Learning With Games

Many organizations and brands are concerned these days with authenticity. Being authentic or true to yourself means you have integrity, are ethical and trustworthy, can be counted on like Michael Clayton to do the right thing without being told.

So perhaps it's ironic that today's hottest approach to corporate learning is creative pretense. Pretense is the opposite of authentic. It is not true or real. It's making things up!

Who decided that we can teach and train people to excel by telling lies?

Probably the wisest among learning pros. Before I explain, let's draw a distinction. Pretense that perpetrates a falsehood is lying. The gamesmanship of deal making is that kind of pretense. We lie--we may be trained and rewarded to lie--in order to take advantage of others. People who do this are manipulative or smarmy. They may be labeled as "salesmen" or "politicians." Their pretenses are uncouth.

On the other hand, pretense that discloses meaning and value is concerned with truth. Creative pretense--acts of the imagination that generate excitement and exuberance from the playground to the boardroom--is transformational. It is the alchemy of insight and innovation from the cradle to the grave.

And that is why games deserve to be the vanguard of corporate learning in 2008. Games deal in metaphors. They make us know what something is, through the clarifying lens of what it actually means to me or you or us. We play games to walk in the shoes of a fictional character, or an avatar of ourselves, so we can improve our perception and judgement.

Old school training teaches people to copy models of good performance. A standard task analysis is a kind of amber that freezes good performance and allows robotic students to mimic it. Instructional design goes on to teach somebody else's solutions: a subject-matter expert's, a consultant's, a fool on the hill. Memorize something, run the algorithm, pass the test, meet the objectives.

Game-based learning is different. There is no monkey-see monkey-do in games as there is in conventional training. Instead there is something more elemental and authentic: face the problem and figure it out. Games teach people how to wrestle with problems and solve them in unique ways, to keep practicing until they become better than other players.

The artist-choreographer Twyla Tharp frames this distinction in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. "Real learning is not copying," she says. "That's the wrong word. Copying is taking somebody else's solutions. Learning is taking somebody else's problems."

After a lifetime of brilliant performances Ms. Tharp is still learning, still working the same problems that others have faced, creating new and disruptive solutions. There is no fundamental difference between what she does as an artist, and what gamers can do in a virtual world.

Imagine what your colleagues or students or employees could do, if they were challenged in the same way. Maybe you should tell them to skip class and go out and play!

Comments

[Robert Becker]

Thanks Michelle. I'm very interested in the conference you're planning. Please do send an email about it. Bob Becker

[Michelle Leberfeld]

i enjoyed today's posting (because I agree with it, of course!) My company has been producing corp learning conferences for many years and we're doing a new event called "Corporate Training for the Gamer Generation" in July. It's not on the website yet but I'd like to know what you think. Let me know and I can email it to you.

Michelle