The key for busy brokers to unlock the productivity puzzle and progress in their business could come from a surprising source: game design. Motivational scientist Dr Jason Fox explains
The key for busy brokers to unlock the productivity puzzle and progress in their business could come from a surprising source: game design. Motivational scientist Dr Jason Fox explains
Right now, this very minute, millions of intelligent
adults are playing video games with a level of focus and engagement we just do not see at work. Some would dismiss this as simply an indulgence in an escapist form of entertainment: they’re ‘avoiding work’.
But when you look at what makes up all games – goals, rules and feedback – you’ll find that the best games are goal-driven, challenge-intense and feedback-rich experiences, geared towards progress. In effect, people aren’t avoiding work: they are simply engaging in well-designed work. And that’s the opportunity game design provides: a new lens to redesign work to make work work. Here are a few tips to get you started.
1. MAKE PROGRESS VISIBLE
When asking the question “What gets people most enthusiastic about doing work?”, researchers found that “a clear sense of progress” was more effective than clear goals, incentives, rewards or any other factor. This “progress principle” was recognised as Harvard Business Review’s number one breakthrough idea in 2010. And it makes a heap of sense. We have a finite amount of energy, time and attention available to us each day, so it’s obvious that we are more inclined to invest it in things that contribute to progress.
Think about how you procrastinate: often your efforts will default to activities that provide the richest sense of progress. Checking email is a prime example: you start the day with one important project and 74 emails. By lunchtime you’ve made no progress on the important project, but hey, your emails are down to 22. Winning! It’s also common practice to write lists, including things you’ve already completed ( just so you can tick it off!).
We love a clear sense progress – and it’s the most significant element missing in most work. Progress is what underpins everything. Game designers know this. The feedback loops in all good games are tight; you can see how your effort is contributing to progress.
The simplest motivational hack you can employ to enhance the inherent motivation of any activity is to make progress visible. Reduce the latency between effort and meaningful feedback. Chunk your work into bits, and then sequence those bits into contextual lists. Work up a simple road map of tasks, and work your way through them.
If working in a team, develop a shared structure and ritual around progress. This could be a highlevel Gantt Chart and a daily team huddle. Or it could be simple collaborative software and a weekly team check-in. Either way, make progress visible, and short-circuit feedback loops wherever possible. With this in play, we can then refine our game even further.
2. CALIBRATE CHALLENGE
We mismanage challenges daily. Some challenges get so big that we feel anxious and avoid them, which makes us feel more anxious. And some challenges are so mundanely boring and inane to us that we avoid them, or drag them out for far too long.
The key to getting our game right here is to calibrate and compress challenges appropriately. Dial super-intense challenges back to a level of discomfort you are comfortable with. Don’t make it easy, though – we grow through challenge. Lean into it.
In some video games, you get experience points for engaging in challenges. This is what your character needs in order to ‘level up’ and develop mastery. In fact, one could say there is an inherent bias to action outside your comfort zone in the very fact that you get a clear sense of progress. And for super-boring tasks: compress the time you invest in them. Organise a ‘productivity blitz’ to smash through email, or see how quickly you can get your pipeline up to date.
Through compression or calibration, we are working our way back into what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as “flow” – the state of “optimal experience” in which time seems to slow, and we are completely immersed in the challenge at hand.
3. WORK IN SPRINTS
Academics have various theories on what makes an activity ‘fun’. Broadly speaking, there’s ‘soft fun’ – passive activities such as watching a movie, or catching up with friends. And then there’s ‘hard fun’ – active activities, in which most of the time is spent in frustration or concentrated
effort. Think sports, board games, hack-days. It’s this type of ‘fun’ that is ultimately most satisfying. A big reason ‘hard fun’ works is because it is usually time-bracketed. There’s tension, followed by release. We see this in sports matches, where various quarters allow for strategic reflection and a clear sense of progress.
We need to see this more in our work. Hard work cannot be infinite. The more we can work in short sprints, within the context of progress, the more opportunities we will have to recharge our motivation. It’s the accumulation of small wins that leads to victory.
4. MAKE IT HARD TO MAKE IT HARD FOR YOURSELF
When the path to progress is unclear or our goals are seemingly unachievable, many of us will conjure up self-sabotaging stories to excuse our lack of progress and performance. Without necessarily intending to, we’ll invent alibis that excuse ourselves from poorer performance. “I work better when under pressure,” says the procrastinator, leaving an important project to the last minute. Then, when the disc corrupts or the migraine sets in at the last minute, the procrastinator is able to say, “Well, if it weren’t for that, of course I’d have done a better job.”
The perfectionist never has enough time, because they spent the first 80% of the time micro-managing unimportant details. And the overcommitted executive remains faultless – with all of those projects they’ve taken on board, what can one expect if some of them aren’t done well?
These self-sabotaging stories thrive on vagueness and an unclear game. They fall apart when we create real visibility of progress. To combat self-sabotage, we need to get clear on the game we are playing and draw a clear line between story and reality.
5. MANAGE CONTEXT
On any given day, you are playing multiple roles. You may start the day as a parent and family person, then shift to strategic adviser, then to negotiator, then to manager, then to mentor, then to mate.
Sometimes you can bring the mindset from one context into another one, essentially contaminating it. We’ve all been in that situation where, after an incredibly busy and stressful day, we’ve brought ‘boss mode’ back home. The family don’t like it.
One thing you can do here is remember that everything is a game. There are always goals, rules and feedback within any given context. Philosopher James Carse, author of Finite and Infinite Games, says there are at least two kinds of game: those that are played to win, and those that are played for the sake of continuing the play.
“Finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries.” Knowing games are at play will help you to pause, shift and adapt your mindset between them.
6. BUILD THE NARRATIVE
One of the biggest things missing in most organisations is a strong sense of ‘narrative’. This is how purpose is expressed beyond numbers. It’s the story of ‘why’ we do our work. Leading games do this well – there’s a narrative that players move through.
Leading companies also craft compelling narratives. Remember Apple’s ‘Think different’ campaign? The intended audience for this was actually internal. Steve Jobs had just taken over a demoralised company; he needed them to rediscover the purpose and pride in their work.
7. CONDUCT EXPERIMENTS
Game designers would call this play-testing, and anyone who has worked on agile projects would know that a lot of work is experimental, and developed through iteration. At a functional level, this works with short sprints; rather than cooking up a perfect plan, and then grinding through periods of stalled productivity and progress, we instead move through various ‘checkpoints’. If one particular approach is not working, we reset to the latest checkpoint and try another.
Games do this tremendously well, so much so that research suggests most gamers spend 70–90% of their time failing. But they’re able to fail fast, and learn from each attempt.
In our own work, we could learn from failure. Apathy is the enemy.
Or, if failure is a bit too heavy a word, think of it like this: in science there’s no such thing as failure, only disproven hypotheses. Persistence is noble and sometimes necessary. Progress is better. If something’s not working, try something else. It’s like Edison once said: “I’ve never failed. I’ve only found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”
Dr Jason Fox is a motivation strategy and design expert, and an in-demand speaker and consultant. He is author of The Game Changer, a new book published by Wiley. Learn more at www. drjasonfox.com.Right now, this very minute, millions of intelligent
adults are playing video games with a level of focus and engagement we just do not see at work. Some would dismiss this as simply an indulgence in an escapist form of entertainment: they’re ‘avoiding work’.
But when you look at what makes up all games – goals, rules and feedback – you’ll find that the best games are goal-driven, challenge-intense and feedback-rich experiences, geared towards progress. In effect, people aren’t avoiding work: they are simply engaging in well-designed work. And that’s the opportunity game design provides: a new lens to redesign work to make work work. Here are a few tips to get you started.
1. MAKE PROGRESS VISIBLE
When asking the question “What gets people most enthusiastic about doing work?”, researchers found that “a clear sense of progress” was more effective than clear goals, incentives, rewards or any other factor. This “progress principle” was recognised as Harvard Business Review’s number one breakthrough idea in 2010. And it makes a heap of sense. We have a finite amount of energy, time and attention available to us each day, so it’s obvious that we are more inclined to invest it in things that contribute to progress.
Think about how you procrastinate: often your efforts will default to activities that provide the richest sense of progress. Checking email is a prime example: you start the day with one important project and 74 emails. By lunchtime you’ve made no progress on the important project, but hey, your emails are down to 22. Winning! It’s also common practice to write lists, including things you’ve already completed ( just so you can tick it off!).
We love a clear sense progress – and it’s the most significant element missing in most work. Progress is what underpins everything. Game designers know this. The feedback loops in all good games are tight; you can see how your effort is contributing to progress.
The simplest motivational hack you can employ to enhance the inherent motivation of any activity is to make progress visible. Reduce the latency between effort and meaningful feedback. Chunk your work into bits, and then sequence those bits into contextual lists. Work up a simple road map of tasks, and work your way through them.
If working in a team, develop a shared structure and ritual around progress. This could be a highlevel Gantt Chart and a daily team huddle. Or it could be simple collaborative software and a weekly team check-in. Either way, make progress visible, and short-circuit feedback loops wherever possible. With this in play, we can then refine our game even further.
2. CALIBRATE CHALLENGE
We mismanage challenges daily. Some challenges get so big that we feel anxious and avoid them, which makes us feel more anxious. And some challenges are so mundanely boring and inane to us that we avoid them, or drag them out for far too long.
The key to getting our game right here is to calibrate and compress challenges appropriately. Dial super-intense challenges back to a level of discomfort you are comfortable with. Don’t make it easy, though – we grow through challenge. Lean into it.
In some video games, you get experience points for engaging in challenges. This is what your character needs in order to ‘level up’ and develop mastery. In fact, one could say there is an inherent bias to action outside your comfort zone in the very fact that you get a clear sense of progress. And for super-boring tasks: compress the time you invest in them. Organise a ‘productivity blitz’ to smash through email, or see how quickly you can get your pipeline up to date.
Through compression or calibration, we are working our way back into what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as “flow” – the state of “optimal experience” in which time seems to slow, and we are completely immersed in the challenge at hand.
3. WORK IN SPRINTS
Academics have various theories on what makes an activity ‘fun’. Broadly speaking, there’s ‘soft fun’ – passive activities such as watching a movie, or catching up with friends. And then there’s ‘hard fun’ – active activities, in which most of the time is spent in frustration or concentrated
effort. Think sports, board games, hack-days. It’s this type of ‘fun’ that is ultimately most satisfying. A big reason ‘hard fun’ works is because it is usually time-bracketed. There’s tension, followed by release. We see this in sports matches, where various quarters allow for strategic reflection and a clear sense of progress.
We need to see this more in our work. Hard work cannot be infinite. The more we can work in short sprints, within the context of progress, the more opportunities we will have to recharge our motivation. It’s the accumulation of small wins that leads to victory.
4. MAKE IT HARD TO MAKE IT HARD FOR YOURSELF
When the path to progress is unclear or our goals are seemingly unachievable, many of us will conjure up self-sabotaging stories to excuse our lack of progress and performance. Without necessarily intending to, we’ll invent alibis that excuse ourselves from poorer performance. “I work better when under pressure,” says the procrastinator, leaving an important project to the last minute. Then, when the disc corrupts or the migraine sets in at the last minute, the procrastinator is able to say, “Well, if it weren’t for that, of course I’d have done a better job.”
The perfectionist never has enough time, because they spent the first 80% of the time micro-managing unimportant details. And the overcommitted executive remains faultless – with all of those projects they’ve taken on board, what can one expect if some of them aren’t done well?
These self-sabotaging stories thrive on vagueness and an unclear game. They fall apart when we create real visibility of progress. To combat self-sabotage, we need to get clear on the game we are playing and draw a clear line between story and reality.
5. MANAGE CONTEXT
On any given day, you are playing multiple roles. You may start the day as a parent and family person, then shift to strategic adviser, then to negotiator, then to manager, then to mentor, then to mate.
Sometimes you can bring the mindset from one context into another one, essentially contaminating it. We’ve all been in that situation where, after an incredibly busy and stressful day, we’ve brought ‘boss mode’ back home. The family don’t like it.
One thing you can do here is remember that everything is a game. There are always goals, rules and feedback within any given context. Philosopher James Carse, author of Finite and Infinite Games, says there are at least two kinds of game: those that are played to win, and those that are played for the sake of continuing the play.
“Finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries.” Knowing games are at play will help you to pause, shift and adapt your mindset between them.
6. BUILD THE NARRATIVE
One of the biggest things missing in most organisations is a strong sense of ‘narrative’. This is how purpose is expressed beyond numbers. It’s the story of ‘why’ we do our work. Leading games do this well – there’s a narrative that players move through.
Leading companies also craft compelling narratives. Remember Apple’s ‘Think different’ campaign? The intended audience for this was actually internal. Steve Jobs had just taken over a demoralised company; he needed them to rediscover the purpose and pride in their work.
7. CONDUCT EXPERIMENTS
Game designers would call this play-testing, and anyone who has worked on agile projects would know that a lot of work is experimental, and developed through iteration. At a functional level, this works with short sprints; rather than cooking up a perfect plan, and then grinding through periods of stalled productivity and progress, we instead move through various ‘checkpoints’. If one particular approach is not working, we reset to the latest checkpoint and try another.
Games do this tremendously well, so much so that research suggests most gamers spend 70–90% of their time failing. But they’re able to fail fast, and learn from each attempt.
In our own work, we could learn from failure. Apathy is the enemy.
Or, if failure is a bit too heavy a word, think of it like this: in science there’s no such thing as failure, only disproven hypotheses. Persistence is noble and sometimes necessary. Progress is better. If something’s not working, try something else. It’s like Edison once said: “I’ve never failed. I’ve only found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”
