GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

One of my most potent memories from my career in organizational learning and development was the power of play as an effective adult learning method during a “Money and You” workshop with Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

It was a business game called “Win as Much as You Can”, also known now as the “XY Game”. The game involved forming four teams of two players, who alternated scoring across four rounds by choosing to throw either X or Y. The scoring process was the key to unlocking and understanding the game’s impact; if your team kept throwing X’s, you were awarded a significant number of points, enabling you to win as much as you could.

The scoring process subtly shifted in round eight, when the key to winning the game was for all four teams to throw Ys, yet not all teams did!

Because we were all unconsciously stuck in a competitive win-or-lose mindset, aiming to win as much as we could rather than adopting an approach where everyone could win, or being collaborative and playing a win-win game.

It was a moment of deep shame for me when I was announced the winner of my small group of eight players — a deeply impactful moment I have never forgotten, because for me to win, the other seven players had to lose, and they weren’t happy about losing.

Critical Foundational 21st Century Skills

These key lessons are encapsulated in my latest innovative co-creation – The Start-Up Game™. This hybrid board game combines experiential learning with achievement and competitive elements. It features an AI learning component that teaches critical foundational skills—collaboration, mathematical thinking, and adaptability —essential for both individuals and companies in a fast-changing AI world. As technical complexity rises, the glue that keeps talent productive is social skill—communication, empathy, conflict resolution, and the ability to coordinate diverse expertise. In addition to social skills, other fundamental capabilities — such as critical thinking, complex problem-solving, and reasoning — are crucial components of a dynamic, collective work environment in the modern enterprise. Together, they offer a shared platform that unlocks the full value of individuals’ specialized know-how, enables adaptation and innovation as technology and markets shift, and is increasingly in demand.

Games as Metaphors for Real Life

Since games are often metaphors for real life, I have spent many years shifting from the win/lose competitive mindset and way of being I grew up with to recognize the value of experimentation and co-operation, and to understand what it means to be truly collaborative.

Adults Learn by Doing

With the ongoing war for our attention, time scarcity, our increasing reliance on mobile devices, and the seductive nature of AI and TikTok as sources of knowledge and information, we have largely forgotten the importance of developing these foundational skills, especially in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

All adults can learn these skills through harnessing the power of play.

Play is essential for developing our emotional and cognitive functions and fostering stronger social connections. In organizational learning and development, experiential learning involves gaining knowledge through direct experience and deep reflection, rather than just passive observation, like simply watching a learning video. It is a highly effective adult learning method that allows participants to link theoretical concepts with practical, on-the-job applications.

This approach involves active engagement in simulated real-world scenarios and:

• Requires critical reflection on the experience to develop new states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills.
• Helps players increase self-awareness and gain a clearer understanding of how their mindsets and behaviors influence the people and teams they lead or interact with.

The Power of Play

Because focused, structured and intentional play, in the context of experiential learning, can:

• Stimulate players’ curiosity, imagination and creativity.
• Help players shift their emotional states, mindsets and behaviors.
• Develop players’ emotional and cognitive agility.
• Enhance players’ decision-making and problem-solving skills.
• Improve leadership and team effectiveness.
• Build players’ courage, boldness, bravery and resilience.
• Reduce players’ stress levels by providing a safe space for improvisation and a break from business-as-usual responsibilities and habits.

Engaging in experiential learning activities, such as structured business games, boosts brain function, improves emotional regulation and self-management, encourages experimentation, and builds and strengthens constructive collaborative relationships with others.

In organizations, the power of play can be structured to boost players’ skills in key areas crucial to 21st-century success, including accepting responsibility, building trust, being accountable, communication, teaming, innovation, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, and achievement, resulting in overall performance improvements.

The Start-Up Game™ Leverages the Power of Play

The Start-Up Game™ engages and encourages players to think and act differently by safely experimenting with language, key mindsets, behaviors, and the creative and critical thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving skills used by successful intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and innovators.

It enables players to develop critical social, emotional, and cognitive mindsets, behaviors and skills that are the crucial components of a dynamic, collective work environment in the modern enterprise.

How to Incorporate the Power of Play into Your Organization

• Create an environment of permission, safety, and trust, giving people agency and autonomy to learn through play and experimentation, and allowing them to learn from mistakes and failures.
• Encourage people to “learn by doing and reflecting” to stretch their thinking by shifting business-as-usual mindsets and behaviors, to push the envelope by developing new 21st-century mental maps, behavioral deviations, and crucial new skills in critical and creative thinking and acting that result in smart risk-taking, intelligent decision-making, and innovative problem-solving.  
• Commit to building an organizational or team culture that promotes continuous learning at a pace faster than the competition.
• Encourage people to develop a regular reflective practice to harness their collective capacity to create, invent, and innovate by establishing a set of habitual reflective practices.

We are living in an age when technical expertise can become irrelevant in just a few years; foundational skills matter more than ever. Adopting an experiential learning approach to Innovation enables people to be agile and adaptive, to develop creative and critical thinking skills, to collaborate, and to sense, see, and solve complex problems, thereby thriving in a constantly evolving environment.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™. Discover our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program. It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that provides a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also up-skill people and teams, developing their future fitness within your unique innovation context.

Image Credit: 1 of 1,000+ quote slides for your meetings and presentations available at http://misterinnovation.com

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