In a recent article, I shared a leadership insight I want to expand on here. The insight is unsurprisingly intended for adults, but grew out of the wisdom of a game designed for fourth graders, however. (Yup, fourth graders.) It’s called the World Peace Game. Despite being originally aimed at kids, the Game’s influence on adults, including two US Secretaries of State and diplomats across the globe, is noteworthy. Among its many benefits, the World Peace Game teaches students to think for themselves. Rather than ease them in, the Game is more a baptism by firehose scenario, one that grown-ups would quickly liken to today’s VUCA business environment – one not only deeply volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, but challenging for leaders of any age to navigate.
You can learn more about the World Peace Game in creator John Hunter’s viral TED Talk (20 minutes of your time well spent to watch), but the basics are as follows. The students are given a dossier of dozens of interlocking real-world problems along with leadership roles, country affiliations and resources ranging from the ample to the scarce. To win the Game over five days of play, not only must all the interlocking problems be solved, but everyone – everyone – must end up better off than when they began.
If you’re a grown-up thinking about what it would be like to play, chances are your mind has already defaulted to all the adult problem-solving strategies and management techniques it’s taken you decades to learn. In other words, in your mental database, you’ve gone in search of the answers already tried and known to be true. Ten-year-olds don’t have that bank of knowledge. That makes it hard for adults to comprehend that once the Game and all its daunting complexities have been communicated, the kids control their own destiny, without all that knowledge and without any perceivable help from the grown-ups. How? By arming themselves not with answers but with questions – three central ones in fact, questions we adults know yet vastly underestimate the power of.
Not answers, questions
The three questions are deceivingly simple: Can we afford this? Can we accept the consequences? and, Does it make sense? Once shared, students are encouraged to use the questions to evaluate their ideas, navigate negotiations with each other and to generally regard them as a polestar toward their goals. Watching the Game unfold guided by these questions, it’s hard to conclude who learns more, students or their teachers.
Not unlike other leaders in other sectors, in the student-teacher dynamic, teachers automatically conclude it’s their job to lead, mainly by having the answers. But in the World Peace Game, those same adults are given a chance to set aside those well-honed and well-intended habits, pointing the kids and themselves back to the three questions.
At the start, the exercise feels awkward, frustrating, wrong, even. What it soon yields, however, is original thinking, critical thinking and a readiness to adapt to the uncertainties at hand – the very things necessary to navigate uncertainty. It’s precisely how students arrive at the unencumbered and unique ideas for how to solve the crises they consistently face. The thought is worth pondering a moment more.
A new take on leadership
Move your thoughts out of the Game’s simulated world and back into your own. As a senior leader, daily you’re tasked with solving an ever more complex set of challenges in an environment best thought of as your new abnormal, a place where the uncertainty never ebbs and only shapeshifts. What if, instead of racing to answers in response to that environment, you asked the three questions? What if instead of just asking them in your own head as the senior leader, you allowed those questions to be pursued collectively, openly, deeply, culturally? How would it make a difference if they were part of your organization’s daily routine? How many decisions past might you take back? What would you alter going forward? Think bigger still and imagine the self-sufficiency and productivity of team members aligned and practiced around such an approach – how might that change … everything?
In this new abnormal, the pressure to arrive at the correct answers and right now is unquestionably great. But that doesn’t describe the true goal of most leaders. The goal extends far beyond this moment. It’s to be able to confidently move forward knowing you can afford to do each thing you choose to do next, able to weather the consequences. More, the goal is to viscerally feel that the decision makes sense – not just now, but ongoing. Just as it’s not a single question that affords these things, the process of asking isn’t one-time or linear. It’s an ongoing cycle.
Daily opportunities for questions
What most of us forget is that every day we are afforded this opportunity to ask. But instead of taking it, we most often bunker down into fear and false impressions of what a leader is supposed to do and be, forgetting why the role exists at all. In the most successful version, leadership is about creating an environment in which everyone can lead. Senior leaders do this best not by providing all the answers, but by allowing the questions to be asked. When that happens, anything is possible – even world peace.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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