Corporate

Crisis Management, Analysis, Networking and Business Development

Increasingly in business, government and the third sector, the concept of serious gaming is being used as a process to aid decision making, business development or gathering organisational insights. The important thing is testing proposed courses of action in an adversarial environment.

In a Stone Paper Scissors manual game we focus on process as an important outcome. There are, deliberately, no 'winners' as such (any more than there are winners in the real world) – there might be competition and there might be varying degrees of success or failure, but these are measured against what is learnt in the process.  In fact recent academic thinking on cognitive development tells us that doing 'badly' is always a far better learning experience and source of insight than 'winning'.  We cannot learn unless we make mistakes.  And doing this in the 'safe to fail' environment of a game is an ideal way of learning.

We specifically use manual games because they are transparent, flexible, responsive and (above all) cost effective in terms of time to develop and time to play.

Here are some of the things other organisations we have worked with have looked for in terms of outcomes:

• Enabling participants to experience a different perspective on a particular set of interactions. For example a cyber security team playing a game as a group of hackers. Or the opportunity to experience some aspect of what it is like to be a partner organisation negotiating with a vendor.
• Creating a safe environment to explore methods or approaches without risking getting it wrong.
• Using emerging game-play that occurs in an adversarial game to learn about processes and decision making and gather insights about how we manage difficult or complex communications.