
What stops them from doing this is the 64 million dollar question.
Imagine if the did?
Rock and roll.
DISCLAIMER: This article was written by a human.
