The gamification of L&D
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Part 1 – Rewarding Effort
There’s a new movement in education called Gamification; this involves learning lessons from the gaming industry about how to make learning compelling. Video games have a unique characteristic – people will pour hours into learning how to get better. What is it that makes learning in games so addictive, but learning in real life is often put off? Can we ‘gamify’ learning in real life, so that it becomes more attractive, and people put more effort in?
One unique factor in games is that in the learning process there are no losers. If you build an avatar (an avatar is an online ‘person’, whether that is a Sims character or a Level 1 World of Warcraft thief), the more you practise, the more powerful you become. This doesn’t mean that gamers don’t make mistakes – they do, frequently. It’s just that every success builds ‘experience points’. If you keep working at it, you will get more virtual money to buy in-game items that make you more powerful, and you will gain experience levels which do the same. Everyone will get to be a Level 90 player eventually. This is why games are so addictive – there is no downside, you are learning and progressing all the time. Some may progress slower than others, but effort is always rewarded. (If only real life was like this.)
This contrasts with the usual approach in schools where individual pieces of work are graded A to F. Gamification would suggest that each piece of work gained you points so that you gradually rose from a Level 1 to a Level 100, with each piece of work earning you credit.
If you really want to know what makes people work hard at learning, there is one interesting experiment that will shift your thinking. In the experiment, 400 children took a puzzle test. They were given feedback which differed by just a few words. The first 200 children were given their result, and told “You must be smart at this!” Children in the second group were told “You must have worked really hard!” Based purely on this, the children who were praised for effort selected harder tasks when given a choice between hard and easy; and they persevered longer at an impossible task. When they were then tested on a test of similar difficulty to the first, they scored 30% higher. The group who were praised for being smart opted for easy tasks when given a choice, gave up quicker, and their marks dropped by 20% on the equivalent test. It seems that where children are praised for native ability, which they can’t do anything about, they become scared of losing the ‘clever’ label and therefore are more cautious in attempting questions if they are not sure they will get them right. Children rewarded on effort won’t worry about failure, because they know that their effort will be rewarded. And they find they are capable of more than they thought.
What implications might this have for learning at work?
How often do we select and praise based on ability, rather than effort? Think about how people are selected into talent pools, for example – do you assess for star quality, or effort? Think about how you motivate graduates at induction, when the CEO tells them they are the creme de la creme and great things are expected of them. With Development Centres, what is most visible and stays on the record to be consulted – the scores you get? the preparation work you put in beforehand? the development work you do afterwards?
What would L&D look like, if we applied the idea of levelling from 1 – 100? T&P have come up with the idea of a Talent Stream, rather than a Talent Pool. In a Talent Stream, the business invests in people by offering them training or a workplace learning opportunity (like 3 hours with a coach, or the chance to observe a top performer in action). After this, people are rewarded based on effort. If they show that they have done work to consolidate their learning, apply it, and teach others how to do it – then they will be offered another investment of time or money. People can raise their ‘level’ – and gain access to the more expensive investments – by putting in sheer hard work. Some will progress rapidly through a number of learning opportunities, while others will move at a slower pace. The speed is based on the effort they put in. There are no ‘winners’ or ‘losers’, only the encouragement of constant development and growth.
Take Away
What would our L&D look like if people habitually earned the right to their development opportunities? Might working hard at actively processing and applying learning become the norm?
(And if you’re a parent…are you praising your children for their initial talent, or how much effort they’ve put in?)
Read more about Talent Streams