No interview series related to business simulations, or simulations and games in general, would be complete without including Clark Aldrich. The founder and former director of research for Gartner’s e-learning practice, he’s authored pivotal books in the field simulations and experiential learning: Learning by Doing and Simulations and the Future of Learning. He’s designed simulations himself, including serving as lead designer on SimuLearn’s Virtual Leader product. He constantly updates the meticulously comprehensive Clark Aldrich's Style Guide for Serious Games and Simulations blog. He regularly advises organizations trying to leverage innovative learning approaches (we’ve been fortunate to receive his input numerous times here at Harvard Business Publishing). And he has two books forthcoming this fall from Pfeiffer: The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games and also Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds: Strategies for Online Instruction. Every conversation with Clark is a learning experience and we were happy to have another opportunity.
The full title of one of your forthcoming books is The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games: How the Most Valuable Content Will be Created in the Age Beyond Gutenberg to Google. It’s an incredible piece of work that builds on what you’ve started with your blog – part dictionary, part style guide, and part reference document for a network of interrelated frameworks through which to take perspective on these tools. Why did you decide that now was the time, and that this was the format?
It has become clear to me that we are at the end of the era of linear content, which let's define here as beginning with the Gutenberg Press and ending with its manifest destiny of Google and Wikipedia. Today, we are seeing that every institution, even every category of institution, is showing the erosion of these previously load bearing pillars of linear content.
Most obviously, there is a deterioration of business models around the production of linear content. Newspaper and magazine publishers are failing on a daily basis. But there are also huge problems in those consulting industries whose major output are traditional analysis and recommendations to large clients. Corporations are simply no longer buying traditional reports of events that are accurate, even profound, because they just sit on shelves unused.
Finally, within corporations, most profoundly but also most subtly, there is a stunning consequence of the failure of traditional media. It can be summarized this simply: management skills just aren't being developed. You can't learn leadership from Googling it or reading a book about it. The raw inability of linear content to support the development of management skills used to be obscured by the fact that corporations first invested in mildy effective intensive management training programs, but more importantly relied on a productive relationship between boss and subordinate to get inexperienced employees pretty good at project management, or innovation, or leadership, or communication, just to name a few. But with the elimination of so many formal learning programs, and the outsourcing, increasing span of control in organization's structures, and the hoarding of skills and opportunities by many baby boomers, employees have had to rely more on linear content to learn critical skills, and they have failed them. As a result, the most important skills are such as leadership or project management are being poached, hunted, but not developed. This is causing a greater rift between the "haves" and "have nots" in organizational pay grades, while business groups have too little skills, putting on pedestals the too few people with the needed skill sets. This "under-developIng all"/"overpaying the top 5 percent" almost inevitably creates cultures of value extraction rather than creation. It also sets up even more failure as the baby boomers finally retire.
Meanwhile schools are grappling with their very essence, highlighted but not solved by the increased focus on testing. Let me give you two examples. At the college level, virtual universities are spreading, which are an exciting opportunity. Students can now take classes while still being productive. This creates a richer diversity of students as well as reducing the carbon footprint of schools and even their seemingly inevitable "bubble-world" nature. But virtual classes are risk of failing to engage students because they over-depend on lectures and text books. In other words, the part of the college experience that results in transcripts and even graduation requirement is pretty weak.
More significantly, there is a focus on many school advocates on what are being called "21st century skills." The most easily way of summarizing this approach is, "the world has changed - what schools need to teach should also change." But that simple statement will be hard, perhaps impossible, to achieve because schools have a dark secret. They rely on media. Schools can only teach in a way that is predictable and scalable if they rely on mass media. And again, because media today is linear, it forces a focus on passive "learning to know" skills rather than active "learning to do" skills. Schools today can't teach big skills like leadership, innovation, stewardship, and relationship management because they are not supported by today's linear media. Thus learning how "to do" is unscalable.
Finally, entrepreneurs do not see an opportunity in "learning to know" because they lost that battle to Google, and they have struggled with but now are admitting defeat in the "learning to be" opportunity because of Facebook. The last of the big three learnings, which is "learning to do" is still a wild west, but they sense an opportunity they are striving to fulfill. There is an opportunity for innovators in creating the next generation of IP capturing tools.
So while plenty see these events as unrelated, I see them as overwhelming signs that an era that arguably started with Gutenberg and has been perfected through Google, when the most valuable content was linear, is coming crashing down. Linear content is great, but cannot do everything we need it to do. The most valuable content is emerging to be around "learning to do."
Where do you now see glimpses of "learning to do" unfolding?
Computer game makers have shed light on a blazing truth - we can put people in increasingly challenging practice environments where they predictably but in a self-directed way pick up and apply previously unknown techniques in increasingly complex ways, improvising, and ultimately working with teams of other people, both asynchronously and real-time, to engage specific challenges and produce various types of intellectual property and other forms of value. SimCity, one special case, is a computer game in which people pay money to do urban planning for fun.
Online multi-player environments, a more generalized case, provide persistent environments where individuals and teams can build stuff. They can build everything from a red ball to a semi-working chemistry lab to a futuristic building. And they can build all of this with no limitation due to cost of materials or available physical space. Further, their every action can be tracked, providing interesting assessment and coaching opportunities.
Meanwhile, flight simulators have always made the broad case that someone can learn and then apply new skills by learning them in well designed virtual environment. But the interfaces, systems, and nature of results have to line up pretty specifically.
SimuLearn's Virtual Leader has added to the argument, as rigorously studied by third parties, that students can go into a virtual single-player environment and, when coupled with a bit of outside coaching, develop quickly leadership skills, including greater emotional intelligence, that change and improve how they behave on the job. People can actually become more broadly productive and valuable across a range of situations in the real world through working in through virtual situations.
So the proof is there. The foundations are there. We just have to spread the knowledge and expectations, best practices and tools sets, of serious games and simulations from the isolated communities today to a more general audience. This is already happening, and as a designer of off-the-shelf sims, as a designer for hire for custom sims, and an author, I hope to play my part.
You provide so many great frameworks in the book that serve as perspectives for understanding and differentiating these tools. One of my favorites from your writings appears early in the book – situational awareness. If learning is about gaining expertise, situational awareness is one facet of an expert’s domain knowledge – the ability to quickly assess an environment or activity and filter and focus on that information which is most critical. That ability could even be a shorthand description of leadership, or at least a critical aspect. You've pointed out that linear structures like books do a very poor job of teaching this type of skill. Can you give an example of how simulations and serious games do a better job?
This brings up a lot of issues. Sims teach more, better, and in less time, including entirely new type of wisdom (such as the situational awareness that you mentioned, and even areas like dead reckoning, which is another absolutely necessary ability of a leader). At the same time, researching a sim involves a new methodology. In fact, the book The Complete Guide to Serious Games and Simulations should be a critical reference for any researcher, whether they are an analyst at a major consulting company, a PhD student writing a dissertation, a self-help book author, or a high school student, even if they never, ever plan to create a simulation at all. The lens of a simulation surfaces new research questions that have typically fallen out of the "case study/pattern analysis" or data crunching mentality of too many writers, which is one reason the entire profession is in such trouble.
For your example of situational awareness, the research questions when talking to a subject matter expert might be: "What do you look for in a new situation? What do you see that tells you things are going well, or badly? What might you see that suggests that you not do anything, versus when to stop everything? What are actions you could take, and how does what you see inform what actions to take or not take?" When you first ask an expert these questions, they are a bit thrown. They are used to being asked about stories of success. However, any question creates a feedback loop of self-awareness, and I have found when I go back to practitioners at the top of their game (as opposed to academic experts, that are much less useful), they have internalized the questions and answer them much more easily the second time around.
The intellectual property that results from this methodology is more valuable, in part because it is more visual, more "first person", more comprehensive, with less of the huge holes that come out of a pure linear approach.
To more directly answer your question, building a sim involves building a context in which the new abilities must be used. In creating Virtual Leader, we had to create dynamic avatars that reacted in real time to both the player's actions and to the actions of the other avatars. This forced us to look hard at body language, among other things. Avatars may check their watch or scratch if they are bored, even blink more quickly if they are tense. For an upcoming sim, I am researching how the body language communicates various levels of trust in the player. This content necessarily impacts the feel of the sim, and forces the student/player to use that information to be successful in the sim, which if it maps to real life, transfers the skills and abilities to real life.
Your second new book is also coming out soon: Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds: Strategies for Online Instruction. This book focuses on how educators can assess and implement what you call Highly Interactive Virtual Environments, or HIVE. This is such a great framework for our times – many of us understand intuitively that there is some relationship between all of these tools and environments – virtual worlds, simulations, serious games, computer games – but it is very hard to articulate how they populate the landscape with regards to education, motivation, etc. Your HIVE framework provides a way to look at these that makes sense – and more importantly, when to look at them as a cohesive whole and when to take note of their critical differences. Can you tell us a bit about it?
I start the book with an example of a swimming pool. Many of us have watched children going through the various stages. The first stage is to look at a swimming pool as a scary, foreign environment. The first challenge is to get them to enter this strange world. Some rules are the same, some rules are different. There are new ways of navigation, manipulation, and to a lesser degree than in a virtual world, communication. Once they get comfortable just existing, they start to play. They invent games. Or instructors may give them light games to get them more comfortable. They play tag or play undersea kingdom. They see how long one can hold their breath. These games start off very casual, and tend to evolve to be more structured. Finally, we watch our children begin to test themselves with higher levels of risk, reward, and transferability. They go into the deep end, sometimes getting unwelcome mouthfuls of water. They practice strokes. They challenge themselves to swim the length of the pool underwater. They race each other. They get sore. This is the "educational simulation" part of the experience. They have now learned skills that can be transferred to other pools, and even lakes and oceans.
In this model, all games happen in the context of some virtual world. Likewise, educational simulations become a special case of games, with more rigor and transferability. Sometimes the flow between them happens organically; other times it has to be forced. But just making available a pool, for most people, doesn't result in a student who can do a great crawl or backstroke.
[For more on this, see Clark's blog entry on HIVE Learning]
Can you give an example of a strategy that educators can employ to effectively leverage one of these technologies in the classroom?
Any time a student has to enter and use (typically manipulate, navigate, and communicate), whether using a new detailed educational simulation or a new, open-ended virtual world, light games, often with some type of friendly competition or self-expression, work well. Students entering a virtual world may be asked to write the first letter of their middle name in the virtual sand. They may do it simply, or ornately. A professor should find transferable the skills of briefing and debriefing between a rich stand-alone sim and a project in a virtual world. However, many organizations need to be warned that buying access to a virtual world does not automatically give them an educational simulation. It is really just an authoring environment more similar to Adobe Flash than The Sims.
I think most people understand how simulation can be used to model system behavior, such as that we see in Sim City, or in a business simulation. And we also understand how avatars that are controlled by “first world” people can be programmed to be more and more realistic when they interact with each other in a virtual environment. But you describe the intersection between these two – how simulation can be used to program avatars to interact with us in virtual environments, and do so in ways that can teach difficult ‘soft skills’ such as influencing skills. Can you give an example of how such an interaction between player/avatar might unfold, and what techniques would be employed in the design of that environment to ensure a successful learning outcome?
I am the lead designer right now on a series of custom leadership simulations for a large organization. The simulation will use artificial personalities, as opposed to an artificial intelligence. To create this, we had to set up a series of physics to explain how the mind of these artificial personalities would work.
All of the simulations will be interactions where the player is trying to influence the person across the table to do something different. In many cases, what has to be done is known by the player, but in some cases a better option is possible but not initially evident. The player will interact with the on-screen avatar through dialogue that roughly falls into the categories of supporting the person, challenging a person, supporting an idea, or challenging an idea. Underneath these broad categories, players can choose very specific techniques such as supporting an idea through threats or rewards, or making emotional or intellectual appeals.
This is just a first person perspective, however, on a map-based artificial personality system. In this system, the player is really trying to move a ball on a map. The player will try to move the ball (which represents the target of influence's current actions) from one state to another. There are two other balls on the map as well, which represent what the target of influence is intellectually thinking, and what the target of influence is emotionally believing. These three balls exert gravity on each other. As a result, the avatar may be asked to do something, and then do it once, but then abruptly stop doing it (showing compliance not commitment), because his/her hands are not aligned with either head or heart (i.e. it is one thing to wear your seat belt once, it is another thing to see yourself as someone who wears seat-belts, and to understand the risks of not wearing one).
There will also be walls on the map, which represent resistance on the part of the target of influence. In some cases, the player will want to plow through these barriers (trying to challenge the resistance head on), but in other cases the leader may work around it.
Taken together, the first person perspective and the map-based artificial personality system, the player will learn about the difference between commitment and compliance, and the different approaches to navigating barriers as they come up. Further, the programming is not inherently more difficult than modeling cars in a parking lot.
In the world of business simulations, you mentioned to me recently how impressed you were with the Sim Games for Entrepreneurs developed by the Acton Foundation for Entrepreneurial Excellence (for the Acton MBA in Entrepreneurship in Austin, TX). What is it about these simulations that hit the mark for you?
First, to understand Acton, you have to realize that they are one of the hottest business schools for Entrepreneurship. This is in part because they are focusing on all three types of learning: learning to be, learning to do, and the traditional learning to know. The simulations are, naturally, around learning to do, and can exist outside of the other two, but are more powerful given the "to know" and "to be" aspects.
Thing that Impressed Me Number One: Given that, Acton decided that to deliver the best-in-the-world education that was their vision, they would need to build and use some number of educational simulations. While so many organizations spend years just debating this, the leadership of Acton made this realization quickly and acted upon it.
Thing that Impressed Me Number Two: Acton identified a series of areas where students routinely had trouble understanding to drive the creation of sims.
Thing that Impressed Me Number Three: They sought out developers of pure Flash-based mini-games, but then evolved to include talent from eLearning vendors as well.
Thing that Impressed Me Number Four: Acton made fully available the deep subject matter experts/practitioners in the areas they were covered to be full members of the development team. These subject matter experts were not compliant in the sim design, they were committed.
Thing that Impressed Me Number Five: The sims were each about one hour long, with very accessible graphics but rigorous and deep computational models. They represent a production value that is good enough to be impressive and classic, without breaking the bank of eye candy.
Thing that Impressed Me Number Six: They have so far built six simulations, roughly two at a time, cycling back the best practices learned from each into the next.
Thing that Impressed Me Number Seven: From the student reviews I have seen, they seem to work very well.
Acton has not just produced the right content for the right reasons, they have also role-modeled the right approach and right ambitions.
What piece of advice would you give to those of us who develop simulations for business education? I know that we should start by reading these forthcoming books! But is there a common mistake, oversight, or opportunity that you’ve seen as you assess the wider landscape?
There are three big mistakes that developers, students, and sponsors alike make.
The first mistake is in thinking first about multi-player activities rather than single player activities. Batting cages and tennis backboards come before a good scrimmage. But organizations too quickly put out multi-player activities, typically that are "run" by an instructor. This is familiar to most traditional instructors as a riff on role-playing. But it prevents the repeatability and practice that is essential to most learning, focusing instead on the big "aha." This allows for sloppy development work, obscuring the learning, and pushing back the hard work of the formalization and execution of the learning goals, and running into the traditional traps of mediocre training everywhere. A good sim needs a stand-alone, single-player (albeit with coaching) mode up front. Only after a robust and sufficient single player mode can a multi-player mode add greater depth.
The second big mistake is to have an instructor deploy a simulation without really believing in it. We have found again and again that the instructors who are apologetic and let trivia get in the way ultimately return to a traditional lecture based model. But the instructors who show tough love in supporting a simulation and don't let students throw up excuses not to challenge themselves love the simulations and swear they will never go back. The right instructors anticipate and even embrace the waves of frustration and resolution. (i.e. Student: "The sim doesn't work on my Macintosh." Best Instructor: "Make a friend who has a PC." Student: "I don't know what to do next." Best instructor: "Welcome to the real world. Figure it out.") These are the programs that transform a student.
The last big mistake is to infinitely "study simulations." So many organizations are stuck in paralysis. If the current team can't move ahead with simulation deployment, fire them and find someone who can. Bring in external experts and plot next steps. Buy and use off-the-shelf. There is no perfect answer. But we are at the end of the era of linear content. The trifecta of "Learning to Be, Learning to Do, and Learning to Know" is upon us. Fighting this tectonic change is not a strategy. Leading your own organization in recognizing, piloting, and embracing the new power and models is the safest thing to do.
That sounds like great advice. As always, thanks so much for your time and insights!
For more information:
Also see this earlier blog post reviewing one of Clark's books: http://saulnier.typepad.com/learning_technology/2006/09/educational_sim.html
Posted by: Denis | May 31, 2009 at 10:18 AM
Thanks for the praise! To sign up for a free account to try the Acton sims, go to www.actonsims.com. Or you can check out what other new things we're working on at actonmba.wordpress.com.
Posted by: Actonmba | June 12, 2009 at 04:30 PM
See all the business simulation interviews here:
http://saulnier.typepad.com/learning_technology/2009/06/business-simulation-interview-series.html
Posted by: Denis | August 21, 2009 at 04:32 PM