Game Based Organization Design

In the spring of 2006, I was invited to attend a business seminar on video games. It sounded entertaining enough, so I went. I did not really consider myself a gamer. Sure, I had a PlayStation 2 at home, but it was mostly gathering dust. My nights of guiding Lara Croft through the jungle were behind me, let alone my days of International Karate on my Commodore 64. But as I sat in the audience and listened to a speaker talk about so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), something happened. I saw a fascinating glimpse of a world that had been invisible to me until then. Millions of people were apparently leading parallel lives in these virtual worlds of Everquest¹ and World of Warcraft.² They had even established an economic system that could rival a small nation. I felt I had seen the future. This needed to be studied. Organizations had to draw lessons from this. The vague idea of combining my work as a management consultant with research that had been in the back of my head for years took shape there and then.

On September 16, 2008, President Bush sat down in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Chairman of the Federal Reserve System Ben Bernanke. They discussed the events of the previous days. Lehman Brothers had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection the day before. In and of itself, the largest bankruptcy in US history was a dramatic event. But the unanticipated ripple effects were what really worried Paulson and Bernanke and led them to propose measures to the president that were previously unthinkable. The Lehman bankruptcy had led to the failure of a money-market fund that owned large sums of Lehman debt securities. This in turn had led to a general collapse of trust and a money-market run, which meant many large (non-financial) companies became anxious because they used this source of finance to fund their day-to-day operating expenses, such as paying their employees and their suppliers. The entire economy threatened to come to a standstill. After he had listened to the men, agreed to the proposed measures, and was concluding the meeting, President Bush put into words the precise perplexity which was puzzling many of us: ‘Someday you guys are going to need to tell me how we ended up with a system like this.’¹

In November of 2011, Finnish video game developer Rovio announced that their game Angry Birds had been downloaded more than half a billion times.¹ To mark the occasion, the company released some statistics about the gameplay, which involves using a slingshot to launch wingless birds at pigs positioned inside increasingly complex constructions. One of the more astonishing facts was the number of birds that had been launched by players of the game since its release two years earlier reached 400 billion. In March of 2013, the number of downloads of Angry Birds (in all its different versions, including a Star Wars themed edition) stood at 1.7 billion,² so we can safely assume that the number of birds launched has tripled by now. These incredible numbers show how pervasive video games have become. In just a few decades they have evolved from an activity for reticent teenage boys to something that virtually everyone who owns a smartphone or tablet computer is exposed to. In fact, adult women now represent a bigger percentage of the gaming population than boys seventeen years old and younger.³ How did we get to this point? And perhaps more interestingly, is it somehow possible to put that commitment to catapulting cartoon birds to use in an organizational context?

On a pleasant autumn evening in 2008, 15 people got together in a hotel meeting room in the Dutch seaside resort of Bergen. All of them had some involvement in setting up a new Elective Care Center (ECC) as part of a nearby hospital. Most of the participants in the meeting did not know any of the others. They had not received an agenda, just a one-page invitation with a photo of a girl blowing bubbles and the request to join an important workshop in the design of the new center. No preparation was necessary. The people trickled in, had some coffee, and stood about somewhat uneasily. Some talked about the nice weather or the trouble they had in finding the hotel. Among the participants were a surgeon, a general practitioner, a nurse, a health insurance representative, and even a patient. Although the surgeon and the general practitioner had never met, they knew each other by name. The surgeon decided to take this opportunity to complain about some of the wrong referrals he had received from the general practitioner. The general practitioner responded with his complaints about the delays in receiving the results of procedures. The mood was set for a traditional round of exchanging viewpoints without making much progress towards the shared goal of a new center.

At the offices of We Beat The Mountain (WBTM) — a start-up company that designs, produces and sells products from recycled materials — we had entered the last stage of our meeting. As WBTM was about to launch its first consumer product, the founder and his core team were assembled for this workshop, which used lusory spaces to brainstorm about aspects of their organization such as the relevant stakeholders and the areas of knowledge that were essential for WBTM. Together with my fellow moderator I had just explained what the objective of the last round was: to write down on the colored cards that were in front of them, different things that WBTM could spend its money on. The winner would be the one who wrote down the most items that others also wrote down. The intention was to have participants think about what they wrote down instead of going for pure volume of ideas (which had been the aim of a previous round). That was how it had been designed. But that was not how it went down. After I had started the timer for the five-minute round, the WBTM founder looked around the table at his core team and said, with a mischievous smile on his face: ‘Is there anyone who wants to win this round?’ No, actually there wasn’t anyone who really wanted to win or at least no one admitted it.

From 1998 to 2002 Fred Collopy and Richard Boland, professors at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, had the privilege to work with architect Frank Gehry on the design of their new building. Gehry is generally considered one of the most important architects of our time, whose iconic and innovative buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao draw visitors from all over the world. Boland and Collopy’s collaboration with the architect allowed them to experience first-hand how he and his partners work and approach problems. It was an inspirational episode for them, which opened their eyes to a very different mindset from the one they were instilling in their management students. From working with Frank Gehry, Boland and Collopy developed the view that ‘if managers adopted a design attitude, the world of business would be different and better’.¹ At the occasion of the opening of the Peter B. Lewis Building in June 2002, they assembled scholars, artists (Frank Gehry among them) and managers for a workshop entitled ‘Managing as Designing’. This workshop and the book that resulted from it² were very influential in casting a new light on organizational design,³ an academic subject that until then seemed to have gotten stuck somewhere halfway through the twentieth century.

Saskia had been rather quiet. ‘What did you think of your role in the game?,’ I asked her. We were evaluating a playtesting session at VGZ, a Dutch health insurance company. The challenge at hand was promoting a healthier lifestyle for their clients and Saskia was representing the role of the caregiver, the friend or family member who supports a person who is trying to adopt a healthier lifestyle. ‘To be honest’, Saskia said, Tthought my role was a little odd.’ ‘How so?’ I asked. ‘Well, all the other players had money to spend on measures that promoted a healthier lifestyle. But I only had all of these time coins. So everyone kept coming to me when they were running short on time, because I had more than enough of it.’ The group fell silent for a moment, as they processed her comments. Then Ron, who represented the municipality in this session, said: ‘Isn’t that exactly what happens in our healthcare system? That we collectively lean on the caregivers, people in the client’s social environment, to fill up the gaps when the money runs out?’ There were nods as Leonie, the client lead for this project, said: ‘That could be a real risk factor. If the caregiver collapses, so does the whole house of cards.’ A weakness in the system had been identified and the group was now ready to start discussing a strategy for dealing with it.