I’ve interviewed hundreds of experts and now lead Engagement Strategy (EU) at TOG.
If you want help applying this, start here: professorgame.com/chat

Can a leader truly be effective without ever presenting a single slide? Clark Aldrich returns to the show to dismantle the “expert-led” model of management and education. He introduces Socratic Cards: a physical tool designed to replace passive consumption with active, high-stakes inquiry. By shifting the responsibility of learning from the teacher to the learner, Clark explains how organizations can transition from “easily replaceable employees” to “heroic tribes” that thrive on peer mentorship and meaningful challenges.

Clark Aldrich is a past guest (episode 94 and 127) and is the award-winning creator/author/founder of Short Sims, Unschooling Rules, The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games, and Gartner’s eLearning coverage. Aldrich’s sims and games have been covered extensively, including by The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NPR, ESPN, and CNN.

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

 

Guest Links and Info

• Website: socraticcards.com
• LinkedIn: Clark Aldrich

 

Lets’s do stuff together!

• Let’s chat about your gamification project
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Start Your Community on Skool for Free
• Ask a question

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Clark Aldrich (00:00)
What if you can lead a staff meeting or lead a client meeting and never present any information at all, but only ask interesting questions?

Rob (00:09)
and

welcome back to Professor Game the number one

Gamification Podcasts where we explore how games, gamification, and game thinking help us boost engagement, multiply retention, and build stronger products. I’m Rob, I’m Rob Alvarez, the founder, and I’m also a coach at Professor Game. I’m also the head of engagement strategy Europe at the Octalysis Group, the leading gamification consultancy. And I’m also a professor of gamification and game-based solutions at top global institutions like IE Business School, the EFMD, EBS University, and many others around the world. But before we dive into today’s

conversation with Clark and it’s gonna be super interesting talking about these Socratic questions diving deep into how this was created and why it can be very important I’d like to know if you are struggling in any way with retention with churn with engagement in your products or services and if you are Let’s turn that around. We’ve got you covered. Let’s have a chat right away All you have to do is click on the link in the description

So Engagers, welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game Podcast. We have Clark back with us, amazing return guest, but Clark, once again, we need to know, are you prepared to engage? We have with us Clark Aldrich, who is a past guest, episodes 94 and 127, a while ago, and is the award-winning creator, author, founder of Short Sims, Unschooling Rules, a complete guide to simulations and serious games, and Gartner’s e-learning coverage.

Clark Aldrich (01:24)
I am so prepared to engage. ⁓

Rob (01:42)
And Simpson games have been covered extensively, including New York Times, ABC, CBS, NPR, ESPN, and CNN. now- definitely. A couple of times already on the Professor Game podcast. And today we’re going to be talking about something new that is, depending on when you hear this, it’s coming up. It has just come up or it has been around for a little while. But Clark, is there any exciting stuff besides of course, these Socratic cards, which we’ll be diving into today?

Clark Aldrich (01:51)
this podcast.

No, I’ve been very focused on credit cards and I’m really excited about them as role modeling what I think the future of education could and should be. So I look at them as a really nice, tangible example of a whole new approach to working and a whole new approach to learning.

Rob (02:27)
And you kind of started talking about that, but you know, in particular without like before diving into specifically Socratic Hearts, in its essence, the core mission that you’re starting to describe, you know, what inspired you to build it. You know, you’ve had decades of experience in simulation and experiential learning, especially we’ve done a lot of digital world stuff, which we were discussing a few minutes ago. What inspired you to go down this route?

Clark Aldrich (02:52)
Well, there’s a whole bunch of reasons. And almost the most important one is I became really obsessed with how the most accomplished people actually learn. So, you you have students in our classrooms and taking our workbooks and essays and lectures and tests and stuff, and that’s all nice. But how do the most powerful people, the most successful people, the most self-driven people, how do they learn? And that process became a spectacularly interesting one for me, away from the context. Because, you a lot of times, you know, they don’t go back to school. They don’t read

they will, they do read books, but they’re not, they’re not taking classes or something. They’re, they’re learning in a whole different way. And so most importantly, ⁓ or one, one of the most important things was, was looking at how the most accomplished people go through a learning process. So that’s sort of one leg of this tool. And maybe a second leg of this tool was, you know, looking at a show like Ted Lasso. Did you ever watch Ted Lasso?

Rob (03:44)
Yes, did. two seasons, I think.

Clark Aldrich (03:47)
Right. And so, you know, to some degree that’s based on John Wooten’s work of how do you use work itself as a place of getting better and stronger and, you know, almost focusing more on everyone growing and everyone making progress on their journey. And then the process of being making progress on your own journey almost necessarily creates a good outside result. I’ve been sort of the third leg of this duel was how do you make something that’s really fun?

that’s engaging. For me, all the things that I think are important, things have to be fun, things have to be optional. I’m really bad if I’m forced into anything. So how do you create a situation where learning is optional but ultimately sort of desire? So it’s going to bring together those three elements.

Rob (04:28)
Hmm. I was also going to ask how did your experience with short SIMS and simulation in general influence Socratic cards, but I think you’ve already started covering that. So actually like the next thing is, you you look at the webpage. I haven’t played them. So full disclaimer, but I haven’t played with your cards yet. But they seem to be like simple, right? Group discussions and questions, right? But there’s also a structured mentor path. There’s challenges. What were some of the principles that guided you in terms of design to balance that simplicity?

Right. Because it’s important to keep things simple to certain extent. You were also talking about before the handoff, right? Like you have a physical card deck. You can hand over to somebody else to do this. How did you balance the deep engagement also with that level of simplicity? Sure.

Clark Aldrich (05:12)
So that’s really hard to get right. And I think it’s really important to get it right. making something that’s both simple and complicated at the same time, the simple part. So I think for any good game, any good game in the world that people want to play almost always follow that same pattern of having a very simple side and a very deep side. you know, let’s take throwing a ball back and forth, throwing a ball back and forth is fun. We don’t need a game or we don’t need a teacher or scoreboard, you know, throwing, you you put a ball in the room and people are going to just start tossing it back and forth. That just happens. So, or

hitting a ball with a stick just happens. People do that almost, almost naturally. Trivial Pursuit. One reason why that was so successful is because people like asking trivial questions of each other. And so, you know, the most important thing for any game or, you know, Mario Brothers, it’s really, really fun to run around and jump over mushrooms. It’s really fun to try to jump onto a mushroom. These are just fun, simple things to do.

And so the most important part for any game and for obviously for your audience knows this because they’ve lived it. The most important thing is creating something that is inherently fun to do. And one thing that turns out to be really fun to do is asking each other Socratic questions. So there’s an obvious one of, if you were a superhero, would you rather be able to fly or turn invisible or something? I mean, you kind of ask yourself these fun questions.

If you hear a good, so credit question that becomes almost addictive. one, so credit question in life does fun lead to success or does success lead to fun? It’s a fun question. and, know, if you have a few friends in the room, you know, you want to talk about it, you know, you’re applying for a dream job. Would you rather be an average worker from a brilliant group or a brilliant worker from an average group? so, you know, and so they’re both, they’re fun. I mean, they’re, they’re fun. They’re candy. There’s something kind of gets you talking about it, but they’re also meaningful. I mean, so.

Structurally, they’re all A-B questions, which means that you can have people vote on them or have people sort of take sides, which is sort of fun. They’re non-coercive questions in that there’s no right answer to it. It’s not like I have the right answer and you try to guess what the right answer is. They’re very genuinely open-ended, non-coercive questions. But they also have implications in your life, which is sort of where the real rub comes in, because it actually matters. It was your most productive time with the group or by yourself. ⁓

The question matters in terms of how you’re going to spend your day and how you’re going to structure your life if you kind of come down one side or the other. there are both options. that’s sort of the front end, the candy to Socratic Cards. And by the way, I think a lot of people who buy them and use them will do nothing but use them for that purpose. It’s like buying truthfully a pursuit and just sort of asking yourself the trivial questions. And so that sort of layer of Socratic Cards can work really, really well with a bunch of friends at night and sort of a car.

cards against humanity crowd if you just sort of want to have fun or it works like in a business meeting if you want to kick off a business meeting in the right way. So know in either way that’s sort of you know that’s the candy and that’s the fun level.

Rob (08:03)
Absolutely. And you’ve been talking about these, I almost want to call it mechanics, right? Of the way these questions are structured.

Clark Aldrich (08:10)
I’m so obsessed on mechanics as are you so you know all of us pedagogy people go into that indefinitely and I certainly do as much as anyone.

Rob (08:18)
You know, beyond of course, the questions questioning themselves, so to speak, is there, is there an element to it that makes it viral self-propagating or almost you mentioned already that it could be for somebody just to sit down at a party, right? And just make up these questions or it could be something meaningful. Is there something sort of built into the cards to get to one or the other or be viral? Like is there an internal mechanism sort of, sort of that supports it?

Clark Aldrich (08:43)
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a couple layers to it and A, you if people find these questions fun, they will share them with other people. So there’s sort of an inherent viruleness to that. And the nice thing about a physical deck of cards is that you can buy a of cards, but you can give, you know, there’s 50 cards there. You can give them to people if you want to. But then there’s sort of two more layers to the cards, which gets a little more interesting and a little more fun. The bottom of every card has a challenge, has a very specific challenge that you can do. And they can…

Some of them are easy and some of them are hard. And so, you know, one challenge is, you know, host two small celebrations or one big one. You know, that’s a challenge and that’s a challenge under the question of, you know, does funding lead to success or does success lead to fun? So that’s sort of a, that’s an activity that you can do and allows you by doing that activity, it actually informs you as to the, as to the big question up top. So, you know, you throw a few parties for people and then you can think does funding lead to success or does success lead to fun? That actually informs that decision. So.

There’s challenges and the middle part of every card is another question that sort of sets up the bottom challenge. So it’s just a, you know, it’s it’s it’s a queuing up the challenge question. Um, you know, so in this case, what should be more celebrated by a community, a group’s achievement or an individual’s birthday. that, you know, again, there’s no right answer, but it certainly depends from community to community, but that sets up the nature of the celebration. Um, so that’s sort of.

Rob (10:07)
Like I was going to say, like those, you’ve always been saying there’s no right or wrong, but here it’s not even, not only no right or wrong, it’s not even right or wrong for a person. It depends on the context. What happens more birthdays? Well, some organizations do, it’s easy, right? You know, when somebody’s birthday is and it just comes up in others, there’s very intentional design of, you know, collective achievements and you celebrate that. But you know, birthday, does it happen? Does not happen. Like it’s, it’s an interesting one to, to dive into and see what the culture is in many ways.

Clark Aldrich (10:37)
And then by hosting some celebrations yourself and then you cycle back to the first question of this You know just does fun lead to successors does success lead to fun? You know how important is fun as an element to eventual success? And that’s sort of that’s sort of part of the cards to make them more meaty And then also you know the way that smart people really work the way the most successful people really work is they give themselves? Puzzles or challenges and then they do things in the real world to inform their they’re coming back to the thing you know does social media work well Let’s try it

You know, does, you know, do people like new exciting products or do they like traditional products? Well, let’s try it out. And so that in and of itself reinforces this notion of trying things. But the last part was actually based on Alcoholics Anonymous, which is, you know, that’s obviously the famous 12 step process, but there’s sort of a four step process, what I’m calling the mentor path. And the first step of the process is to do a couple easy, easy challenges. The second part is to do two medium challenges.

And all the challenges are labeled, you know, easy, medium or hard, but also having a mentor sign off on them. So not only do you do them, but you sort of have to quote unquote, prove it to a mentor that, I did it. And sort of here’s what happened. Then the third step out of four is do some hardest challenges, some of the hardest challenges on the card, which might take a week or two or more to do the kind of meeting, but also again, have a mentor sign off. But the final step of the process, the fourth step is to actually be a mentor yourself now and sign off on other people’s work.

Rob (12:05)
There’s a path to mastery.

Clark Aldrich (12:06)
So the path to mastery, it’s a path to building a community where we help each other out and we support each other. And this can be in the course of a context of a school or an organization or with friends. I mean, you can do this with friends, you know, without any organization at all, just to sort of to fuel the sensation of growing and challenging yourself and challenging each other. And all the challenges themselves on the cards are meaningful, important challenges. And some of them deal with, you know, practicing mental models or finding your calling or achieving excellence or ⁓

you know, getting good habits or increasing the energy, which is sort of the fun, the playfulness of the situation or reducing drama, the interpersonal drama that can suck us dry. And so, you the cards are organized into those different categories. And then, so as you kind of go through this mentor path, you, you’re both making real progress, but you’re showing it to others and discussing with us. And that’s where the real viruleness comes in. And what I’ve seen in some, in some of the early test organizations is these cards do spread out. You know, one small group starts using them and they sort of start

bringing other people in and other people in and pretty soon it grows to affect entire culture.

Rob (13:12)
That’s, don’t know if it’s that what you’re going to go for, but one of questions I always have is, is now that you’ve started beta launching and you know, you’ve had some soft launches, so to speak, is there something that has surprised you, something you didn’t expect about the cars being used or in which way or any comment or I don’t know, like, there anything that is like, wow, this was unexpected.

Clark Aldrich (13:32)
It’s not something where it does not work better when managers are insisting that it happens. you know, once you have a boss saying, have to do this or this is our new program, it almost sucks the energy out. It really works a lot better when it’s viral and bottoms up and people are doing it for fun and for growth rather than sort of for credit. So the notion of, so I think some organizations will track the growth and that’s important to do, but almost the rigorous tracking of

The use of the cards almost suck some of the fun and energy and optional, optionalness away from the card. So I think it does work better as a fun bottoms up activity of growth rather than a tops down activity of accreditation or the boss telling you what to do.

Rob (14:15)
That makes sense, right? And you know, not to suck out the fun anyway.

Clark Aldrich (14:21)
What’s fun about front to suck out?

Rob (14:24)
of anything, is there, know, like we always, you know, in gamification and in this space in general, we tend to talk a lot about metrics, engagement metrics, or rather than engagement metrics, it’s actually metrics that matter. Is there some, again, metrics always sound boring, right? But metrics are important nonetheless, but is there some metric or in general, like what would success look like if somebody was implementing or using a Socratic cards for you? If you were telling them that here it is, you know, this is what to expect in the next, I don’t know, six months, two weeks.

Clark Aldrich (14:52)
I think the easiest thing, absolute falling off a log easy thing is how many people complete the mentor path. ⁓ So that is absolutely how many people went through, you know, three, three different levels of challenges. And then, then they themselves checked off other people’s work. And that is an absolute, you know, you can write that up on the whiteboard or the chalkboard or having your learning management. mean, that is the absolute easiest, easiest tracking possible. It’s, then if you want to track more, you can ask people, well, what challenges did you take?

you know, and even what categories of challenges, you know, grabbed you more or whatever. So you can kind of drill, you can work the metrics if you want, but simply the metric of saying how many people became mentors and finished the mentor path. So that’s easy. And I think the rewards for a mentor path are very significant in terms of creating a culture where people do. If you complete the mentor path, you’ve normalized asking other people for help. You’ve normalized mentoring others.

You know, and that’s really cool. It’s really fun to mentor other people and have them come to you and say, here’s my work, how’d I do, or, or, you know, give me credit for it and let me talk to you about what I did it. And then you get all these conversations going. You you normalize a culture that actively improves itself and its members. And that sort of gets back to the Ted Lasso thing. You you normalize the intellectual process of, of thinking of little challenges, all the initial Socratic questions are little challenges and then doing activities.

to sort of inform them, to validate them. So you’re sort of getting yourself into this mindset of I’m going to create little experiments for myself and then do them and then go back to the original hypothesis and say, which way do I now fall? Which way do I believe? Does fun lead to success or does success lead to fun? I can now answer that a little more. ⁓ It also normalizes high energy. one of the most, so there’s the big tracking thing, which sure, why not? We have to play that game. But the most important thing for me is

If you start off every business meeting with a single, Socratic question, no right or wrong, just, Hey gang, I have a question for you. What do you think? And you give people a question and spend five minutes on it. One question, do failures haunt you? Yes or no. Unless before we start this whole staff meeting or before we start this classroom session or before we start this client meeting or something, ⁓ you know, which do you share with friends? Information that confirms your beliefs or information that challenges your beliefs.

Do you work under a confirmation bias perspective or do you fight a confirmation bias? Do you learn more from a good lecture or from a good game? And so if we start off every meeting with a Socratic question for five minutes, then the easy metric there is people are going to be more engaged. so for the entire, you know, I do have, most people love asking Socratic questions. It’s just really hard to come up with good ones that are actually meaningful and interesting and meaty. And so, you know, I am seeing some managers saying, I don’t want to start off the meeting anymore.

without a certificate question just to get everyone super engaged. And so that is, you know, that is proving it to yourself. You know, don’t trust me. Go to the website, www.socreditcards.com. Look at, I have whatever, 10 cards there. Pick a few that you like, you know, and start off your next meeting by asking the question at the top and see what happens and prove it to yourself. So, you know, don’t listen to me, but proving it to yourself. to me, that’s sort of the most important metric and it gets people.

Rob (18:04)
Interesting, interesting. We’ve talked about, and I’ll even mention, I have my own experiment with card games and the whole physicality is a component, it’s an important component, but in the future, you know, let’s move ahead maybe a few years, this massive success and maybe you want to scale it in some way, shape or form. Do you see this turning into perhaps a digital experience, a hybrid experience? And if so, is there anything that you would anticipate happening that is any…

change, would that change the core experience or would that still keep its basics?

Clark Aldrich (18:38)
I hate the thought of these being electronic. I absolutely will fight tooth and nail. I mean, so for me, what success means, there’s a whole lots more Socratic cards I want to build. I want to build a Socratic cards for families. I want to build a Socratic card for 14 year olds. I want to build a Socratic card deck for tribe building. And we get a bunch of people in the room for the first time. How do we figure out how we should organize ourselves? I want to build a dedicated deck of Socratic cards just for building energy. How can we, you know,

wherever we are, how can we have more fun being there? You know, I want to build a whole Socratic deck on excellence. You know, how do we become world-class? How do we as a bunch of friends or colleagues, you know, absolutely get really, really good at what we’re doing or a deck of Socratic cards around reducing drama? You know, how do we get along without fighting and without, you know, how do we all play the same game in life? Or while we’re together, you know, the worst thing in the world is to be a chess player in a room full of poker players.

You know, it’s just, you know, how do we make sure we’re playing the same game? And so, you know, all those kinds of cards I look forward to building. And as this becomes, you know, successful, you know, I really look forward to building more decks of cards. This is a great generic, general deck of cards, which really proud of. And it covers a lot of bases, but I want to dig into all of the little areas in a lot more detail if I can.

Rob (19:53)
love it. I love to see the evolution not even necessarily going or need it. Actually being fought against the digital world. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against that. I’m sure you don’t have anything against digital stuff with your short sims and whatnot. yeah, there needs to be also some pushback with some things.

Clark Aldrich (20:10)
Well, the fact is that, know, you and I, if you come over to my house for dinner or something, or we have some friends over, we can put away our screens, we can put away our devices and, you know, just take a deck of cards, fan it out, say, grab a random card and pull it out. And, you know, let’s talk about it. And during the course of the conversation, we’re going to learn about each other and we’re going to learn about our own, you know, we’re going to have more meaningful conversations. And so it’s, it gets us away from the screen mentality, which I think as we all know, because I mean,

The problem with education in general is it gets infrastructure heavy very quickly. I mean, you look at a school and pretty soon you’re having fire drills and shooter drills and your landscaping and stuff. so the infrastructure of technology takes over very, very quickly. You take a course, but before you take a course, you have to sign in, you have to get your password and you forgot your password. And so the infrastructure of, when I look at education, one thing that kills it is the infrastructure.

And so part of my goal, ala Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous is an amazing program in that ⁓ it’s incredibly cheap to deploy. So the cost per person is next to nothing. Same thing with, know, Socratic cards are built to have an incredibly cheap cost, know, cost per person. It does not require any expertise. It does not require a master’s degree to deploy these, you know, to be a good Socratic conversation leader, you know, helps to have lot of skills. But these cards focus it so that anyone can

Anyone can lead their own Socratic conversation effortlessly. Lack of skills. It’s something that people can, if you have a staff meeting and every week you go through a Socratic question, eventually you can find a challenge that you want to do. So you can sort of hang around and wait until something interesting pops up and then do it. It’s meant to be viral. It’s sort of designed to be viral. And not in a way that particularly benefits me because the cost per person. No, but if you get a deck of.

50 cards you can give people you know card and so now for next to nothing you can sort of share it with people and get other people sort of asking questions as opposed to listening and then inherently ultimately it’s either you know it’s either gonna be fun or not and it’s gonna improve your life or not and if it does either of those two things it will spread on its own and become viral if it does neither of those two things that you die and it should die but you know it’s either gonna be fun to do or

it leads you down a really meaningful path where you become a person who is, you know, and your community too. think the other part of it, a la Ted Lasso is, you know, it’s really fun when you’re around other people who are also working on improving the community, on working on helping each other on the journeys that they’re on.

Rob (22:39)
I love that. I love that. If you were to ask or to say what’s one question that we should be asking learners or leaders even today that we’re not, which question would that be and why would it be so important? I know there’s many on your deck.

Clark Aldrich (22:54)
Well,

it’s almost, you’re almost answering your, I’m going to take your exact statement, which is sort of saying what happens if you as a leader, stop talking at people and start asking questions. You know, your question is brilliant because it’s exactly what a leader should be doing. What happens when a leader gets in the, you know, gets in the framework of saying that, you know, a good leader presents good information. A great leader asks great questions. And what if you can lead a staff meeting or lead a client meeting?

and never present any information at all, but only ask interesting questions. And it’s a complete inversion of the traditional, you know, leader, manager, teacher model. And it gives all the power and because the other thing is not only gives the power to the learners, it gives the responsibility to the learners. It gives the responsibility to the people who are sitting around the staff meeting. It goes from making them passive participants to active people.

So I think just that alone, teaching leaders how to ask great questions rather than to give good answers is transformational to a workplace and to a classroom.

Rob (24:00)
Beautiful.

love that. you’ve, you’ve already started on, on, you know, there was one thing I wanted to talk about. If you were to redesign the way, as you were saying, the way leaders relate to teams, right? If you were, if that were to completely change or the way teams function as teams, ⁓ well, like, of course the asking questions rather than.

Actually, let me take a step back because it also happens in education, right? Like this is one of the things that I love about, for example, case studies. When you do case studies, a well-structured case, it does have a piece of information, right? People have to read the case ideally, it’s relatively short, so the barrier is low, but then it’s all about guiding with questions. And the questions cannot be how much did they make that year or how much will they make next year if you’re using this formula? It’s more about having a Socratic question.

no right answers, you could have even 10 different answers that are all correct in their own way. like, ⁓ although I love that again, there is also a side to it that has, that is more content heavy. And it, it, includes as well, the relationship that leaders have with their teams and the teams have to leadership because sometimes you’re as a team member presenting, right? You’re bringing something to leadership because you want to implement it. So

Of course, the questions would restructure that. Is there anything else that you, you know, from this thinking of Socratic cards that would, that would change if the world were built by Socratic cards, how would it be different in terms of wherever you want to go education, you know, work, what would that look like?

Clark Aldrich (25:33)
There’s so many parts to that there. It’s an awesome question and well said. So I one thing you can do is, you know, the activities that are done by the person in charge should increasingly be handed off to the people, to the community itself. So if you’re the manager of a group, you know, hiring new employees, you should never hire, you know, a new employee that the group itself hasn’t signed off on. Like, and actually making decisions, like what happens when you have the community itself make the yes or no decision on a new community member, not

not the boss or HR or something. Right now, the boss is sort of in charge of motivating people. Well, what if you motivate yourself? Right now, sort of the boss is in charge of looking at each other’s work and checking it off and making sure the work is good. What happens when work is peer-reviewed as opposed to boss-reviewed? So that general notion of how do we take away and weaken the notion of here’s the person in charge to do that. I think another thing is, you know, to, I think there’s a skill set around auditioning.

that I think is way underrepresented, which is, you know, we are auditioning all the time. We’re auditioning for client business. We’re auditioning to be part of groups. But also we are being auditioned to, you know, by people who want to, who want us to hire them or, you know, even working with clients kind of things. And so that notion of how do you make auditions a lot harder and a lot more rigorous, you know, I think is part of the process as well. think giving a team itself the…

control over the team members. can either have, you know, a team can either be managed or it can be high performing, but it’s really hard to have them be both. There’s a framework I want to maybe put forth now, which is most corporations right now are about 65 or 70 % easily replaceable employees and about 30 % what I’ll call heroic tribes.

70 % easily replaceable employees, you know, they’re increasingly hired by AI, they’re managed by AI, and frankly, they’re fired by AI. The rules themselves are designed to be replaceable. You know, if you get sick or hit by a bus, okay, fine, you know, goodbye, we’ll bring someone else in kind of, you know, pretty quickly and easily. And so, when I first sort of heard about the easily replaceable employee model from General Motors, you know, 20 years ago, and it’s, you know, only gotten more and more prevalent.

Having said that, again, there’s still about 30 % of a corporation, maybe less now, ⁓ of let’s call them heroic tribes, of groups of people who aren’t overly managed, who have very high goals, who use work itself as an opportunity to grow and become more valuable. And obviously the senior leadership team, I’ve done a lot of work with senior leadership teams, are that way. Some sales teams are that way that are very self-managed.

Some design teams are really that way. Some advertising and marketing teams are that way. It’s a whole different feeling than the easily replaceable employees. so part of the notion of Socratic Cards is to get more people towards the heroic tribe model of organizing and growing rather than the easily replaceable employee model of growing. And that might be the biggest shift that we’re seeing.

Rob (28:38)
That sounds amazing, Clark. It’s amazing also how time goes by. It’s already been 30 minutes of us chatting about these very interesting topics. I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to leave our listeners with or our viewers as well with. Again, the Engagers are always interested in seeing how, you know, how is the thinking behind this. And I think we dealt, you know, deep enough. Of course we could spend hours, I’m sure, talking about Socratic Cards. But I don’t know, is there anything else that’s left unsaid, at least for now, that you would like to highlight?

Clark Aldrich (29:05)
Here’s a broader thought that’s true of Socratic Cards to be sure, but broader than anything, which is when you do something that works, when you do something that makes you a better person, take a more active role in spreading it to other people. And I think that’s almost the, know, we get in a mindset where we’re competitive with the people around us and, or, you know, where we do something that works and we kind of like it, but we keep it to ourselves. And I think the notion of evangelizing things that really helped you is not a bad model. And so,

Obviously, I’m hoping that with Socratic Cards is, know, there’s not, you know, I’m not gonna spend any money on advertising. I’m not gonna spend any money on one, you know, it’s certainly not a fancy website or something. But I’m, you know, I’m counting, stupidly, but I think excitedly, you know, someone goes through this and they say that was fun or that really worked. I’m going to spread it to other people. And so I’ll say it selfishly with Socratic Cards, but I think anything, you know, as you do stuff that works and really helps you grow, then champion it to other people and put it up on your, you know,

put it up on your website or something. And by the way, actually, think, sorry, I’m going to differ here. Socratic questions themselves are a really fun way of doing that. So if there is an interesting question, here’s a question. Can you be forced to learn? I put a gun to your head and force you to learn something? Yes or no. Well, if you find that an interesting question, then ask it to strangers. mean, literally, put it up behind you, put it on your email salutation and say,

forget, you don’t cite it or anything. I’m not even saying give me credit for it. Please don’t. But share the question and ask, spend two weeks, you know, whenever you’re, if a Socratic question is sort of interesting to you, share it with other people. Hey, I got a question for you. You know, can you be forced to learn? What do you think? And that notion of sort of sharing things that are interesting, again, is something that I think is greatly increases ⁓ the connection between people and…

kind of in of itself becomes this really powerful habit.

Rob (31:00)
Love it. Love it. Thank you very much, Clark, again, for taking your time and sharing your Socratic cards with us, especially all the thinking behind it, all the strategies, how you think about this, sort of systems thinking as well that is going behind the Socratic cards. But at least for now, Engagers, as you know, and at least for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Hey, Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game.

I’m Gaston, since you’re interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty, using game-inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on School? You can find the link right below in the description, but the main thing is to click there, join us. It’s a platform called School. It’s for free, and you’ll find plenty of resources there. We’ll be up to date with everything that we’re doing, any opportunities that we might have for you.

And of course, before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.

 

End of transcription