Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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From Skeptics to Superstars: The Power of Play at Work with Alex Suchman | Episode 405

 

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Forget trust falls and awkward icebreakers. Alex Suchman is redefining the workplace with intentional play. Tune in to find out how one game changed a manager’s mindset—and why play may be the missing ingredient in your team culture.

Alex Suchman is the CEO and co-founder of Barometer XP, whose mission is to create cultures where people are excited about their work because they feel a strong sense of purpose and belonging. She uses games and play to strengthen interpersonal dynamics, such as trust, accountability, and psychological safety, into the workplace.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in community building and education. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Alex Suchman (00:00)
we’re really out to change the reputation that play at work has. There’s a lot of people that are like, play is frivolous, it has no place at work. I don’t think those two are mutually exclusive and hope that we dive into that today.

Rob (00:12)
So yes, Engagers, we already know how important play can be and that’s maybe one of the reasons why you are here, but we’ll be diving into details like this. Many of the strategies that she is using…

on your daily work, many of the things that are already happening. And if this is something that you are interested in, I am sure you will find a lot of value in all the free resources you can find on the link that I’m sharing in the description. So if you want all that free value, there are thousands of dollars worth of work that I’ve been doing for many years. I put a lot of that stuff right there for free. Just go to the link, click on that link, join that place, and we’ll be providing many of

those resources for you right now. Because as you know, this is Professor Game Podcast where we interview successful practitioners of game design, gamification, game-based learning, gameful strategies to give us the

best of their experiences to make experiences meaningful. I’m Rob. You might know that I am the host and the founder of Professor Game where I both do the podcast, but also do coaching, consulting, and many other things around game inspired strategies. I also teach, I teach at IU University, EBS Universitat, EEFMD, and many other organizations around the world. So if you want to know more, as I mentioned before, make sure you click on the link

in the description. You will have plenty of free resources there. Now let’s get back into the interview. So, Engagers, welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game Podcast. Today with us we have Alex. But Alex, before anything else, we need to know, are you prepared to engage?

Alex Suchman (01:57)
Yeah, I’m ready.

Rob (01:58)
Let’s

do this. Let’s go. have Alex Sukhman. that fair? She is the CEO and she’s a co-founder of Barometer XP. And if that rings a bell, you will know why very, very soon. The mission is to create cultures where people are excited about their work because they feel a strong sense of purpose and belonging. She uses games and play to strengthen interpersonal dynamics, such as trust, accountability, and psychological safety into the workplace. And yes, that might sound familiar because we also had Peter.

while ago, a few years ago, actually. And he was the one to introduce us as well. And I am excited to have you on here. But Alex, Alexandra, is there anything that we’re missing that we should know before we dive in?

Alex Suchman (02:38)
I don’t think so. We’re really out to change the reputation that play at work has. And I really appreciate people willing to take that seriously. Cause there’s a lot of people that are like, play is frivolous. It has no place at work. Work is serious and we have to be profitable and efficient. And I don’t think those two are mutually exclusive and hope that we dive into that today.

Rob (02:59)
Absolutely, absolutely. as a CEO and co-founder of Barometer XP, what do your days look like? If we were to follow you around like a shadow or something, what would that look like? What would that feel like?

Alex Suchman (03:11)
Every day is different. There’s some days where I’m facilitating. do a lot of speaking in both in person and virtual events. So you facilitating different types of sessions. I do a ton of networking and business development right now looking for. You know, partnerships partnering with other tools and methods within the learning and development and culture space where I think play is a really nice compliment. So.

I would say watching me for a day, you’d be watching a lot of different Zoom conversations, which may not be the most exciting day spent.

Rob (03:49)
Hopefully safe to say, you know, even after the pandemic, all this fun stuff happened in Zoom. All kinds of memories come in, you know, two weeks I had to change my whole face-to-face curriculum to online. We were pretty well set up in the university, but all the fun security breaches at Zoom, no longer there. Hopefully that hasn’t happened anymore.

Alex Suchman (04:08)
Well, and it’s funny because we, Brahma as a company officially started during the pandemic, but Peter and I had met a couple of years before and really clicked and felt like there was something there with this idea of using play as an experiential learning tool, but we didn’t really know what we were creating. But what we did know is that it was going to be in person and we were looking at all these different types of game pieces and.

⁓ you know, activities that you do when you’re sitting in the same place as somebody. then when COVID started, you’re like, ⁓ well, that has to, that version has to be on the shelf for a while. What can we do that’s digital? So we were able to take a lot of those same activities and figure out ways to do them virtually and then create different types of activities. then eventually it turned into barometer.

Rob (04:55)
Sounds very, very exciting. Very good story. And many more things to come, I’m sure. Talking about stories and things to come, let’s actually look into the past. Is there a time, well actually which is the time you’d like to tell us about, where things did not go the way you guys were expecting? One of those failed moments or first attempts at learning, where you know, things went south and you were going north or you know, whatever you want to share, how, you know, how that, what you learned.

How did you get out of that fail? I don’t know. We want to be there in that story and feel, you know, the pain and the difficulties and take those lessons away as well.

Alex Suchman (05:26)
Yeah, we have lots of them. The biggest one, so, as I mentioned, even when we started the company, we didn’t ultimately know what we were gonna do. We just knew we had this good idea. We’d already invested a lot of time into it. And I had my own consultancy before this, and I was bringing the games to my clients, and they were really successful, and I was seeing what they were unlocking in terms of performance and culture. So one of the first things that we decided to do, we had created this simulation.

this like team simulation, it’s a scenario based game. know, you’re the leadership team at an amusement park and you’re trying to figure out where to build the next ride. And you have some data on cost and data on risk and safety, some data on customer. It’s just putting all the information together. we created, we created one version of it that everybody gets the same information. ⁓ and they’re all working together. Then we created another one.

where each person had a different role and they got different information and it had to be synthesized. And we created like a very DIY, you know, we would send people the individual links, but that, that took a long time to do. experience was really effective. So we’re like, well, let’s build an application, a web application for this that automates a lot of it. And maybe that will be, that will be the foundation of the company is that we have this, this simulation that we can share.

And so we invested a lot of our own money. didn’t fundraise for this and a lot of time building up this app that none of us had ever done anything in software development. it’s, I mean, it was like Pandora’s box and what we know, Phil, what came out of you several months and a lot of money, tens of thousands of dollars was good, but not to the point where other people could facilitate it. had.

little kinks that we had to work around. And so we realized pretty quickly either we had to invest probably two or three times as much money and time to get that to where it was functional or look at, have all of these other games that you don’t need a particular app to facilitate. You don’t need any specific equivalent and it wouldn’t require a lot of money or time to put those out.

And so, you know, that was a really humbling experience because we were really excited about what we’re building. It’s really cool. It’s a great experience. But that we had to change the direction that we were going in because it just didn’t make financial sense to keep going down that path.

Rob (07:57)
Hmm. So you’re, you’re, you’re thinking sort of about going to scale, right? When you think about software, the only thing that like the only reason to go from something not software into software is because of scale. Like you automate things entirely and you just don’t do them again. And in this case, it didn’t make sense. If I, if I may ask the question, is it because like, had you gotten 10 times more clients, would it still not make sense? Was it a question of how many clients you got or like.

What was the driver behind that not being a financially sound decision? If you may share that.

Alex Suchman (08:30)
Yeah, absolutely. So when we started, we were just focusing on being a facilitation services company and we would create these games and game experiences, but we would be the one delivering. But after a year or so, my network, because I had been doing operations, organization development consulting before, my network was a lot of other consultants and facilitators and coaches who worked with companies and they all expressed interest in bringing games into their work. And so we started thinking, okay, well, how do we

share the stuff that we’ve created with other people. And so it’s like, well, if we create an application that where it’s really easy to facilitate the simulation, other people can use it. But to get it to that point where it would be intuitive for other people was, you know, a much more sophisticated software development. So the, you know, we’re like, if we really want to expand our mission to be

almost evangelizing the use of Play at Work and making it really easy for other people to learn this methodology and use our tools. We have to do it in a way that’s going to be more accessible and more affordable to us. So we have all these other games that are less sophisticated to facilitate, but no less impactful in what teams get out of it. And so we decided to focus on those and make those tools accessible.

Rob (09:54)
Beautiful. And talking about those that were successful, is there a story about the instead of going for a fail, something that you’re proud of? Again, the first try, the 10th try, it doesn’t matter. We want to be there with you, maybe take some of the success factors. don’t know. However you want to share this. We want to, again, feel that pain, or in this case, that comfort or happiness.

Alex Suchman (10:14)
Yeah, I think this is a pretty small instance, but it’s the first thing that popped into my mind. You know, as we were developing, we did a lot of sessions with different types of teams pro bono because we just wanted to test our methodology. And there’s a lot of skeptics out there. A lot of people that, you know, say play has no place at work. And, you know, maybe the, people on the team are really excited about it, but the leader is like.

You can tell when you’re facilitating a session, like who the skeptic is, who’s the person that’s going to kind of poo poo on all the ideas is. And so we were doing a team. was with a government contracting team and they, I think there were about seven people and six of them are really enthusiastic and the manager was not and, and was sort of trying to take over and run everything. We were a little bit nervous about that as it was going along.

But one of the great things about facilitate play is people show up as themselves. It’s a really nice way to hold up a mirror and be like, is this really how you want to come across to people? Is this really the best version of yourself? And in seeing how it played out and with us so gently pointing out, you hey, so you made this assumption at the beginning of the game that you declared as like,

This is a given statement. was like, well, obviously we’re trying to maximize profits in this game. So we need to do this strategy. And afterwards in the debrief, someone was like, I totally missed the part in the instructions when it said that we had to focus on profitability. And I said, I didn’t say that. That was not in the instruction. That was an assumption that one person made and nobody questioned. And as a result, people weren’t really happy with how they did. And so it was a way to see, wow.

We didn’t think to question the manager because he’s the manager, but he makes assumptions too that are not always right. And he sort of realized, wow, I’ve maybe being a bit of a jerk in this situation and maybe I should be open to other people’s ideas. And whenever you see that type of light switch.

change in people’s minds where they’re more aware of their own behavior and the impact that they have on other people. Like that to me is the most successful moment because then people are emotionally bought in to the idea that there’s room for growth and evolution and development and are excited because they can see they’re going to get better outcomes. They’re going to have better experiences with other people and preserve their relationship with their colleagues. Work. And let’s face it, work is a lot more pleasant if you

can enjoy the company of the people that you work with and not see them as obstacles in every step of the way.

Rob (13:06)
Absolutely. You know, I’m sure you’ve heard the whole thing of, you know, people don’t quit jobs. They quit managers.

Alex Suchman (13:13)
Yeah.

Rob (13:15)
And managers set the pace of the company and their managers said they’re like, it might be a chain and the culture might be built from the top and all you want. But in the end, it’s your manager, it’s your team, the one that you’re coexisting with all the time.

Alex Suchman (13:28)
And companies invest in developing managers’ technical skills. Can they understand budgets? Can they do deadlines? Can they tell people what they’re doing wrong and course correct? But they don’t learn, well, how do you cultivate the type of environment where people feel like they can succeed? How do you encourage interdependence? not everybody, everybody doesn’t feel like they have to know how to do everything. They know that they can lean on each other and focus on the things that they’re more

you know, that they’re stronger in, or they have more expertise in. And those are, you know, they’re called soft skills. And I really hate that term because I think people skills and human relationships are really the foundation of, of success at work. And I think companies need to invest a lot more in people in leadership and management positions to have those skills.

Rob (14:19)
⁓ I was part of the creation of a course that had to do with not with the startup phase of companies, but rather what they call the scale ups. This professor, Joe Haslam, he always argued that we don’t know things like Facebook and these huge companies because they were startups. We know them because they were scale ups, because they managed to bridge the gap from that to scaling up. And one of the things he talked about, he had like, I think it was four pillars, it was a while ago. But I remember,

very clearly one, which was culture, right? Because when you’re scaling up, no longer, it’s no longer the founders are showing everything all the time and, you know, creating that culture. The culture that you were setting there or that you will set there on this scale of face is what will determine how those people will be behaving when you’re not there because you won’t be there as a founder. And this was a coursework for the founders. And it’s that thing of how does that work? And if you don’t design a culture, right? And it was one of the big arguments, the culture will be there anyways.

The difference is it won’t be the culture you want it to cultivate. So, you know, all the complexities there and all along. And again, you were saying like, you want it to be interdependent all that. Some companies want that. Some companies don’t, right? Like some founders or the company, that’s not the way it works. And that’s not part of the culture. And some people fit in very well in one or the other. So that’s that. That’s I just remember that I thought it was.

Alex Suchman (15:39)
Yeah,

I love it. And that’s something I talk about a lot. One of the things that we’ve created is people still think culture is like, do I want to hang out with my colleagues outside of work? And that is the least of it. I mean, that’s not even like 1 % of what culture is. Culture, the way that I see it and that barometer defines it is it’s the water you’re swimming in at work. It’s everything in the work environment that and whether it

makes people feel like they’re set up to succeed or whether it’s making them feel like they’re set up to fail.

Everybody plays a part in it. It’s not like the culture is static and everybody just feeds into it. If you’re, if you work in a place, you are part of that culture. You’re contributing to it. You’re shaping it. And to be intentional to say, is how we expect people to treat each other. This is how we expect people to hold themselves and others accountable. This is what leaders and managers are going to do to help facilitate success and not just, you know, be these overlords on high.

And we’ve developed a model of culture that is nine different dimensions that connect both the individual experience of work with the outcomes and expectations at the company level to really show that if your people are miserable, if they don’t feel like they have the tools they need, if they’re fearful that, you know, they’ll be punished if they ask questions or put forward an idea that’s not a hundred percent perfect. There’s no way you can be, you can.

be optimized for performance. There’s no way you’re going to get the best out of people. There’s no way you’re going to get the most profitability and the most efficiency. And you have so many companies that are pouring money into becoming more efficient and more productive, but are not at all dealing with the employee experience side of things. And they’re wondering why these billions of dollars are not showing them results. And so you were really trying to make these different dimensions of culture more visible through play.

Because then you can work on them. Then you can build that intentional culture that we’re talking about.

Rob (17:46)
So you’re

talking about these nine dimensions and of course with all the work you’ve done pre-barometer XP, during barometer XP and all the stuff that you guys have done, I’m guessing that you have some sort of process, a way of doing things. If you’re entering a project right now, what are the things that you do? What are the steps if you have any?

Alex Suchman (18:04)
So we really tried to understand what do people want to get out of working with us? What is there a challenge that they’re having that they want to resolve? Do they want to improve specific elements of their culture? So we’ve actually turned our framework of culture into an assessment. It’s a very quick, it’s not meant to be diagnostic. It’s a point in time for how on a day to day basis, how are your

how are members of the team, how are employees experiencing the work environment? And there’s 36 different statements, half of them are positive, half of them are negative. And you see who agreed with what statements. And when you compile everybody’s results, you can see, okay, there are patterns here. People feel on this team by and large agreed with the statement, the positive statements for the sense of identity belonging. People feel like they can show up as themselves. They feel like.

They make meaningful contributions to the work that they believe in. But when it comes to clarity and complexity, people don’t understand their roles or they don’t feel like they’re getting clear expectations about how to perform or what success looked like. And so we would look at that and say, either we want to go in and celebrate their strengths. Maybe if it’s a team that’s really been struggling, you don’t immediately want to go in and talk about problems. You might want to celebrate some wins and play some games that are going to highlight the things that they do really well.

And then get into, all right, and here’s the opportunity for improvement. Or if they want more of like a workshop type intervention, we would design a workshop around how do you do better communications for better clarity and roles and expectations. And we would design that around games that have that mechanic and dynamic at the heart of it. So we use that assessment to both see what does this team need? What are their goals? And then how do we better understand the ways in which they want to change?

And then we also use that as a way we connect it to games in our database. So you can search by what element of culture do you want to explore in a game.

Rob (20:07)
Interesting, From that experience and the work that you’ve done with companies and using this framework that you guys have, what would you say is like a best practice when you’re thinking of using play games and fun or anything in between? What would be something that you say, well, if you use this, project, your results are going to be at least a little bit better than if you didn’t?

Alex Suchman (20:29)
I, one of the things we spent so much time thinking about is why a large percentage of people, if you say we’re going to do a team activity, they like hide from like avoid eye contact. They ⁓ hide under a desk. Like people have.

Rob (20:44)
I’m one of those. I’m one of those. Yeah.

Alex Suchman (20:47)
Yeah. ⁓ and we want to know why. And that’s because oftentimes when an activity is brought in, the intention is really good. But I’m to do it, but there was no, there wasn’t really any strategy or purposeful thinking in, is this the right time to do a game? Is this a game that actually is going to resonate with people? Why are we doing it? What do we want to get out of it? ⁓

And how do we make, how do we set people’s expectations up at the beginning so they know why we’re asking them to do this? Play is an inherently vulnerable thing. You don’t know, even if it’s a game you’ve played before, even if you’re playing with people you’ve played it before, different things happen. You get the good cards on this day and you get the bad cards on this day, or, know, somebody new comes in and they don’t know how to play. And so you have to change the dynamic a little bit. That’s all uncertainty and vulnerability. And so.

For us, what we’ve developed and I think is sort of the best practice is you have to think about, have to understand who are these people, what do they need, what will resonate with them? And that affects not only the game that you pick, but the way that you introduce it, the way that you facilitate it. And so those are some of the different tools that we’ve developed, not only the pressure matrix, that culture model and assessment that I mentioned, but we have.

A framework, we call it the iceberg. It’s the three levels of depth that you can get through play. And, you know, one, we call it team bonding, team building, and team development. And the differences, the type of outcome you’re getting, you team bonding is just, have fun. Let’s be together as people outside of our normal roles and expectations, because that’s going to build psychological safety. That’s going to build social capital. you know, we’re going to have these shared moments of joy. And then the other levels are adding more, more reflection on individual and group behavior and talking about how to change it.

So being really intentional with how you design it, I would say is the best practice. And that’s what we’re trying to share with everybody with these tools for how to do that.

Rob (22:51)
I don’t know if it’s just a question of the day, but you say these things and things start popping up in my mind. I remember, don’t get me wrong, even after some years after this activity, I became a LEGO Series Play facilitator as well. I love facilitating. I do group activities. I raise my hand because it is true. What tends to happen is that, in fact, I remember one time where we were introduced to this LEGO Series Play activity, but the problem was that the culture in this organization was very top down. And we knew that even though LEGO Series Play is about taking

people’s ideas and putting all the ideas on the table. It’s like, well, yeah, I’m going to spend here and this is work. Like it’s fun, but it’s work and it’s hard work. And you end up exhausted after a day of like a serious play because you’re putting everything there. But me and, I think almost everybody else, and you could see this in the faces and especially, you know, weeks and months later that there was, there was not really going anywhere. Like all these suggestions, all these strategies that we create and all that was going nowhere.

Even though I really liked the idea, I tried to focus on, you know, this is Lego, I want to learn about it. I’ve been curious about this for some time and I’ve never done it. Then it was like, yeah, but how much do I really want to, as you were saying, like, how much do I want to put on the table? How much vulnerability do I want to provide here? Because if it’s not going to go, like if it’s going somewhere, I’m more invested. If it’s not, then why bother?

That was where, you know, this kind of thing is very important and it has to do with the culture of the company. The objective, as you were saying, is what was going to be reached there. And let me tell you, I even knew the facilitator from before and after. And she even told me like, well, the problem is I was pretty upset because they had promised me that this would have results. Right. That I was doing this and people get results from this. And then when I checked in, nothing had happened. I was very, very upset. Like, yeah, they paid me. Yeah, that was great. But I didn’t want to do it just for the sake of it. And these are people I’m going to get to meet.

later and I’m going to see them in daily, maybe not daily, but weekly based. I’m going to see them on the street as well, because we’re nearby. She didn’t, she really was very, very upset about this because of exactly what you were saying, that safety and that vulnerability you put, you put there. Like after, after these

Alex Suchman (24:53)
I really like Lego series play. I’ve seen it be really successful, but it’s one type of play. It’s one type of activity and that’s not going to resonate with everybody. ⁓ it’s great, but know, Legos are really expensive. They take up a lot of space, so they’re not the most accessible. You can’t do things virtually unless you’re shipping things. So I think a lot of people see Lego as like the end-all and be-all facilitated play.

And it just addresses a couple of the potential mechanics and dynamics, but there’s so much more you can do that.

Rob (25:30)
Don’t

get me wrong. Like here, I’m going to slightly disagree because I do think there are problems with virtual teams and all of that. And there’s another problem, which has to do with sizes. Like I’ve done a workaround for this. When I facilitate this at the university, have classes of these are classes of around 50 people. So I divide the class into and that division of two, I get another facilitator and we divide that into and we’re still cheating because groups shouldn’t be larger than six to think the maximum maximum is 10 in theory.

So what I do is within that class, I have two teams. So I’m facilitating two teams at a time, which again, in theory you shouldn’t do. So it has limitations, but for what it’s made for, of course, not for anything else. I haven’t seen anything work as good as that yet. I’m not close to saying it’s the be all and there’s nothing going to be there, but I haven’t found it. Like sometimes people are asking for that kind of thing and, know, everybody putting this stuff on the table and everything sort of all the creativity of people being there.

And these meetings being 100, 100, and every time it’s like, Oh, Lego, then it’s like, Oh yeah, but it’s virtual. It’s like, Oh, this can’t be done by Lego. And then it’s like, Oh, how can you work around it? there are other things to do, but I haven’t seen them be as. You know, on the spot as, as Lego can be for that, but, we don’t need to dive super deep into that. There’s, there’s many more strategies as well. And I’m sure you have a ton of things because you’re actually doing this all the time. So.

Alex Suchman (26:41)
Yeah.

Rob (26:52)
Love it, love it. And by the way, is there any anywhere where people can, anywhere you can point people to these resources that you guys have or the kind of stuff you do?

Alex Suchman (26:59)
Yeah, just a few months ago we launched, it’s called the Play Concierge platform and it’s a web application, not the one I talked about earlier, a different one that has been successful. And the free tier of it gives full access to the different frameworks, the iceberg I mentioned, the culture matrix, understanding the different mechanics and dynamics within games. And then the star of the platform is our database of there’s about 120 games in there now.

And you can filter for what are games that are good for sparking creativity? What are games that are good for practicing, ⁓ you know, conflict or negotiation? What’s a good 10 minute thing I can do with 12 people that, that is going to be humorous. so it’s that it’s a, take some of that guesswork out and let’s you be more intentional in picking a game. ⁓ if you go to our website, which is barometer XP.com, there is a little thing at the top that says play concierge.

And that will prompt you to set up a free account and.

Rob (28:02)
I’ll put the link directly to that for sure on the show notes. So if you’re curious, definitely look for that in the description show notes wherever you are hearing, listening or viewing this interview right now. Ax, if I were to ask you after seeing all these questions and the vibe of the podcast, who would you be curious to hear in an interview like this one on the podcast? Does anybody pop to your mind?

Alex Suchman (28:23)
interested in ⁓ the difference between gamification and game-based learning. And so far, a lot of stuff that I know about strict gamification, I’m sort of skeptical of a lot of it as a real deep learning. It’s more like extrinsic motivation and ⁓ a lot of like capturing people’s attention, but I don’t, ⁓ that’s not my area of expertise. So I’m always interested to learn.

More about, you know, we’re in the game based learning side to learn more about really deep and meaningful applications of gamification.

Rob (28:57)
Hmm.

Is there, anybody you’ve, you’ve heard of before that might be interesting to hear about that?

Alex Suchman (29:02)
no one’s popping to mind. could probably look it up, but nothing’s popping in right now.

Rob (29:07)
Okay,

that’s okay. Just to give you a sort of overview, at least of what I’ve seen working, especially in gamification where like the typical tendency is to think like, this is the rewards thing and the leaderboard stuff at the points. And this is extrinsic motivation. And that’s, that’s definitely a part of it, but it’s a, in my opinion, it’s not the most powerful part and it’s not even the most significant one. Intrinsic motivation can definitely be there and it is something you should aim for.

There’s even, you you kind of child talks about white hat and black hat, you know, black hat being those things that sort of ask you of immediate action, which are things like scarcity and patients loss avoidance. But then there’s also the white hat stuff, which is, know, epic meaning, accomplishment, creativity. That’s in the, in the, the octalysis framework. And lots of people talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic and how they can, they can work in different ways. In general to you or anybody curious about it, I would invite you to look a little bit more into,

What are the different ways in which gamification can, can be about those things. And it doesn’t mean that it’s better or worse. It’s just, it’s just different from, from game-based learning in many ways. And the other thing I tell to people, especially when they’re starting is if you want to make the best of these tools, forget about the discussion of dividing which, on which side you’re creating for now, use it, know, achieve your objectives, reach whatever you’re getting to. And then you can get into these sort of academic quote unquote discussion of whether this is this.

Or it is that, but that comes later. It’s not interesting at the start. It’s not useful for you if you’re, if you’re starting and trying things out and talking about recommendations. So is there a book that inspired you or some book that you would recommend an audience like this one for the engagement?

Alex Suchman (30:47)
⁓ So it’s interesting with barometers, Peter, my co-founder who you talked to while ago, he’s like the game person. Like that’s his whole background. And I’m more the organizational development and understanding teams and people aside. for me, it gets really difficult when Peter and I first started working together, he was thinking, okay, here’s a game and what kind of scenario could it be applied to? And I was like, here’s a real problem my clients are having, what’s a game?

that could fit within that. And I think a really good book for understanding the nuance of how culture changes as a company grows and being able to pinpoint what are the specific tension points, what are the needs that change. There’s a book called Predictable Success that I think is really good, but that’s more understanding the organizational dynamic side of things. Makes sense. That’s what popped into my mind.

Rob (31:46)
And in this world of game-based learning and using this for organizational change and so on, what would you say is your superpower? That thing that you do at least better than most other people? ⁓

Alex Suchman (31:57)
would say on the facilitation side, I’m really good at seeing things and making connections that other people don’t see and drawing them out so that we can talk about them. So, you know, in a lot of teams, there’s two people who just never seem to get along and they don’t really know why. And, you 10 minutes into a game session, I can usually see, it’s because this person is much more detail oriented and this person is much more of a creative thinker.

So it seems like they always butt heads, but really they just think about things from a very different angle. And so bringing those things to the surface. then once you understand it, then you could figure out how do we make this? So it’s not a point of tension. How do we make this? So these are two complimentary perspectives that work really well. So I think in pulling out the behavioral observations and how performance within the game directly relates to a performance and experience at work and finding those opportunities for development, I would say that’s.

that’s a superpower that I’m really proud of.

Rob (32:57)
Amazing. Now to difficult question. What would you say is your favorite game?

Alex Suchman (33:02)
that’s really difficult. I, there’s so many right now I’m really into the mind, which is a nonverbal collaborative communication game. It’s so simple, but has, is a really profound experience and you feel so successful at the end of it. And you learn so much about yourself and you learn so much about other people and communication. I’ve used it in so many different contexts. So.

That’s one I really love and a game called Priorities, which there’s a bunch of random words and one person ranks the order from which they like them from most to least. And everybody else has to try to guess the order and it you’re putting yourself in someone else’s mindset as you try to guess their preferences. I’ve found that is a great one to play with friends or family or to use in a professional setting.

Rob (33:53)
Sounds great, sounds great. And Alexandra, before we take off, is there anything left unsaid to this point? And of course, after that, let us know where we can find out more about you. I know you mentioned barometer XPs or any other place or remember us, remind us of the webpage and so on and so forth.

Alex Suchman (34:10)
Yeah, I say the barometer XP website. I am on LinkedIn and share a lot of facilitation stories and ideas of ways to use play. I love talking to people about this, so if anybody wants to reach out to me directly, my emails alexatbarometerxp.com or you can find me on LinkedIn. I truly love sharing.

the value of play and helping people think a little bit differently and more proactively about creating great culture and building great leaders. So I consider myself very approachable and open to conversations and hope people will take me up on that.

Rob (34:44)
Sounds brilliant. Thank you again, Alexandra, for taking the time to be here with us today, for sharing all those insights, all that experience that you got. However, Alex and Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Hey, Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game Podcast. And since you’re interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty, using game-inspired solutions,

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