Serious Games for Leadership Development: What I Have Learned

I make learning games, and most of them end up being about leadership development.

So people ask me about serious games for leadership development a lot, and they are usually lovely and a little suspicious.

Fair enough, really.

Because "games for leaders" does sound a bit odd at first, and it sounded odd to me too.

What I mean by a serious game

I will be honest, the label is a bit clumsy, and I have tried to rename it more than once.

For me, a serious game is a game built so the thing you practise inside it is the thing you need at work.

The rules are the lesson. The choices are the practice.

That is the whole trick, I think.

A quiz with points on it sits closer to gamification, which is a perfectly good tool too, and I wrote about serious games vs gamification separately.

A good leadership seminar gives you frameworks, and I have sat in some genuinely brilliant ones.

But, for me, those frameworks never really got tested until a real Monday morning, with real people and real consequences.

A game gives me a safe Monday morning instead. A pretend one, where the stakes sting a little and still leave room to laugh.

Then I can try the hard conversation, get it wrong, and try it again in the same afternoon.

Which is lovely.

Leadership, for me, is mostly decisions made with half the information and other people watching.

A game can hold that pressure probably better than a slide deck can, and certainly better than I can by talking at people.

Picture six managers with one shared budget and three projects that each need more than half of it.

Nobody tells them to negotiate, and nobody tells them to listen.

Usually someone grabs the budget early and someone else goes quiet, and that is where the good stuff starts.

The debrief afterwards is where the development happens, honestly. The game gives everyone the same story to talk about.

A shared story.

Then the facilitator can ask why the quiet person went quiet, and the answer is almost always more interesting than anything I could have scripted.

I will admit my early games had far too many rules.

My first drafts had rulebooks long enough that I probably needed a second game to explain the first one.

Players spent their energy on the rules, and the leadership part got squeezed out.

Lesson learned, slowly.

Now I try to keep the rules small enough to explain in five minutes, so the hard part is the people.

My other mistake was making the winning strategy too obvious. If one move always wins, players find it, and then they stop thinking.

Start with one behaviour you would like to see more of on a Monday morning.
Check that the game makes that behaviour the hard, interesting choice.
Give the debrief as much time as the play, and ideally more.
Ask whether an existing game fits your people's real work, or whether a custom build makes more sense.
Run it once with a small group before you roll it out to everyone.

If you are weighing up vendors, I wrote a longer piece on how to choose a serious game vendor, and I tried hard to be fair to people who are not me.

If you would like to go a step further, have a look at my piece on leadership simulation games.

I think serious games work best when the game is simple, the debrief is long, and the behaviour is real.

That is my bias, anyway.

And a well-run seminar or a patient coach can develop leaders beautifully too, sometimes better than any game of mine.

With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.