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Episode Summary

Stephen Balzac, PhD, organizational development consultant and president of 7 Steps Ahead, shows why LARP in business settings exposes the dynamics that meetings hide. He explains how a fantasy role lets teams argue about goals and success without threatening anyone’s business identity, and shares what a pandemic flu simulation taught him: people who played themselves took fewer chances and defended their decisions harder than people playing a character. He also tells how a game full of his coworkers turned into an x-ray of his own company, and why he builds story before mechanics. Listeners come away with a clear case for using roles to surface real decisions and give people room to practice new behaviors.

About the Host

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.

Key Takeaways

• In Stephen Balzac’s pandemic flu simulation for the National Capital Region, participants who played themselves took fewer chances and defended their decisions harder than those playing pre-written characters.
• Casting a programmer or sales manager as the big bad wolf or the evil duke lets teams argue over goals and what success means without the argument threatening anyone’s business identity.
• Balzac’s early spy games failed because roles were only labels: his CIA and KGB agents simply cooperated until he built story and goals that mattered within the game’s time frame.
• Watching coworkers play one of his games, Balzac saw the office compressed: the LARP became an x-ray of the business and a safe place to practice behaviors people had no room for at work.
• Every goal you give a character is a statement about what is possible in the world, so build the story first; a clever mechanic with a story bolted on is not a role-playing game.
• In Secrets of the Necronomicon, the magic system is scattered across a 30-page madman’s book and a 15-page story, so players argue over physical texts and the fiction becomes socially real.

Topics Covered

• 0:00 Stephen Balzac and the MIT Assassins’ Guild
• 2:48 Why fantasy roles free people up
• 4:09 Spies who wouldn’t stay in character
• 7:05 Model UN, French pride and a staged kidnapping
• 11:39 The game that became an x-ray of the business
• 13:23 How Balzac designs a LARP for a company
• 14:43 Pandemic simulation: playing yourself vs a character
• 16:58 Goals, story first, and the Necronomicon
• 20:29 Adam Grant, Daron Acemoglu and Ed Schein
• 23:22 Making it easy for people to play roles
• 24:38 Chess, Catan and Galactic Civilizations
• 27:05 Use games to build one organization

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD

About Stephen Balzac

Stephen R. Balzac, PhD is a consultant, author, and speaker, and president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm that uses live-action roleplaying to help leaders develop strategy, surface real decisions, and build teams that learn faster, act braver, and perform better. He founded the MIT Assassins’ Guild, now the longest-running collegiate LARP organization in the United States, and designing live games led him from a career in computer science to a doctorate in psychology. With over thirty years in high tech as an engineer, manager, entrepreneur, and consultant, he is the author of The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development (McGraw-Hill), Organizational Psychology for Managers (Springer), and The LARP Effect: Creating Connection and Competitive Advantage Through Story, Ritual, and Roleplay (Springer), and a contributing author to Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play. He also appears in the Monopoly documentary Under the Boardwalk, with the distinction of being the only guest personally panned by a New York Times movie critic.

Find the Guest Online

• Website: 7 Steps Ahead
• Book: The LARP Effect
• LinkedIn

Mentioned in This Episode

Some links below are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

• Stephen’s book: The LARP Effect
• Recommended book: Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership
• Suggested future guests: Adam Grant (organizational psychologist) and Daron Acemoglu (MIT economist)
• Stephen’s LARPs: Secrets of the Necronomicon, Game of Empire
• MIT Assassins’ Guild
• Chris Hemsworth’s documentary series Limitless (the aging episode)
• Board game designer Tom Lehmann (Race for the Galaxy)
• Favorite games: chess, plus Roll for the Galaxy, Settlers of Catan, and Galactic Civilizations (Stardock)

Free Resources and Get in Touch

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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you, Rob   Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Stephen Balzac and the MIT Assassins’ Guild

Stephen Balzac (00:00): And I was like, wait a minute, this is what I’m seeing in the office. It’s just we’ve compressed it down. And suddenly I realized this game was a tool. Rob Alvarez (00:11): So hey, welcome to Professor Game, the number one gamification podcast where we explore how games, gamification, game thinking help us boost engagement, multiply retention, and build stronger products. And I’m Rob, I’m the founder and I’m coach here at Professor Game. And I’m also the head of engagement strategy in Europe for the Octalysis Group, a leading the leading gamification consultancy. And I’m a professor of gamification and game-based strategies at top global institutions like IE Business School, the EFMD, E and EBS University in Germany. And before we dive into today’s conversation, remember that if you are struggling with retention, share, and engagement in your product, service, or business, and want to turn that around, you can find our free guide, Core Drives in the Wild, to see how to successfully use motivation in business situations. All you have to do is click on the link in the description, sign up, and you’ll get that straight to your email. So, Stephen, welcome to Professor Game. before we say anything else, we do need to know, are you prepared to engage? Stephen Balzac (01:10): I am prepared and looking forward to Rob Alvarez (01:13): Let’s do this. We have Stephen Balzac. Is that a good way to pronounce it? So Stephen Balzac is a PhD, a consultant, author, and speaker, and he is the president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm that uses live action role-playing or LARPs to show leaders how to develop strategy, surface real decisions, and build teams that learn faster, act braver, and perform better. Because insight, insight sticks when you live it. His interest in live role-playing started in college when he founded the MIT Assassins’ Guild, now the longest-running collegiate LARP organization in the United States and his experiences designing, writing, and running live games led him from a career in computer science to a doctorate in psychology. He has over thirty years of experience in the high tech industry as an engineer, manager, entrepreneur, and consultant, and is a popular speaker on topics ranging from leadership, innovation, learning, organizational change and motivation. In addition to publishing over a hundred articles on different aspects of organizational performance, he is the author of The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development with McGraw-Hill. Organizational Psychology for Managers with Springer and The LARP Effect: Creating Connection and Competitive Advantage Through Story, Ritual, and Roleplay with Springer. He’s a contributing author to Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play. And he appears in Under the Boardwalk, The Monopoly Documentary Movie, and has the distinction of being the only guest personally panned by a New York Times movie critic. So, Steve, are we missing anything from that intro and welcome to the podcast? Stephen Balzac (02:44): I think you’ve covered it very well, and it’s a pleasure to be here.

Why fantasy roles free people up

Rob Alvarez (02:48): Phenomenal. So, Stephen, if we were to follow you around for a day or a week, whatever you want to choose, what would that look like? How would we feel? What would we be doing in those days? Stephen Balzac (02:58): Probably getting very bored because most of my time is spent writing. But if you’re asking when I’m running one of the LARP experiences, what you would see is people coming together to enter a completely fictional world. And this is one of the things that I really have found doing doing games and doing live games in particular, is that when you take people outside of the typical environment, outside the typical office space. And put them in a fantasy setting. So instead of you know being a programmer or the sales manager or the marketing guy, you’re the big bad wolf or you’re the wicked witch or the evil duke, suddenly people become free to act in a more natural way. And that allows them to deal with the same problems they deal with at the office all the time. You know, conflicting roles, arguments over how to interpret goals. arguments over what success means, because different departments measure all these things differently. But by putting it in a separate space, we can have the arguments without it feeling like a direct threat on people’s business identity.

Spies who wouldn’t stay in character

Rob Alvarez (04:09): So basically bringing them out of their typical setting to to have them change their potential attitudes and see different stuff is what you’re arguing. All right. Sounds great. we always like to start with failure on the podcast, funny enough, because we’ve seen how as in games, we learn by failing or or with our first attempts in learning, and these can happen many, many times. But you probably have a favorite one or one that led you to some some interesting or or or or cool story. So can you tell us the story of of a time when you failed and how that that worked out? How did you pivot? What would you do differently in the future? How it changed your business? I don’t know, wherever you want to lead us as long as we can learn from your experience. Stephen Balzac (04:52): I’ve often joked the reason I learned to be a good game designer was because when I started doing this back in the 1980s, I had the advantage of being the only game in town. so looking back at those games, they were really awful. And the main thing was I didn’t know how bad they were. But I struggled with getting people to engage. I struggled with getting people to stick with a character. I would say, you’re a CIA agent, you’re a KGB agent. And then they’d start cooperating. And I couldn’t figure out why the heck this was happening. And so I just kept pounding at it. I didn’t have the sense to give up and just be a pro computer programmer. And I started to come realize I needed more story. I needed to build structure. That would made these labels meaningful was the story behind them. And the story had to be thought. essentially three-dimensional in the sense that it had to lead to goals that mattered within the time frame of the game. And as I did that, I started to build up a game structure that people actually stuck with and people would actually play out. And you know, and even after many, many years of doing it, sometimes the game would still flop, sometimes I’d get too ambitious, or I would try to design a plot that relied essentially too much on aspects of the world that could not easily be embodied in people. And so what the real lesson that came out of this was designing these games to really get a really good engaging game, you need to focus on the human side of it. You need to focus on how do these plots, how do these stories connect to people? And then once you have it connected to people, it starts to come to life and the people reinforce it with each other. That was that was all just doing it for entertainment. It was really by accident that I then found that it led to to business to an effective business tool. but I assume you’re gonna wanna get to that, so I will I will end my my answer here and hopefully that gives you a sense of where I how failure kinda led this along the way.

Model UN, French pride and a staged kidnapping

Rob Alvarez (07:05): Yeah, y there there are many things from what you said, like one of them the the most recent one where how how can people sort of put themselves in those shoes and and how how how that’s a difficult thing. I I I remember a documentary with the author the author, the actor of Thor in the Marvel Universe. I I was interested essentially in the documentary initially because because it was him, Chr Chris Hemsworth. And one of them is is about aging and and essentially grow your when your body starts growing old and of course for a guy like him, you know. Big muscles, strong guy, you know, very driven. He’s an actor. His body is his essential tool, and he’s still relatively young. so they they they physically started impeding him. They put him some things so he couldn’t see well, hear well, a lot of weights. Some of his movement was actually not possible for him, or or it really required a lot of effort for him to fully raise his arm. so it was a it was a LARP. for him exclusively. They they f they literally built like an old people home, right? where there were other real people who lived in another home for for for for for the elderly. so they put him there and he played tried to play ping pong with another one who was a very, very good per person at this. it was a very interesting episode and I it kind of reminded me of when you were saying that. and the other one is I I as as a as in in the university Didn’t realize I actually kind of participated in some LARP as well because we did these model UNs. these are essentially a large, very, very large sometimes LARP. Because you’re you’re put in a situation where you’re representing a country that is ninety-nine point nine percent of the time not yours. in my case, one of them was we did a simulation of a fr the French cabinet. So we were the French ruling group, and it was interesting because you know. most of the people in the committee were were were Americans who have all these preconceptions about the French. And I’m Venezuelan and at at that time I hadn’t been to even to France, but I did a lot of research. my university only participated in one model a year, whereas many of these Americans universities had, 10, 20, 20 of these every every year, right? So th their their depth of preparation for a committee like this one had nothing to do with what I did just because of the the raw volume for them. So when you said the KGB and CIA cooperation, I completely went in there. It w it was like putting of course we were all university students, but putting a a an American government to to rule in France without considering at all all the context. in the committee we were we were some well, we were some of the c delegates were trashing French intelligence, you know, being in France. saying, the CIA would actually have fixed this because we had a a few issues. It was you know, and French Pride and all these things were completely out the window at that that stage. So it it was it was very unsuccessful because of the lack of context and story and personal involvement in this. Again, because I mean for me it was a preparation of, you know, like eight months just for for representing France because we were also representing France that that year. But for them was just another model they were having fun with. So Stephen Balzac (10:05): Well, one of my early inspirations, one of the things that led to the types of LARPs that I do was a Model UN. And it was actually started out as a joke. we were a bunch of us decided to hack a Model UN on campus. This is at MIT in the early eighties, by kidnapping one of the delegates. because there was a lot of terrorism going on at the time and kidnappings and stuff. So we thought it would be great joke. And we had a guy on the inside who was wanted to play along with this. So we burst in, we kidnap him, and you know, and it kind of ran the joke for about a half a day and then let it end. But this inspired me to say, what if I did a model UN and all the spies showed up? Yeah, but so Model UN and all the business people show up. And Model UN and all these people looking for connections and money and and that was the the kind essentially the germ of the idea that turned into these originally very elaborate spy thriller games and then I branched out into a lot of other genres. But yeah, and it took several months. Typically as they got more c complex, it could easily take six months to a year to write one of these things. Rob Alvarez (11:18): Yeah. Yeah. Of course and it was a side job for you as well as a student. Stephen Balzac (11:21): Right. Yeah. And then even Rob Alvarez (11:21): So And my T delegation was very, very good when I participated, by the way. So Stephen Balzac (11:27): As a student and then even after I graduated, I was still writing them again just for fun. Something I did at science fiction conventions. and then it kinda took on a life of its own.

The game that became an x-ray of the business

Rob Alvarez (11:39): So so turning it around instead of going for failure, what is something that maybe you we will have a proud story to tell and because we always like to also learn from from what success factors you could have had on on that story? can you run us for that story as well? Stephen Balzac (11:51): Yeah, well one of one of my big successes, I didn’t quite realize it at the time, was I was running a game and a bunch of coworkers of mine came to play in it. And all of a sudden I realized I’m looking at the way they’re ha playing their roles and the way things are going. And I was like, wait a minute, this is what I’m seeing in the office. It’s just we’ve compressed it down. And suddenly I realized this game was a tool. It was giving me essentially an x-ray of the business. And it was also giving people a chance to practice behaviors that some of them had said they wanted to do, but there was never an opportunity at the at at the company to put them in a role where they could do it. And I was, you know, if you know, in management at that particular company, so I could hear what people were saying they wanted out of life and out of the company, and not always in a position to give it to them. But suddenly here’s a chance to both really understand people’s behavior a lot better, see what their tendencies are, and give them space to explore something different. And so being open to that, just this totally unexpected thing. And that I’d say is the mark the beginning of when I really start to shift from being a techie to going into psychology and consulting and and starting to build up these games as training tools.

How Balzac designs a LARP for a company

Rob Alvarez (13:23): Cool. Cool. When you when you when you design one of these LARPs for for for these purposes, how’s your process? Like how do you how do you go about it? Do you do it for specific companies? do you have a general one you apply to different companies? and how does it go? Like how do you go from I would I need to build this to actually getting it built in and done? Stephen Balzac (13:40): So I do have a c a standard game that I run much of the time. It can do anywhere from about 20 to 40 people at a time in it. and that is frequently the right place to do because again, it’s it’s the fairy tale, fractured fairy tales gets them out of their heads, gets them out of their usual space. but if I need to design a game, I start by trying to come up with a good storyline. What’s something that is going to be an interesting place to be and an interesting story where I can build goal a goal structure that’s gonna map well to what the company is trying to do. But I really try to again keep it as in essentially a fantasy. So we’re not gonna write a game about not necessarily going to write a game about being part of a company. you’re Yo, it’s instead of the software company being called Microsoft, it’s called, Fredsoft or something. You know, I’m not gonna tend to do that because it’s too close.

Pandemic simulation: playing yourself vs a character

Stephen Balzac (14:43): And this was a lesson I learned running a pandemic flu simulation about twenty years ago for the National Capital Region. People who played themselves, and because this has involved a lot of government people, a lot of local medical people, military business, plus a number of written, pre-written characters. create more tension and to bring in people who had a motivation to be difficult. You know, to not just go along and say, yes, of course, that is the obviously the right answer. I wanna be very reasonable about this. And this was always the problem with pan with a lot of the pandemic flu exercises that were being done at the time, was everyone sitting around a table and going, Yes, yes, of course. Obviously when I see signs of the pandemic, I will do this, this, and this. So I had a much more chaotic environment where you weren’t sitting around a table, where the information is coming in through different p different directions, where you have to interpret it. And you can’t just go, this is clearly a global pandemic. Maybe it’s a pandemic. Maybe it’s not. You don’t know. And so you have to make decisions with that incomplete information. And what I found was that the people who played themselves, who felt that they were on stage and would be evaluated by their bosses, were much less willing to take chances and much more defensive of their decision making than the people who felt like, hey, I’m just playing a character. I can just get into it and be this person. Rob Alvarez (16:20): Yep. Yeah, it makes sense. Makes sense. You feel less attached in some ways to to try to represent yourself in the best way possible because there’s also many, many things at stake when you when you do it that way. Stephen Balzac (16:33): And you can blame your when you do something stupid, as we all do in these days, I myself include. I’ve I’ve made some classic blunders, but you can always blame it on the character. Yeah, yeah, well that’s how I decided to play the character. And maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is you have a way to create a little bit of separation, which means you can learn from the experience without feeling defensive about it.

Goals, story first, and the Necronomicon

Rob Alvarez (16:58): Makes sense. And when when creating, these experiences that you create and and thinking about it in the terms that you do of, trying to do things differently so people behave differently in a different scenario, what would you say is is a best practice? Something that, do this and your your LARP or your your structure, whether it’s a LARP or not, will probably be better off than if you don’t do it. Stephen Balzac (17:19): I’d say recognize that the goals that you put in are defining your world. So every goal you give a character in a game is something that is a statement you’re making about what’s possible in the world. And therefore, part of the game is discovering the world. And you want to give people as much freedom and flexibility to do this. As you can within the story you’re creating. Part of that means making a story that feels real. We do that by creating a story, building game mechanics to support the story. one of the things that I see some game writers do is they come up with a really clever game mechanic and then they try to build a story and a game around it. But that’s not a role-playing game, that’s just a game mechanic. Whereas if I build a story, for example, Secrets of the Necronomicon is an H.P. Lovecraft game. It’s an occult mystery. You know, it’s it’s not horror because no one wants to be horrified. That’s not fun. But it’s a game in which most of the players are evil wizards and they’re trying to figure out spells to summon their choice of you know, pick your menu of elder gods, you know, if you’ve ever read Lovecraft. The way I we built this game, though, was that We want to really capture the feel of a Lovecraft story. And in every Lovecraft story, you have the point where people have to go and find the ancient book and go through it and try to figure out the spell to stop whatever’s happening. There’s no pure heart stops the monster. You So what we did for the game was we built this elaborate magic system and then broke it into pieces and created books and literally wrote a thirty page book. Of the ravings of a madman, or wrote a 15-page story in which somebody is going deeper and deeper into black magic and going progressively insane, and then the magic system is scattered throughout all of this. So that you, as the player, have to find the book, and then by reading this, have to figure out from context what spells are being cast, and frequently figure out, This story here has this part and this has another part, and then you have to figure out to put it together. And so in this way we captured the feel of the stories. And that reinforces the role play, even though the actual physical environment is not some creepy haunted castle or something. It’s a it’s a nice hotel in San Jose. when the sun is shining and there’s no elder god standing there knocking on the door. But the feel and the interaction and the fact that you’re all sitting there arguing over these books and these physical, I was looking to see if I happen to have one kicking around here from the last time I ran it. that really brings the story to life. And it suddenly makes it feel real. This makes it feel socially real because we’re now all reinforcing each other.

Adam Grant, Daron Acemoglu and Ed Schein

Rob Alvarez (20:29): Makes sense. Steve turning it around once again, after hearing these all these questions, I know you’ve you’ve heard a few of the of the episodes as well. Is there somebody that you would like to listen to in an episode in the future? somebody that maybe has inspired you or somebody you would you know would be curious to to hear how they answer these or other questions on Professor Game? Stephen Balzac (20:48): man, you know, I would love to hear how someone like Adam Grant addresses using games. Adam Grant, if you haven’t heard him, is a well known organizational psychologist in the United States. And he is really you know, his work is really very, very interesting. another person who I’d love to hear talking about this is Daron Acemoglu. he’s an MIT professor of economics. And while he doesn’t write specifically about games, when I read through his books and his work, I’m always thinking, I could see how these the s economic and social structures he’s talking about, how could they be rehearsed? How could we test them? You know, he’s proposing these various ways of how do we build an economic system that would solve certain problems? I’m thinking, how can I design a game that would test that? And I’d just love to hear how he would approach this. Rob Alvarez (21:44): Very cool, very cool. and in that same vein, perhaps a book you would recommend the the listeners, the Engagers? Stephen Balzac (21:50): Well, I’m always gonna take a moment and and high my new book, The LARP Effect, which is you know, creative Creating Connection and Competitive Advantage Through Story, Ritual, and Roleplay. I I do feel I should mention that, and I think it is a very good one. But for people who want to get a good understanding of like organizational behavior, there is I think nothing better than Ed Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership. You know, Ed Schein is one of the was one of the seminal creators of the whole field of organizational psychology and he’s the guy who came up with the whole concept of organizational culture. he died just a couple of years ago, but his his works are amazing and that’s a very, very good place for someone who wants to learn this. I mentioned Adam Grant, he’s got several books out, and I’ve mentioned Acemoglu who also has, again, several books. all of which are really worth reading for someone who wants to get a sense of social structures and social interaction and and economic structures and how they interplay. And if you’re thinking about designing a LARP, while I won’t say that I’m sitting there with a book sitting next to me as a manual, the better I understand social structures, social interaction, and the ways groups work, make decisions, interact. solve problems, the better I can write a game that really captures these elements of human behavior and brings them out of people and let people and enables people to see their own behavior.

Making it easy for people to play roles

Rob Alvarez (23:22): Very cool. Very cool. And in in this in this whole, world where using game structures and game mechanics and game design strategies and you know, I tend to call it gamification in general, what would you say is your is your superpower, that thing that you do at least better than most other people that makes you perhaps stand out? Stephen Balzac (23:43): Say building a s a game where people really can interact easily. I think this is the the key lesson that I’ve learned after doing this for so many years is how to make it easy for people to play their roles. And I think that’s the key thing. And and I guess the related part of that is seeing how these different parts of a human system interact. Seeing how, leadership, decision making, creativity, collaboration, these all play off each other. Or as I I like to say, leadership, alignment, role, and perspective, which is the other meaning of LARP. It’s being able to understand them, put them together, and s move between seeing an individual character in a game and then seeing the big picture of the story that’s being created.

Chess, Catan and Galactic Civilizations

Rob Alvarez (24:38): Amazing. Sounds fantastic and very useful for the kind of work that you do for sure. Now it’s the difficult question, finally, Stephen. what would you say is your favorite game? Stephen Balzac (24:49): and I I have played chess forever. I still do occasionally. I got into Roll for the Galaxy, which was based on a game called Race for the Galaxy that a friend of mine named Tom Lehmann designed. And yeah, he’d be another great person to talk about games. He designs board games and comes up with some incredibly creative things. I will admit to being a big fan of Settlers of Catan. I’m not as big of a computer gamer, but I have always had a special space in my heart for Galactic Civilizations, which is from Stardock Systems. I played that back in the nineties when they released version one of it on OS/2, and I still have a current version, even though I don’t have time to play it as often as I used to. But I would say, all of these games, sometimes I I really get into cooperative games, sometimes competitive, but what I really like are games that challenge my ability to think about a system. That challenge my ability to look at different moving parts and see how they fit together and then see if I can influence them. Rob Alvarez (26:02): Neat. Neat. Some very interesting games. I I it sounds like because you just because you mentioned it first, it sounds like you settled on chess and the other ones are are other passions you’ve picked up after after chess. All right. Stephen Balzac (26:12): Yes. I started playing chess when I was about five years old and I was a very, very serious chess competitor up until college and then life got too busy. Rob Alvarez (26:22): Yeah, for sure. I remember when I was five mm mm mm maybe around yeah, five, six or so. It was for my age I was pretty good and then I stopped playing. And that that’s probably my level of chess nowadays. Probably a little bit better, but not too much. I I’m I’m really I’m I’m kind of sorry I didn’t I I didn’t play it more. I do think it’s a very interesting game and and it has many benefits also in in, you know, daily life and professional life and and how you structure and how you think about strategy. But I I do think it’s influenced my my thinking process quite a bit. Stephen Balzac (26:55): And I will say I have a game, it’s called the Game of Empire, and part of it includes a puzzle that is a living chess game.

Use games to build one organization

Rob Alvarez (27:05): Interesting. Interesting. Sounds very, very cool. So Steve, before we let you go, is there any final piece of advice you want to leave us with? Of course let us know where we can find out more about you, your book, your work, and anything else you wanna lead us into. Stephen Balzac (27:18): Well, okay, to answer this not quite in order, to find out more about my work and my book, go to www.7stepsahead.com and you go to larpeffect.7stepsahead.com for specific information about my new book. but I’d say for games and gamification, one of the things I always look at, and I think is an important part of all the various gamification efforts is how can we use this? To build community and make people feel more connected to each other. And ultimately, that’s the real goal for me of using games to help in the workplace. So that people are more connected, share more stories, and feel like they’re more part of one organization, not a dozen separate organizations that are kind of all competing for turf with each other. Rob Alvarez (28:09): Brilliant. Thank you very much for your time, for your for all your stories, your experience, and sharing it, of course, with all of the Engagers in the audience. Remember, Engagers, if you are looking for ways to improve retention and all the things that we’ve been talking about in the podcast for many, many years, I put together a free guide called Core Drives in the Wild. The Core Drives you probably have heard of before from me or Yu-kai himself, the eight Core Drives of Octalysis. You can find that guide. And it is based on interviews like this one where I’ve seen the Core Drives in the wild and I’ll be sending you a guide day by day talking about each of the Core Drives and how they apply in corporate settings that you might be interested in, how these are applied, how these actually work and how they pan out with both how I observed them on the podcast and in that specific case, and of course my own take as a consultant of Octalysis. However, Engagers, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. End of transcription