Game theory: The gamification of trust
Executives often say they want to improve morale in their company, and sometimes they turn to games to pep up the team and get them bonded.
But the kind of games they choose so often worsen morale and performance.
Why is that?
Consider what games like Monopoly encourage. Certainly not teamwork. Think of a few games now and they will draw fun from competition between each other, even competitive ones, at the expense of one trait that without which there can be no morale:
Trust.
Trust is knowing that those you work with have your best interests in mind as you have theirs, as you all strive for a common goal together.
Trust means that you can make suggestions and decisions without fearing mistakes, and so drives innovation, roots out errors without blame, and makes for happy and dedicated staff, and customers who feel the love and stay with the company for decades.
Dead of Winter
There are scant few games that develop trust. I'll talk about the trust-building merits of the survival game Dead Of Winter in another essay, but let's get back to how games built for 'fun' usually erode trust.
Aren’t games fun? Isn’t fun good?
Games are derived from either play-fighting or play-acting, and the ones we most often think of are the ones about fighting.
Fun they are indeed, as mock exercises in proficiency and supremacy. You compete, measure productive outcomes, and come out on top of others in an environment safe for failure. Bound within a defined time and space, with no great stakes on the outcome, games can be great training grounds for youthful competence and confidence.
So what happens when a company plays these games together? You reinforce proficiency and supremacy. Nothing has changed.
Beyond this, many businesses then go ahead and include this kind of game in the form of rewards over Key Performance Indicators. These sound like great motivators, but end up rewarding the goal-focussed sales agents while dividing and punishing the supportive team next to them.
This leads to some very sad and anxious team players in an environment where mistrust is more profitable than teamwork.
A case study: Paying For Performance
Teaching is a tough job, much more bearable when you get support from other teachers, and protection from the principal. You can tell you’re in a well-run school when you visit the staff room and hear the optimistic buzz.
I spoke with a teacher who had come down from Canberra, where the school board had introduced a game-like element: Pay For Performance.
In this scheme, the better results a teacher gets, the more pay. Sound like a fun game?
What happened, she said, was that nobody would speak to each other, nobody helped when you had trouble, there were never any whiteboard markers as teachers took them with them, and when you asked ‘Hey – I like that worksheet, may I copy it for my class?’ The rejection would come before you even finished speaking.
A power hierarchy formed, where teachers played politics for the authority to seed the well-behaved kids into their class for next year, and farm the problem children out to junior teachers.
Schools under Pay For Performance created an unbearably toxic culture, and the quality of education suffered greatly.
Compare that to the schools which are protected from outside threats (parents, the Department of Education, bad press etc.) and a strong leader dedicated to enforcing that protection, and you get happy teachers who love what they do, help each other, put in extra work, and provide an excellent classroom experience for the students.
What creates trust?
To make trust in a game, there needs to be:
Reason to support(agreement or morals)
Uncertainty (imperfect information)
Opportunity to disappoint
The classic Game Theory example of the Prisoners’ Dilemma gives two arrested suspects a chance to confess or deny the accusations. You really don’t want to be left denying when your partner has already confessed for both of you.
If they had agreed to an action, had a lack of information about the other player’s action, and had free will to act, then you are playing for trust.
Take away any one of these, and trust is not a factor.
-If there was no agreement, then there was no trust to keep.
-If no uncertainty – given full knowledge of what the other is doing – they would just do together as was most profitable to themselves.
-If they had no opportunity to betray (maybe a patsy confessed for them) then trust was not exercised.
Whenever this model is used, it always assumes rational self-interest, but I believe that the model is incomplete as it doesn't account for trust.
Let’s say our team agrees to pass a tin around to collect moneyfor a staff member.
If we carefully watch each person, making sure they put in,there is no uncertainty, no opportunity to disappoint, therefore no trust.
But if I leave people alone to secretly contribute to thetin, then there is uncertainty and opportunity to disappoint, so this becomes atrust exercise.
The more potential for disappointment, the more trust, so if you REALLY want an exercise in trust, imagine leaving an openable jar, left unattended in the kitchen.
According to the Prisoner's Dilemma model, the money would go missing every single time. But the higher the trust already existing in a group in the same circumstances, the less this happens, debunking the rational model.
Of course, this is more a cruel exercise of dangling temptation in front of people, sometimes called a 'shit-test', and will backfire, so I wouldn’t recommend it as a trust-building exercise.
Macho
Bone by Jeff Smith
Where people feel unsafe to express their fears and concerns, the result is macho individualism.
You will have experienced this yourself - gone to a friend and expressed a deep emotion, only to have that friend not keep your secret, even use it as ridicule for their own social advancement.
In a work setting, there are often rewards of career advancement in betraying another's confidence, and when these benefits outweigh the need to keep hold of trust, then this is the same ‘shit-test’ temptation as the open jar of collection money.
Except that in this case, the thief is rewarded even when caught.
This week, a friend was asked to open up by her supervisor about how she was going with all this online work. My friend took this as an invitation to trust, and shared that it was indeed stressful, as well as a few other life events that were happening at the time.
Rather than just listen, perhaps assist, the supervisor used that information as a reason to advance her own standing and put a black mark against my friend's name.
This, as you might guess, has made my friend unwilling to share again, and instead to build a wall of disinformation between her and her supervisor.
Opening up on the open sea
In The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek tells us about Claire Nuer’s approach on an oil rig.
Oil rigs at sea are dangerous places, and the men full of macho individualism to get by, often testing each other's emotional mettle with ridicule to make sure they won't break under pressure.
This is a coping mechanism, a means of finding external trust in the absence of interpersonal.
After much convincing, Nuer started a program on a rig where these tough-as-nails workers would share their vulnerabilities to each other.
Opening up in this tough environment certainly leaves plenty of uncertainty and opportunity to disappoint, which made it a strong environment for trust.
And trust they did. Eventually. As the workers opened up, they became as tight as army buddies, and would look out for ways to improve the conditions for their buddies. Dangers were called out early and accidents reduced, as well as better ideas adopted, which all saw productivity and profits rise.
Games to foster trust.
To improve trust, de-emphasise competitiveness.
The ‘best umpire’ award was the only reward for merit in Mercantile Cricket Umpire Association. It was fostering competitiveness, but it needed to stay. To strengthen teamwork, I created an alternative award where umpires would vote once a month for the umpire they felt was most supportive.
Mercantile Cricket Umpires
The Peter Maddox award soon became as highly prized as any other, umpires became very supportive of each other on the field and were proud to get even one vote per season.
It speaks to the team-focussed character of umpire Paul that he was somewhat abashed at winning the prize at all, let alone three times in a row. He kept questioning me as if he wanted to give it away to someone 'more deserving.'
Fostering trust can be as simple a matter as to walk around, ask how everyone is, listen to any ideas or suggestions, and see what they might need to have a good day.
Opening up completely is a bit far for most settings, and is far better among peers rather than supervisors, so I like to leave a deck of old Scruples cards, or philosophical conversation starters (School of Life is good), in common areas, and encourage simultaneous tea breaks.
If you need to gamify this, listen for the sounds coming from your tea room. You will know you are winning when you hear a happy buzz.