I’m not going to be able to say it better so I’m just going to quote from the source itself and pepper the blog with my own thoughts. The topic is leadership, management and MMOs. Holy extrapolation?! What does one have to do with the other, you wonder? My friend, you have never been part of a raiding guild if you have to ask!
Although this line of thinking has been bandied about and postulated for a few years, a recent article sent to me by way of my friend Nesto, from Harvard Business Review titled, “Leadership Online Labs” seeks to dispel the notion that online games are merely simple play, describing them as “enterprises [are actually] where sprawling online communities in which thousands of players collaborate with and compete against one another in real time within a visually three-dimensional virtual world—one that persists and evolves even while a player is away.” Which makes a lot of sense, as these persistent worlds consists of real-time interaction between avatars controlled by humans, not AI. It’s always been worth it to examine the leadership and group dynamics in these games, but few people took it seriously. They don’t know that completing a mission or defeating a new boss often requires myriad levels of collaboration, on-the-spot decision making, morale building, and all sorts of problem solving. Not a task for the feeble-minded or faint of heart!
What follows (in the article) is a discussion of what leadership means in-game, and how that can be different or similar to management in organizations. But this was not an article about how you can learn leadership techniques from awesome WoW raid leaders. What’s mentioned is “the tools and techniques they’re using will change how leaders function tomorrow—and could make them more effective today”. “Tools” being a state-of-the-art headset and “techniques” like withholding DKP points for latecomers. Just kidding!
What they imagine is: current virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Everquest may lend insight into the future of real-life organizational leadership. Imagine, we may one day face fire-breathing chimera in the elevator. Just kidding! But perhaps companies willing to adopt characteristics of game environments could exact some kind of leadership change. I think it’s very radical that an organization may consider changing their environment in order to support their leadership instead of finding the right people to lead in their current environment. It certainly would be in line with other progressive HR startup strategies that seek to retain human capital. Not the HR strategy of having a company sushi chef, although I heard that really helps with productivity too. And by “productivity”, I mean “getting fat”. What I mean is, we should all be so lucky.
