Stories

Tag: Humanitarian leadership

  • Why gamification is a disaster for humanitarian learning

    Why gamification is a disaster for humanitarian learning

    Is gamification an advantageous strategy that can help increase knowledge and application when it comes to humanitarian responses? What are these advantages? Can gamification contribute to better humanitarian preparedness?

    Certainly, if you have been forced to maniacally click through 500 screens of a boring “e-learning” from the past – dressed up with multicolored bells and whistles or cute little Flash animation – to finally get to the stupid quiz that is insulting your intelligence by asking you to recall what you will have forgotten tomorrow but that you need to pass to earn your stupid gold certificate before your field deployment, “gamification” sounds enticing. After all, you figured out how to game that e-learning module… so maybe games are the key to the future of humanitarian learning? Not.

    Is gamification one of the “current innovations in the field of learning”? Well, arguably, this may have been the case… over a decade ago. And it has long since been debunked. Can gamification help tackle some of the challenges we face in humanitarian learning? These challenges include scale (we need a lot more people ready to face disasters and volunteering to strengthen their communities’ resilience), reach (all the way to the last mile to people on the receiving end of aid), strategic relevance, and using new learning methodologies that model how humanitarians work together with and within communities, solve problems, and grow as leaders.

    Is there potential in using game elements for increased engagement and effective training of humanitarian staff? Often, “gamification devolves to just creating competitive experiences based on some sort of point-scoring model that is at-best glorified industrial psychology and not necessarily a great, giant outcome of innovation or game design,” explains Ben Sawyer, the founder of Games for Health. (Ben convinced me five years ago that serious games not gamification are a viable approach for some needs – just an incredibly complex, costly one.)

    My twelve-year-old son is a gamer. I observe and ocasionally participate. The immersive qualities of recent games are amazing, and the way they work your psychology is mind-blowing. Game studios understand the intricacies of human behavior and motivation at least as well as casinos do. So, yeah, imagine if we could put that power to use for the good of humanity…

    There are three obvious problems.

    The first problem is that building quality learning experienced as a game is very expensive. Creating a fully-cognitive experience with a more encompassing model of engagement and interaction starts at 50 million U.S. dollars (Final Fantasy XII) and there is no upper limit (200 million for Star Wars: The Old Republic).

    What could you do with the shoestring budgets available for learning and capacity building in the humanitarian sector? At best, try to short circuit the experience and use just a few elements in hopes that creating a ‘game’ or an experience that instills some of the core ideas of what a game is by definition will generate a bump in engagement. And that, my friends, is a recipe for failure in so many ways, but above all because it is disconnected from humanitarian learning needs.

    That, in fact, is the second problem. “For all staff, the abilities to learn, to reflect, to negotiate, to critically examine and analyse what they are seeing and hearing, are crucial,” wrote Connell Foley in 2008. Creating a game that is about more than stimulus-response is difficult (requiring talent that does not exist in our sector), costly, and therefore unlikely. As a learning approach, it is not the one you choose if you want to support the development of analytical capabilities or critical thinking.

    Increasingly, humanitarians, like other knowledge workers (cf. Robert Kelly’s longitudinal study), can only get things done through collaboration, because the knowledge they need is no longer stored in their brains. This is not the “Social Age” (another dead end I have previously debunked) but part and parcel of the Second Machine Age. Many video games are self-contained worlds, closed systems that fail to model the very complexities that matter the most in the messy real world that we live in – and that can make the difference between life and death when you are working on the edge of chaos.
    Robert Kelly: % knowledge stored in your brain needed to do your job from 1986 to 2006
    Robert Kelly: % knowledge stored in your brain needed to do your job from 1986 to 2006

    The third problem is that the diverse culture of video games contains a dominant strand that is just awful – full of racism, sexism, and violence that is deeply ingrained. The hottest video game right now is called Battlegrounds. It is a Battle Royale where the ultimate purpose is to kill the other 99 players and be the sole survivor whose reward as a “Winner Winner” is to earn a “Chicken Dinner”. Is this really a culture that can be reshaped to serve humanitarian needs, where a lone individual may be trying to save 99 others?

    We undoubtedly need new ways of learning and thinking for humanitarians. This has to include both core abilities and value skills. Gamification cannot deliver either of these, and forces us to work from a culture in which the dominant values are difficult to stomach.

     

    New ways of learning and thinking
    New ways of learning and thinking

    Gamification is about behaviorist rewards for selfishness, where you earn points for killing others. It is often innately, to the core, about competition – and contortions to make friendly, peaceful, collaborative forms of gamification are lipstick on the ugly pig of behaviorism that hides beneath the supposedly “innovative” character of gamification.

    Behaviorism is a widely-discredited learning theory. It might be relevant for humanitarian workers only if the nature of the work was “do this-do that.” It is not. Problem-solving, navigating the unknown, strengthening the connections between us, developing contextual knowledge that we can use… gamification cannot do any of that. And that happens to be precisely what we need the most.

    This brings us right back to the boring e-learning of the past. Clicking through screens and taking a quiz also contains behaviorist assumptions. And, in fact, some of gamification’s strongest advocates in the humanitarian space spent years building boring, one-dimensional, and ultimately ineffective media-heavy content before becoming enthralled with gamification.

    The fascination with the video games industry is easy to understand. This industry is already bigger than Hollywood and growing much faster. The potential of virtual (VR) and augmented (AR) reality, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies show that this it just the beginning. But “gamification” is precisely not what will help us harness this potential to support humanitarian work.

    The fetichization of gamification in learning is akin to that for “story-telling” in communication. Yes, humans play games and tell stories. That both are part of our experience and cultures poses a challenge for learning leaders, certainly. But gamification zealots seem to see every problem through their single, reductive lens – and what was originally an innovative idea full of potential becomes one more rote, knee-jerk response set of blinders.

    We need to say “game over” to gamification and commit resources to approaches that foster new learning and leadership to support humanitarian work – not sink precious resources into what was once a fad in the corporate learning space, more than a decade ago.

    Featured image: Sinistar Wallpaper – Beware — I Live! (Retroist.com)

  • Debunking the “Social Age”, a dead end for humanitarian leadership practitioners

    Debunking the “Social Age”, a dead end for humanitarian leadership practitioners

    “And I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still … put to use by reasonable men to reasonable ends, or by madmen to nonsense and disaster.” – Joseph Campbell, Foreword to The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, 1969

    Humans are social beings. If there is one constant in our experience, this is it. Of course, the tidal waves of digital transformation are reshaping the cultures of how we learn, share, communicate, and grow. But this constant remains.

    Claiming that our entry into a “Social Age” is the key to grappling with change is akin to clamoring that we are entering a new “Age of Transportation”. There are obviously new means such as electric cars. But to try to understand what is changing – and how we can learn, grow, and lead to harness change – through such a narrow lens is likely to lead to reductive, myopic approaches. It confuses both symptom with cause and effect with intent.

    Anyone who values peer-reviewed evidence will find nothing to discern whether the “Social Age” is a valid concept. Zero articles in Google Scholar and just one book written a decade ago by IBM’s vice president of cloud computing enablement. There is no science to describe or theorize the “Social Age”. Stripped of its marketing collateral, the pretty pictures painted by the “Social Age” reveal themselves to be hollow of meaning.

    There is no denying the constance of change. It is a truism by definition. The need to adapt is true by necessity. One should be suspicious when a concept appears to be premised by not one but two tautologies. Stating the obvious is a wonderfully effective way of reassuring those who maintain the status quo that only need to adopt a new vocabulary, distinguishing themselves from the “usual suspects”… when in fact they should be front and center in the line-up.

    There is no spoon
    There is no Social Age.

    So why is the “Social Age” concept a dead end for humanitarian practitioners, and especially the learning leaders amongst them who work on the outer cusp of chaos in emergencies, disasters, and toward greater community resilience?

    First of all, the humanitarian space is already littered by amorphous, vague, or empty concepts that, combined with opaque jargon, lead to analysis paralysis or just produce more litter. We need tools and approaches that help us clear the rubble, not add to it.

    Second, there are evidence-based approaches to understand and harness the sweeping changes we face, how they impact our work, and how we can build on them to strengthen how we learn and how we lead. Yet, given the dearth of impact measurement in humanitarian capacity-building, this not the first time that we have observed senior managers seduced by an imported concept with no sector-specific evidence to back it up, for reasons that have more to do with their own identity and moral quandary than with the actual relevance and usefulness of such imports. There is a need to resist our own insularity, but this should not lead to embracing obscure concepts as an end unto itself. The vocabulary of the “Social Age” proponents may be different, but how is it different from failed attempts of the past to build capacity through training?

    Third, nothing in the amorphous relativism of the “Social Age” explicitly recognizes the unequal power relations that are the heart of the contradictions in a humanitarian system that preaches localization from the center to the periphery, but lacks effective mechanisms (and, in some countries, domestic political will) to shift the balance of power. There is a growing number of promising projects that are already helping us find new, authentic and meaningful ways of growing collaborative leadership from margin to center. These are increasingly often being driven and led by those on the periphery. They are about inspiration, innovation, and collective responsibility to progress through self-directed growth and development. By contrast, the “Social Age” seems to be about renting and delivering the policies of others, rather than shared ownership and development around a compelling purpose. (Yes, I am paraphrasing Hargreaves and Shirley’s distinction between Third and Fourth Ways in their book about inspiring future for educational change.)

    Barbara W. Tuchman, in her analysis of why governments pursue policy contrary to their own aims and the needs of the people they serve, asks why we should “expect anything else of government”, answering that “governments have a greater duty to act according to reason” because “folly in government has more impact on more people than individual follies.” This echoes the peculiar responsibility of those who are in the business of transforming the aid business. Imported gimmicks are not where we should be expending time and effort. Staying silent is not an option.

    Yet, inertia remains a powerful force in our peculiar, mission-driven corner of the universe. Once an idea somehow gains currency, it breathes a life of its own. Lip service to failure tolerance has not changed the reality that once you have promoted a clunky concept, chances are that you will feel offended or threatened or both when challenged, especially if you lack the evidence for a rebuttal. There is little or no reward for critical reflection or questioning, for taking a necessary step back to reconsider, especially when scarce sector resources are being expended at for-profit corporate rates in the name of doing something different. This is unfortunate because stonewalling equates to lack of accountability – no matter how stringent the logframes and other formal mechanisms that may be in place. Is dissent ignored, tolerated, or does it open up to potentially nasty reprisals?

    La critique est facile, l’art est difficile. It is really easier to tear down than it is to evolve and/or reconstruct?  In fact, my perspective is shaped by substantive collaborative leadership work that I admire or the digital learning that I see transforming people and strengthening their individual and collective capabilities. Few blog posts about this work ever get written. I consider this failure to self-promote to be consistent with the modesty and authenticity of practitioners who are truly pushing the boundaries. We need a space where such stories can be told, not for competitive advantage in the marketplace of ideas for rent, but to strengthen and deepen the bonds of our yearning for a better future.

    Image: It’s a dead end baby (Andrew Mason/flickr)