69 THE JOB’S A GAME: HOW GAME DESIGN BUILDS BETTER TEAMS frantic game […] But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril […] when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island.”24 When rules, expectations, and boundaries are poorly communicated, fear can cripple productivity, as team members hunker down within the smallest possible range of possibility, moving slowly and never too far from safety, for fear of tumbling over the cliff’s edge of reprimand and unemployment. “Games,” McGonigal reminds us, “eliminate the fear of failure.”25 The possibility of failure remains, of course, but the fear is gone. Games do this, not only by removing all real-life consequences from the exchange (recall Rosewater’s flight simulator), but also by fundamentally reorienting our posture towards failure. In games, after all, we spend most of our time failing. Dying twelve times in a boss fight does not remotely detract from the experience; in fact, these failures only enhance the allure and the eventual satisfaction of victory. For in games, we can be confident that we have what we need to succeed, and that our failures along the way will only serve to improve our performance. With the necessary tools in hand and the essential rules spelled out, we can face the possibility of failure as the necessary learning experience that it is, and so “spend more time suspended in a state of urgent optimism—the moment of hope just before our success is real, when we feel inspired to try our hardest and do our best.”26 Leaders, therefore, are not so much rulebreakers as rule makers. They must provide the essential framework upon which their teams can creatively build. Kouzes and Posner are adamant that innovation and creativity are essential for good leadership. A good leader, they argue, must “challenge the process” by “search[ing] for opportunities by seizing the initiative and looking outward for innovative ways to improve,” and also by “experiment[ing] and tak[ing] risks by consistently generating small wins and learning from experience.”27 Yet innovation is not a matter of flouting the rules, but rather a matter of knowing which rules truly matter and which rules can be dispensed with. Take, for example, the Kobayashi Maru. This simulation forces Starfleet cadets to choose between two morally repugnant alternatives. The goal of the simulation is to test their character and their response to no-win scenarios, but James T. Kirk (not surprisingly) opts instead
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