Turn Change into a Game

Daniel Coyle writes about a fascinating experiment in his book The Culture Code. A group of business school graduates is placed in one room and a group of kindergarten children in another. Each group receives 20 sticks of spaghetti, some tape, a piece of string and one marshmallow. The task is simple: build the tallest possible tower and place the marshmallow on top.

If I had to put money on the outcome, I would probably bet on the students. They are educated people, after all. They have studied strategy, management and problem-solving. They can certainly calculate in Excel how tall the tower should theoretically be. They will probably begin by appointing a project manager, dividing responsibilities and agreeing on who is accountable for the marshmallow.

Kindergarten is less orderly. One child grabs the spaghetti, another takes the tape, and a third may already have eaten the marshmallow. Nobody conducts a SWOT analysis or asks whether all stakeholders have been sufficiently involved. They simply start building.

The first tower collapses. They build another. That one falls over too, so they try again. Eventually, something slightly embarrassing happens for the adults: the kindergarten children outperform the business school graduates by building a tower three times as tall.

Not because five-year-olds understand strategy better. They simply manage to run more experiments in the same amount of time. The adults spend much of their time searching for the perfect solution and establishing status. The children find the solution by trying.

They play.

The more I think about this experiment, the more it seems that organisations face exactly the same problem. We do not lack good ideas. They come from customers, employees, books, training programmes, competitors and, increasingly, from AI every day. If ideas were the primary source of competitive advantage, every company would already be excellent.

The problem begins after a good idea has emerged. On Monday morning, customers need answers, sales need to be made, invoices need to be sent, unexpected fires need to be put out, and someone has to attend a meeting whose original purpose nobody can remember. The new idea gets written down somewhere. A particularly good idea may even make it into a PowerPoint presentation.

By Thursday, it has become “something we should come back to”. A month later, somebody asks: “Whatever happened to that idea?”

Nobody knows.

Presumably, it is enjoying a peaceful retirement somewhere in the depths of SharePoint, together with all the other good ideas.

This is one of the strangest paradoxes of management. We invest enormous amounts of energy in finding new ideas, but far less in turning one good idea into a small experiment, an experiment into evidence, evidence into learning and learning into a new way of working.

It is rather like buying a new cookbook every week because dinner still is not ready.

An idea changes nothing on its own. Change begins when someone does something differently next Monday than they did last Monday.

This raises another question: do people really fear change as much as management books claim?

People voluntarily replace their phones, move to new cities, take up running, learn to sail and decide in January that they are giving up bread. Some even keep that final promise until February.

Human beings are actually quite changeable by nature. Perhaps people do not hate change. Perhaps they simply hate change that is badly managed.

We Have Made Change Far Too Serious

In companies, change often begins with a 74-slide presentation. Then a working group is formed. The working group creates an action plan. A steering committee is established to oversee the action plan, and the steering committee decides that another working group is required.

The final slide usually features a rocket launching into space, because apparently no credible transformation can take off without one.

Three months later, people are doing more or less what they were doing before.

What if change were treated more like a game?

In a good game, you understand what you are trying to achieve, you can see how you are doing, and you quickly discover whether your latest idea was brilliant or foolish. The objective is clear, but nobody dictates every step you must take to reach it. If you make a mistake, you do not have to produce a 17-page root-cause analysis. You can simply try again.

This does not mean turning work into a children’s birthday party where we hand out points, badges and gold stars. Adults do not need stickers for doing their jobs.

A good game does not make work childish. A good game makes the objective clearer, progress more visible and learning faster.

What would happen if the next major change initiative did not begin with a three-year transformation plan, but with a simple agreement?

We have 12 weeks. During that time, we want to learn how to do something we cannot do today.

Twelve weeks is long enough to create meaningful change, yet short enough to prevent the “preparation phase” from continuing until next spring.

For most people, three years is a little like a pension plan. You know it matters, but it is not something you think about much over lunch today.

Twelve weeks, however, is tangible. It means 12 experiments, 12 opportunities to receive feedback and 12 chances to become a little smarter the following week.

We Are Actually Playing Two Games at Once

A company cannot lock its doors for 12 weeks and tell customers to come back around Christmas because everyone is currently busy developing themselves.

Bills still need to be paid, customers served, goods delivered and sales made. A healthy company must therefore play two games simultaneously.

The first game is Run the Business.

Its logic is simple: do what you have promised to do. Sell, earn, deliver, respond to customers, maintain quality and do not let the building burn down.

KPIs have a perfectly sensible role here. They show whether today’s business is operating as it should.

Run the Business is not some dull, old-fashioned activity that innovation should replace as quickly as possible. Quite the opposite. If this game does not work, Grow the Business can quickly become Grow the Bankruptcy.

Customers value innovation—but usually only after the product they were promised has arrived on time.

The second game is Grow the Business.

It asks what we need to be capable of tomorrow that we cannot do today. Which customer problem could we solve in a completely new way? Which task could AI help us complete twice as quickly? Which new product, service or way of working could create our next competitive advantage?

If we play only the first game, we may become an excellently managed company from the past. Every dashboard is green, meetings begin on time and everyone is terribly busy.

The only problem is that the customer has gone somewhere else.

This is why KPIs and OKRs are two very different tools in my view. A KPI tells us which result we must achieve. An OKR helps us tackle an ambitious challenge where we know where we want to go but may not yet know how to get there.

One helps us manage today’s business well. The other forces us to discover tomorrow’s business.

The problem begins when we rename all our old KPIs as OKRs, place them in new software and announce that we are now agile.

A potato does not become an orange simply because you give it a new label.

The Most Important Thing About Google’s 20% Idea Is Not the 20%

Google made famous the principle of encouraging employees to spend part of their working time on projects they believed would benefit Google most.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote in their 2004 founders’ letter:

“We encourage our employees … to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google.”

This environment contributed to the creation of Gmail, Google News and early versions of AdSense.

For me, the most interesting part of the idea is not the number 20. What matters more is that Google’s leadership acknowledged something leadership teams often find very difficult to admit:

We do not know whose mind the next great idea will come from.

It might come from the marketing director, a developer or a customer service representative who has spent six months observing a problem that the leadership team hears about once a quarter on the third slide of a PowerPoint presentation.

People encounter problems and opportunities in their work that the organisational chart cannot see. A smart organisation gives them room to work on those opportunities.

But there is a catch.

Give one hundred intelligent people time to develop new ideas and you may end up with one hundred ideas. That does not mean you have an innovation system.

It simply means you have one hundred ideas—and probably another Teams channel.

Now the Real Work of Leadership Begins

An organisation needs a system that makes ideas visible, enables them to be tested quickly and allows the best ones to progress to the next level.

Which idea deserves a second experiment? Which one is worth bringing two more people into? Which one should receive funding? Which one could become the next quarter’s Grow the Business game?

The opposite question is equally important: when do we say to an idea, “Thank you, we learned something,” and stop pursuing it?

Companies find this surprisingly difficult. A bad idea is like an old sofa in a country house. Everyone knows nobody needs it, but nobody quite has the heart to throw it away.

Especially when the sofa cost two million euros and a board member decided to buy it.

At that point, it becomes a strategic initiative.

And naturally, you cannot simply end a strategic initiative. You have to establish a steering committee for it.

A kindergarten child is far more ruthless. The tower collapsed. Fine. Let us build another one.

They do not have to defend last quarter’s PowerPoint presentation or explain that the tower actually collapsed because of “temporary factors caused by the external environment”.

They learned something.

The Quarter Chooses the Game; the Week Teaches Us How to Play

This is where quarterly goal-setting becomes much more interesting than yet another management ritual.

Every 12 weeks, an organisation should look beyond today’s work and ask which few Grow the Business games are genuinely worth playing during the next quarter.

Some existing games are over. Some need another quarter. A new problem may have become important enough to justify quickly assembling a team around it.

And an idea that seemed brilliant three months ago may now feel slightly embarrassing—which is also an excellent result, because it means we have learned something.

Quarterly planning should not therefore be limited to assigning tasks for the next three months. It is the moment when we choose our games and decide which problems could take us to the next level.

As far as possible, people should come together around challenges they genuinely care about and where their strengths can create the greatest value.

This does not mean adopting a soft management philosophy where everyone only does what they enjoy. Sometimes we have to do things we do not like.

So far, the tax authorities have not accepted “submitting the VAT return did not align with my strengths” as a valid excuse.

But if we want creativity, courage and exceptional effort from someone, it is still worth asking whether they care about the problem they are working on.

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall have written extensively about the importance of designing work around people’s strengths and how much of a person’s actual work experience is shaped by their immediate team.

The point is not that every day must be fun. The point is that people give more when they see meaning in their work and can use what they are genuinely good at.

The quarter gives the game its direction, but the week gives it speed.

On Monday, we choose an idea worth testing. During the week, we take it into the real world. At the end of the week, we look honestly at what happened.

Not what we did, but what we learned.

If the idea did not work, that does not necessarily mean it was a bad week. Perhaps we learned in seven days something that would previously have taken six months—and a considerable amount of money—to discover.

If the idea worked, we make the next experiment slightly bigger.

Learning quickly also means abandoning what does not work quickly.

An idea may die in the second week, and that is excellent news because we have saved ten weeks.

Another may begin showing its first evidence in the fifth week and receive additional people or resources.

By the twelfth week, one experiment may have progressed so far that it is no longer an experiment, but a new product, process or way of working.

This completes the circle.

Yesterday’s Grow the Business becomes today’s Run the Business.

What was an experiment yesterday is now our standard way of working. Meanwhile, space opens up in Grow the Business for the next problem and the next game.

AI Makes This Question Much More Urgent

AI makes this entire topic more serious and slightly more amusing at the same time.

Companies buy Copilot licences for their employees, organise prompting workshops and count how many people are using AI.

That is roughly equivalent to buying new football boots for the entire team and then reporting to the board that our ability to play has increased by 37%.

As a leader, I would be interested in a more uncomfortable question:

What changed in the result?

Is the sales director selling more effectively? Is the marketing director generating more demand with the same resources? Can the finance director complete a forecast in two hours instead of two days? Is the leader making better decisions?

Or are we simply producing bad PowerPoint presentations twice as quickly?

Using AI is not a result. Completing a training programme is not a result. Even saying that “our people are actively experimenting with AI” is not yet a result.

A result exists when something important for the customer or the company becomes measurably better.

This is why every good game needs a scoreboard.

Imagine a football match where the score is not displayed. The coach tells the players not to worry: “We will have a performance review in December, and then you will find out how the match went.”

It sounds absurd, yet organisations consider this perfectly normal.

A person may work for months without having a simple answer to whether they are better at their most important role today than they were three months ago.

A good scoreboard is therefore not a control mechanism. It is a learning mechanism.

When people can see the objective, the result and their own progress, management gradually begins to shift from supervision towards self-management.

“We Don’t Have Time Right Now”

For me, the most accurate illustration of innovation is still the old cartoon where people are pulling a cart with square wheels and someone offers them a round one.

Their response is: “No, thank you. We’re too busy.”

It is funny for about three seconds. Then one of your own meetings comes to mind.

Grow the Business cannot be something we address only when there is time left over from Run the Business.

There is never any time left over.

Today’s work will always consume tomorrow unless we deliberately create room for the future.

This is why Google’s 20% idea is so interesting to me. Not because 20 is a magical number or because every company should now schedule innovation for two o’clock every Friday.

The principle matters:

An organisation must consciously protect some of its people’s energy from being consumed by the urgent at the expense of the important.

But allocating time is not enough. We also need a system that helps ideas develop.

From idea to experiment. From experiment to evidence. From evidence to investment. And eventually, into a new standard way of working.

Otherwise, we simply have many creative people doing fascinating things until Friday—things nobody knows anything about on Monday.

Perhaps the entire idea is ultimately surprisingly human.

We do not need to keep telling people that they “must change”. It is much smarter to give them a problem worth solving, the freedom to search for the best solution and the opportunity to see themselves improving.

We do not need to know every answer on the first day of the quarter. We need to know which questions are worth pursuing over the next 12 weeks.

And we need enough courage to admit when the first answer turns out to be foolish.

At the end of the twelfth week, the most interesting question should not be whether we completed every activity entered into Excel at the beginning of the quarter.

A much better question is:

What can we do now that we could not do 12 weeks ago?

If the answer is “nothing”, then no development—or transformation—has taken place.

Even if we held 38 meetings, established seven working groups and produced an exceptionally beautiful action plan.

But if people have learned to do something new, the customer receives more value, an old problem has disappeared and a small experiment has become a new way of working, then something far more valuable has happened.

Run the Business remains strong, but Grow the Business has changed what the organisation is capable of becoming next.

We did not simply implement change.

We learned how to change.

And if the first marshmallow tower still collapses, that is all right.

At least we did not spend three years executing a transformation plan before finding out.

Next Monday, we will build another one.