BEFORE YOU READ THIS POST, WHY NOT PLAY THE GAME?
- Take a look at the graph below – it represents the changing staff morale over time of a (fictitious) organisation, as measured by a regularly administered survey instrument.
- You’ll see you have two buttons, one of which administers a rebuke to staff for poor performance, the other offers praise for excellent performance.
- Your task, as manager, is to ensure that morale remains within the orange-bounded band – too low, and staff are too demotivated to perform, too high and staff are insufficiently engaged with corporate brand values.
- There are 19 (equal) time periods, with a value given at the end of each. It moves quite quick so you really need to focus on your strategy.
- The newest data point is always on the left, older points move towards the right.
- Click the arrow button to begin and see how you get on.
Press arrow to start, reload to replay.
So how did you get on? Did you find the right balance of rebuke and praise to maintain morale? Did you learn how to react when morale suddenly dipped or soared? How did your staff morale end up? What would you do if you played again? Did you realise you’ve been pressing buttons linked to absolutely nothing whilst watching an animated gif?
Chances are you developed a narrative around the data displayed and your “interactions” with it. It is only an 20 frame gif so you probably couldn’t develop a truly compelling story based on the data (over which you had no control whatsoever). But if I’d expanded it (or if I was Martin Hawksey and was able to figure out how to do a live random number plot with Google Charts) you’d have eventually become as unshakably certain in your internalised policy rules as David Cameron.
Here he is, running the country.
His iPad visualisation displays a variety of socio-economic indicators in real time, including sentiment analysis (and was developed by none other than Rohan “year of code” “silicon roundabout” “exploding cheese” Silva). His iPad, of course, has an email function allowing him to request action on the hoof, as it were. As much as I’d love to tell you that his email actually goes to “null” I fear this is not the case.
Anyway, let’s get back to how much you sucked at playing the “corporate morale management simulator”. Here are some questions you didn’t ask:
- What was the survey instrument used? Why was it chosen? What did it measure?
- Why were the only options to “praise” and “rebuke”? Why couldn’t you do something else?
- How large was the company? What did it do? What did the staff do?
- Why did morale have to stay in the orange zone? Where did those values come from?
Why didn’t you ask these questions? No, not because you suck, but because I presented the situation as a game. If you’re playing Flappy Bird, you don’t ask why the bird has to flap or why he can’t just land on the green Super Mario Bros pipe-thing. It’s more fun not to ask, and to go along with the premise.
Suspension of disbelief: great for games, bad for policy.
In Joseph Heller’s “Closing Time“, the president (referred to only as “The Little Prick”) plays a fictional computer game named “Triage”, one of a suite of war-themed games he keeps in an annex to the Oval Office. Triage simulates the planning of preparations for ongoing life post nuclear strike, in particular allowing the player to decide who to allow access to underground bunkers.
Of course, policy becomes based around the constraints of the game, and when he (inevitebly, after Chekov) triggers the “real” nuclear football, his subsequent choices are based on game logic – and are characterised by his unwillingness to question the logic of the “game”.
In times of uncertainty and rapid change, an ability to question the rules of the game are an essential prerequisite in adding value to decision making. And though access to data is helpful, this must be coupled with a deep understanding of the limits and constraints of the data, something that requires that you are able to comprehend it as a messy and contradictory corpus, away from the clean lines of your dashboard app.
So – our great generation of leaders – look with concern at dashboard apps and anything else that restricts your decision-making by design. And imagine how the morale in our imaginary company must have dipped if you had been randomly praising and rebuking them in the mistaken belief that it was effective.