Quest Based Leadership: Shifting the Business Paradigm
A while back I had an interesting discussion with T.J. Theodore, a KM and collaboration advocate and practitioner, about the value in changing the corporate mindset from a task/action items paradigm to a quest based paradigm. Specifically, we were thinking about the concept of questing as used successfully in a multiplayer online gaming context, like the one in World of Warcraft. For those who have been gamers for many years, this is an obvious application, and one that will appeal to and be readily accepted by the new generation of “wired” workers who have grown up with technology and multiplayer games. It might be more difficult to convey to non-gaming managers or executives, however, even though it’s just a variation on the carrot-and-stick paradigm. Here’s how it might work.
The Gaming Environment
In games, when a new player (“the avatar”) enters the 3D “world”, he/she is often placed into a safe learning area for beginners, where they can learn the user interface, the keyboard commands, the rules, and the objectives of play. Typically, this involves interacting with a computer generated, non-player character (NPC), who is a trainer, quest giver or companion. The NPC is programmed with a preset agenda of tasks to be accomplished by the player/avatar that trains them in the basic skills they need to be successful in a particular role. The avatar interacts with the NPC, then goes and completes the task he/she was given, often requiring multiple attempts (learning), and returns to the NPC for a reward. Rewards can be an item needed to play in the game, for example, a sword or coins, or experience points that apply toward advancing the avatar to a new and “higher” level of accomplishment. In the real game, many quests require collaboration by a group of players to complete them, for example, to rescue a valuable object or person that is being held by powerful evil forces or to solve a puzzle.
As predetermined milestones are reached, the new avatar gradually becomes more powerful, better equipped, more skilled and more confident. Having taught the new player the basics, the NPC completes their interaction by sending the avatar on a quest to meet a new trainer or quest giver in a new location. The avatar is then physically relocated from the protected learning area into the mainstream play area of the game, where they will interact and communicate with other players’ avatars. Think of this as the end of the period most companies provide as “new hire orientation” or a promotion.
As one might expect from a game company with 11 million worldwide players, Blizzard Entertainment understands well the needs and motivations of World of Warcraft players and anticipates them. Not only do they provide a rich and stimulating gaming environment where complex social interactions can occur, but they also provide:
communication forums, both in the game (public and private chat channels) and outside the game (web-based online communities) self-selected affinity groups (called guilds or clans), where like-minded players can band together as a team to support one another and accomplish game goals training, such as manuals and help files tools for self-assessment, such as talent/skill development options and the impacts they might have if selected tools for locating people with similar short term interests/needs, such as trying to complete a specific group quest or connecting a player who can forge armor items with players who want to buy those items tools for monitoring the current knowledge and power levels of the player’s own avatar, as well as comparison to the avatars of others (for example, a public “armory” where detailed profiles of all player avatars are housed) management/supervision, as provided in the form of “game masters” who provide in-game customer support, field complaints, rescue trapped players, and give a sense of security that someone in authority is policing the rules and fair play
These tools already exist in many rich, 3D multiuser environments and could be readily adapted to business quests, instead of game quests.
How Questing Applies to Business
Journals are full of predictions about the future of the corporation and corporate structure. Here are some of them — here, here and here. Sources such as John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation are on record as early as 1992 saying that the top-down control corporation as we know it today is dying, and will be replaced with a new, flatter organizational structure where ad hoc groups come together to solve problems, and knowledge access and peer to peer communication is vital. Companies will be completely different in 2050 (or even sooner). Futurist John Luthy of the Public Futures Blog says, “Leadership and management development coupled with technical training holds a very important key to preparing for future challenges. Unfortunately, those challenges are not in the distant future. They exist now.” This matters because it indicates that everyone, at all levels of an organization, is dealing with a paradigm shift, and needs to learn new skills, new concepts, and new ways of interacting. This is a period of high uncertainty and change in the corporate world.
Just-in-Time Knowledge. Recent and ongoing scientific research into how workers want and expect to communicate effectively in their jobs shows that access to information and expertise at the point it is needed results in a wide range of organizational benefits. For example, Tom Davenport and John Glaser reported both greater accuracy and cost savings in a hospital setting using a just in time knowledge system for doctors. John Mangan at Cincom Systems reports fewer registration errors, fewer denied claims, and greater patient satisfaction. Although based on Toyota’s lean manufacturing concept, just in time knowledge delivery in most industries will lead to better work products and worker satisfaction.
Group Meetings and Training. Many organizations have already realized the potential in virtual worlds as global same-time meeting locations that cost practically nothing, yet provide an experience very close to having been in a face to face encounter. They are also seeing that immersive education in a rich virtual environment results in much higher learning retention and satisfaction in workers. Organizations such as Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Accenture, Nokia, government agencies, such as the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, and U.S. State Department, the MacArthur Foundation, and many universities routinely use virtual world environments such as Second Life, Active Worlds, and Qwaq to stage educational and/or collaboration meetings. Their developmental activities and results are well documented. Business Week has a brief slide show highlighting some of the types of virtual meetings.
The American Society for Training and Development cites survey results showing that 79 percent of surveyed organizations say a skill gap currently exists in the organization. Various sources cite multiple reasons why skill gaps persist – retirements, lack of training dollars, inability to attract talent, and the specter of instability. Imagine what a quest based paradigm might look like for business leadership. What if each time you completed a work product, attended a training course, acquired some new knowledge, or coached others you “skilled up” in a technical, soft or business competency? What if you could go to an armory of profiles to search for knowledgeable teammates or specific expertise based upon their skill levels and types of “quests” they had completed? Self-discovery is more stimulating for workers, and produces greater innovation and creativity…resulting in higher job satisfaction and greater employee loyalty.
How Questing Might Work. Thinking about how a challenge/reward or quest-based paradigm might work in a traditional industrial organization might be difficult for some. This means it isn’t going to happen over night, even though the elements needed for a sweeping change to occur are in place and rapidly gaining wide acceptance as viable options for certain types of business activities — especially with the ascension of Gen Y and Millenials and their more collaborative communication styles into leadership roles. We can expect changes in how routine business is done. The potential benefits are great, but they will not be without some pain.
Still, imagine how routine work would be different if after we completed one task, we were sent to a quest giver to receive another assignment. What if we could then immediately link knowledge, artifacts, and expertise into a chat or meeting with a mouse click. Using tools that already exist in MMOGs, like multi-layered presence visible at the room, team, community or world level, imagine the ability to pull experts from anywhere in the world — inside or outside your organization — instantly into a discussion, kind of like the summoning or teleportation effects in a multiplayer game. And what if you could walk virtually with your experts from one team room into a different room with a different group of people and they would all be connected instantly and seamlessly, just as if you had made that walk from one conference room to another one down the hall in real life? Imagine conventions and trade shows, where products can be demonstrated, sales can be made instantly, and virtual social networking has as much relevance as being there in person with a Budweiser in your hand — and with no travel and hotel costs or weather delays. These things are possible today, they are in use in many businesses today, and they are only the tip of the iceberg.
Using chat macros, session recording, user programmable graphical interfaces, and 24/7 access to organizational knowledge bases and expertise, as well as to key external resources, requires a complete rethinking of what managers actually manage (hint: it is no longer access to exclusive information). It requires new thinking about where the actual value in an organization resides (hint: it may not be in the traditional revenue stream). It requires a visionary IT department that wants to enable actual user needs instead of their own concepts about what technology stack they prefer to use. It requires a legal department full of people familiar with intellectual capital, virtual objects, recent patents and the dynamics of 3D immersive interactions, as well as global copyright and trademark protection precedents. It requires a new type of manager, who is more like a multiplayer game guild or raid leader, with the flexibility and skills to manage a fluid and ever changing group to accomplish organizational goals in a timely way – goals that they must define clearly so that the team can succeed. Managers in a quest-based organization will be more like ballet choreographers, who choose the dancers, determine the musical environment, provide a vision and define a deadline date for performance/completion…and then step aside and let the dancers dance, only intruding on the process to adjust misinterpretations.
Peter Drucker wrote that there is no one right organization design nor one right way to manage people. For those organizations where the sharing of knowledge or continual professional education and development are vital, quest based leadership might well change the competitive dynamic — not to mention create exponentially engaged, excited and collaborative employees.
I previously blogged about the key planning decisions related to initiating the use of virtual worlds in an organization. If you are interested, you can read it here. I also blogged about quest based training/education here. Keeping it real, there is also the potential for a backlash effect from increasing interactions with computers. We humans are more than bits and bytes that can be transmitted electronically between devices. We experience more from face-to-face interactions than the simple exchange of information, for example, body language or brief facial changes. Heavy reliance on virtual interactions and technology may lead to an anti-technology subculture, but that’s a topic for a different article!
