Book Watch: The Score – Rethinking Gamification, Metrics, and Strategy

I’m living dangerously this week: writing about a book I haven’t yet read. But this conversation with author (and philosophy professor) Thi Nguyen so caught my attention I can’t help it. If the words “philosophy professor” are enough to make you click away, stay with me for a minute.

In The Score, Nguyen explores how gamification is increasingly part of our everyday lives, even in those spheres of our lives that we’d think have nothing to do with games. The most obvious example of this is perhaps the ways in which we can now place bets on almost anything: from minute details of athletic contests to geopolitics.

What particularly interested me from the article with Nguyen is the starting assumption: that a game is a scenario in which a participant is faced with “a goal to be pursued under certain constraints.” That definition is broad enough to encompass activities that don’t seem like games at all, including strategy-making. As we often say in our trainings, constraints are what enables creativity. So is strategy-making a game? There is undoubtedly real joy in watching a group develop a strategy that doesn’t bemoan what isn’t possible, but rather works within what is possible in new and interesting ways.

While his own belief is that the pleasure of games is in the play itself, Nguyen’s also concerned about the reality that gamifying something can by its nature teach us what we should desire. That might not matter so much in a board game, but it matters a lot when we use games to reach for bigger goals. There is no one quite telling us what matters, but the way in which the game is set up implicitly imparts that lesson, often without our really noticing what’s happening.

Here’s what really stopped me in my tracks: “[w]hy, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?” I’ll concede that is often the case. The drudgery of building a logic model only to satisfy a prospective funder is a prime example. In Strategic Doing (and in most strategy-crafting), the step of thinking about metrics holds a similar risk.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The secret is in adjusting our thinking about what those metrics should be doing for us. Rather than choosing metrics that will tell us whether we have succeeded or failed, we benefit most when we choose metrics that will help us learn, or as Thi memorably puts it, will micro-dose an epiphany. This is hard – and groups almost instinctively fall back on metrics that they think a funder or other decision-maker would like. Perhaps the question we need to insert into our process, before we choose metrics, is: what assumptions have we made that we’re not absolutely certain about – and how could we check them before we commit any more resources?

If we are really operating in an uncertain environment, we won’t ever arrive at concrete conclusions – but we will, perhaps, illuminate the next step we should take. There should be genuine satisfaction and even joy in that small win. As leaders, helping our teams make that switch – from depending on certainty to finding pleasure in the adventure of learning – is one of the most important ways we can help them.

Have you read the book? I’m in line for a copy at my local library and can’t wait to learn more about how to think more expansively about “games” in my world and work.