Latest / Glovisor Podcast / Your Team Isn't Ready for Pressure—Unless You Rehearse It | Stephen Balzac [Ep 74]
Transcript
- Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: What if the secret to high performance teams isn't working harder, but learning how to think, connect, and act differently? Welcome to the Glovisor Podcast, where we explore business growth, communication, and personal development through real conversations with people who make an impact. is a consultant, author, and speaker. He is the president of Seven Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm that teaches leaders how to develop strategy, surface real decisions, and build teams that learn faster, act braver, and perform better. His latest book is The LARP Effect Creating Connection and Competitive Advantage through story, ritual, and roleplay. Glovisor welcomes Doctor Steven Balzak. Steve: Thank you, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: it's a pleasure to have you here today. Steve let's start off with what specific problems do you solve and who do you help? Steve: So I help leaders and teams perform better under pressure. One of the real problems in business and it's best expressed through a quote from the late novelist Terry Pratchett, which is when you do emergency simulations, what's the one thing you always leave out? The emergency. And the problem is that we're all really good at making the right decisions when there's no pressure. know, no matter what topic you're talking about, whether it's you know financial matters or how to respond in a fire or dealing with a pandemic. I did that in 2006, actually a a live simulation. we're really good when we're sitting here calmly, there's no pressure, I can pick up my coffee, I can take a sip. But when you put people into a story and you create some tension, suddenly all those perfect solutions fall just disappear. And so what I do is I create simulations that are narratively intensive, socially intensive, and plot complex so that people can't optimize their behavior and they get caught up in the story. And they feel the emotions they would feel if this were real. And because it feels real, they act more like what they would do in real life. And with practice, you learn how to manage that tension and manage that excitement and make better decisions. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Wow, this is really interesting. And I'm gonna move some questions around here because now you just brought up something that is so different. So now who is the ideal client that you work with? So that way we can get a little bit of the background of how you would generate this process for people to be put under that pressure and work through those process and steps. Steve: So I work typically in tech, mostly because that is where I've had most of my my experience. I actually started out as a software developer back in the 90s before moving into organizational psychology. And I work with teams anywhere really it can be very small up to arbitrarily large, but in terms of the simulation activities, typically 20 to 40 people at a time. And What I do is I put them in a pre-constructed scenario. typically the scenario is you're all characters from popular fairy tales and you're all gathered together in one place. So, you know, imagine taking all those fairy tales, mixing them together. You know, it's a little bit like what Marvels does with the Avengers, except with fairy tales and it's shorter and it's more fun. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: That's so interesting. Now, what made you change your career into in focus into this aspect of it? Steve: Well, I'd like to say that this was a brilliant plan that I'd had since childhood. but the truth is I I kind of backed into it initially. When I was a undergraduate at MIT, I started writing live action role-playing games. And I started doing this because I played a couple of killer games, and killer gets boring really fast. And so I started to add plot to it, a little bit of a storyline, a little bit more complexity. And over the course of of several years and Grades, it probably would have been better if I hadn't done this. I developed this much more elaborate, much more complex story-driven game. And then when I graduated, I continued to run these just for fun, for friends of mine running them at like science fiction conventions, things like that. And you know, I met other people who were doing it and kind of learned from them and sort of picked up techniques here and there. And evolved my craft. And eventually I was a director at a comp director of operations at a software bioinformatics company about the late 90s, early 2000s. And a whole bunch of people from the company came and played in the game, in one of my games. And all of a sudden I'm like, wait a minute. What I'm seeing here in the game compressed into a weekend is what I'm seeing spread out over months in the office. And I started to realize, the person who is really h struggles to organize people in the game, yeah, that's the type of thing he trul struggles with at the office. But when he has this other type of problem, he does really well with it. Maybe that's what I should be asking him to do. And so it was that realization that this connection and that how well the behavior translated that then triggered My interests in going back to school and learning the psychology behind it and in starting consulting and working with companies to try to build this. And I ended up doing doctoral research on the use of these games for leadership development, or specifically leadership, decision making, and working with a team. And that's what led to my most recent book, The LARP Effect. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: is this something that you have to have that gamer mindset to really get into this? Let's just say you come into a new company or an organization that needs you to come in, and now you have a hundred people sitting in front of you. Are Steve: Uh-huh. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: they all going to embrace this immediately? Or the the non-gamers are just a little bit on the outside of that? Steve: Well, I think some people will always feel a little bit of what the heck is going on? This seems really crazy. But this is not an activity that requires a gamer mindset in in the sense of I have to really like playing tabletop games. Because the nature of this type of game is that it feels a lot like any corporate meeting. You're at a big conference, you're meeting other people, you know, you probably have some objective for being there. Whether it's making connections, selling product, checking out what your competitors are doing, you know, any of these different things depend on the nature of the conference. So all that we're doing in one of these games is taking a very familiar scenario, but we're creating a story around it and giving you a mask to wear, i.e., a character to play. And the advantage of playing that character is that it frees you to experiment with different behaviors. Experiment with different ways of interacting with people, and experiment with different ways of developing strategy to accomplish your goals. and because you're wearing a mask, i.e., as again a character, things you do badly, or if you do something that feels really stupid in the moment, you can blame the character. And when you do something clever, you go, that was me. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Yeah. Steve: And you know, you can look at that and say, is that a cop out? Doesn't matter. It lets people learn. And that's the key thing. It creates an environment where people can make mistakes, fail, get up again, and find different ways of accomplishing goals without worrying about a quarterly or annual review where your manager says, Well, why'd you do something that stupid? Wasn't it obvious that it you shouldn't do it? Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: I like that a lot because I mean just like you said, I think it gives it the opportunity to have everyone involved, but without feeling like you're probably selected the wrong thing, maybe I said the right thing, or whatever, either either direction. But the ultimate goal is still fulfilled. That's awesome. Now, can you share a client success story that shows the transformation that your work creates? Steve: So I've got a couple of interesting ones. and I mentioned this right at the beginning. Two back in 2006, I was hired to do a pandemic simulation. This was back when the big news was all about the potential outbreak of a pandemic bird flu. And so we're all looking at the birds here. And and so I div I had played in a number of tabletop simulations that purported to do bird flu analysis, and they were just emotionally dead. You know, you went there, you sat around a table, you said, yes, yes. Yeah, obviously if there's a big pandemic and people are dying, I'm going to close the airport. You know, everyone would pretty much agree. one of them added the little bit of, you might die of the flu, but the way that happened was that one guy walked around the room and would randomly tap you on the shoulder and say, You just died. And once you kind of figured out that's how the mechanism worked, It's like you just avoided that guy. And then you never got the flu. So it didn't have any real emotional resonance. So that when I get got hired to bring in and develop a pandemic flu exercise for the National Capitol region, I did a mix of some people were in their na in their roles. part of this was because I was brought in very much at the last minute, so I didn't have time to write a full 130 character game. But I cr so I t I played off We already had, which was business, government officials, local medical. And then I also wrote a number of characters to interject some of these different conflicting views. So you had businessmen who didn't want airports closed down because they were preparing for a major conference that was going to make a huge difference to the success or failure of their business. You had you had doctors. Who were concerned about whether or not they had adequate supplies if something went wrong. And some of these players could play off of the people who actually did these things in real life. But it meant that these different perspectives got interjected into the story in a way that they just didn't just get ignored. And so one of the things that happened is as the pandemic starts to spread, the person playing the governor. Is suddenly hearing from all these different people, some of whom are legitimately, this is what they do in real life, some of whom are in the game, but within the context of the game, it all feels the same. And he's struggling to make good decisions. And meanwhile, there was a game mechanic where you could catch the flu by being exposed to someone who already had it. And this is a simple thing of, you know, if someone had the flu and they spoke to you, they'd hand you a a sticker. And if you got a sticker, you draw an envelope and some of those envelopes told you to start distributing more stickers and open another envelope. And so your flu would progress over the course of the thing. And so part of it the game went from like, this is fun to this is real when the first person died of the flu. Because they figured, it's this is cute, this is harmless. And then someone got through and having done absolutely nothing to deal with their their case of the flu, ended up dying of it. And which was set up, by the way, it looked a lot more likely to die than you really would. This guy had to work at it, but he he managed it. And but it changed everyone's mindset. And the game got much more serious after that. And what came out of this was A detailed analysis of gaps in preparedness in how different departments didn't have good communication, how messages to the outside world, because we had players who were remote, who whose only information was what people within the the auditorium were posting on a bullet on an internal bulletin board, plus newspaper articles that would come out about the progress of the pandemic. And they went into they were panicking. So Because of that, you know, it became very, very real. And these gaps in preparedness came out of it. And I actually go into this in some detail in the appendices to LARP effect, looking at how we came up with this. And I will say that this was 2006. And then when we had that swine flu epidemic or swine flu outbreak in early in the Obama administration, they followed the recommendations that had come out of this activity. Obviously I have no way to know what was going on internally and how much they looked at this and said, this is it. But it is interesting that these are the things we identified and those were the things that then showed up later. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: this seems extremely involved. If an organization Steve: Mm-hmm. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: contacted you today with a hundred members or players, how long does that take for you to to organize and write all of these different roles? Steve: So if an organization contacted me today with 100 players, what I would actually do is take them in groups of about 30 through the same scenario. So we'd have three different groups, they'd go through the same scenario. Well, what this does is produce some interesting effects. First of all, the people playing in a scenario get to experience the story, they create story with each other, and this is an important part of. Is that they're creating a shared experience and a shared set of stories. Now, because I've just taken three groups through it, they will all come away with a different version of those stories because the game is not set up to go particular have a particular outcome. So what players do changes how it goes. So then the final step with this would be to then bring everybody together to share their experiences. And so now people start to connect, even though we might have played in different runs of this activity, different runs of the game, we can say, in my version, this, I did this. Wait a minute, what did you you did? What? I never thought of that. And what happens is people start to connect over their different versions of the story, and they start to recognize Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: let's just say you you divide them into those three different groups and they complete their own segment, do you encourage them not to communicate with other people until you've done the other segments as well? Steve: Yeah. Yeah. It works best. It it won't destroy it, it won't break it, but it will work best if each group enters the scenario essentially unknowing not knowing what is gonna happen or what the other groups have done. And that's not always possible because sometimes, you know, people do this and they talk about it and then I run it for a different group in the same organization a year or two later and they've heard stories. But even then it still works. And that's the beauty of it. Because even when you think you know it's gonna happen, it doesn't always happen that way because different people make different decisions. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Now let's go back to the book. I want to find out what made you name it the LARP effect? Steve: Well, I was really trying to capture the idea of what I'm talking about. And you know, I was bouncing a bunch of titles back and forth with Springer, and they were like, team building using live action roleplay, friends, LARP. And I'm like, Well, that'll put them to sleep. So I was really I I really wanted to try to capture what's happening here. And what's Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Yeah. Steve: happening is it is live action roleplay when you get a certain level of complexity. Produces just a deeper reaction. It produces this deeper substrate of shared experience, shared story, shared connection. And when you start putting those things together, that's where you start to really build your company and build your culture. Because you know, I I don't now go off on corporate culture for a moment, but if you think of what culture is, which is a set of shared experiences, shared stories. Successes, where we succeeded, well the more we can create shared experience, the stronger and more resilient our culture becomes. The more culture, the more people are, you know, separate experiences, the more fragile the culture is, the more vulnerable it is to a sudden shock breaking the cohesion of the company. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: have you found that there's a specific industry that this will not apply to? Steve: Well, I have not found that, but again, I've primarily focused in in tech. So it is entirely possible that there are other industries where this wouldn't work. But I will say that the thing that makes these games work is it's based in the idea of human connection. So as long as we're working with other people and we're interacting with other people, then we're going to benefit from experiences that help us connect. And develop shared context and shared story with other people. Now, if you have an industry where they're primarily employing Klingons, I cannot make any promises. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: So now once these segments you've met with them independently, then you brought them together, now Steve: Mm-hmm. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: that's the end of the game. And Steve: Now we debrief it. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: you debrief it. Okay, how does that work after that? Steve: So now we have a conversation. And in a case like you described where I have three different groups, I would debrief each group individually before doing a global debrief. But the whole point of the debrief is to reflect on the experience, to pull out what happened, what did you expect? What did you not expect? And again, I go into this in a fair bit of detail in the book, you know, with lists, you know, various types of questions I might ask. But for example, if I'm doing leadership training, I will ask, you know, were you did you start out in a leadership role? What happened to you in that role? How did you get people to listen to you? When did they listen? When did they not listen? You know, if you didn't start out in the leadership role but ended up in one, how did that come about? What did people pay attention to? What did you do? You know, what experiences did you have? I ran this game very recently for a group and a group of of of kids who were actually getting ready to start college. And they had this very interesting experience because part of the whole activity was to help can teach them that they needed to work with other people. These were very smart people who knew who would always, you know, like all high school kids, you know, you are always expected to do all your work on your own. Well, one of the kids said there was a point where a bunch of people came and and ganged up on me. And I'm like, where's my where wait, where are my allies? And then I realized I hadn't made any. And this was a real eye opener, but I've seen that same pattern play out in business settings where people suddenly realize: wait, where are my allies? I didn't lay the groundwork. I didn't find allies before I needed them. And so they weren't there when the moment came that I needed to call for help. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Yeah, and you can see how extremely Steve: Whether that Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: valuable that would be. Steve: Yeah, and when you think about how much being able to ask for help is a critical part, especially in these very complex world we live in, with very complex tasks that one person cannot do by themselves. Frankly, even with AI, you you know, you still at some level meet other people. Whether or not we're talking about a fantasy scenario where yes, you might be attacked by a dragon, a golem, and a djinn, if you don't have allies, or whether you're just Stuck and you need to be able to stand up and walk over to somebody and say, Hey, can you help me with this? If you haven't laid the groundwork, if you haven't built the social connection, it's really hard to do that. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Absolutely. Now what would you say would be the most important takeaway that you want listeners to remember from today's conversation? Steve: That organizations don't rise to the level of their strategy, they fall to the level of their rehearsal. It's what you practice that's what is what you're going to do under pressure. Not what you imagine, not the best case scenario, not your optimistic projection. It's what you've practiced. And if you haven't practiced, you don't know what you're going to get, but it's probably not going to be good. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: before we share where people can connect with you, do you highly recommend that they read your book first? Do you think that that's probably one of the most important things to do so they can understand the LARP process first before they choose to move to the next step? Steve: Well, I do think reading the book would help a lot. the book goes into a lot of organizational development issues in the course of explaining how LARP and organizational development connect to each other. In a sense, this type of LARP is applied organizational psychology. However, there is also no reason why a business would should wait. If they've got you know, if they need to build a stronger team, well, the best time to start is well it's always like Last month, but the second best time is now. You know, if you want your teams to be better, you want leadership to be more effective, you want better decision making, the longer you wait, the longer it's gonna take. Because even once you've done this, you still have to practice, you still have to internalize the lessons. These are not things that happen overnight any more than an athlete can go out and learn a brand new technique and then do it right the first time. That's what they that's why we need to train and that's why we need to practice and that's why we need this level of immersion so that we're emotionally connected to what we do. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: As you said earlier, is laying down the groundwork, not waiting to the last minute. Steve: Yes. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Now, where can people connect with you? Steve: So I can be found at seven steps ahead or www.sevenstepsahead.com. that's number seven. It should work even if you write out the word, but you can find me on LinkedIn if you search for Steven Balzac. And it's LinkedIn.com slash in slash Steve Balzac. those are the easiest ways to get a hold of me. And then, you know, you can find my YouTube channel, has a couple of things on it. this podcast will eventually end up on there. yeah. But best thing, again, reach the website. you can also find out information about my other books there. And I maintain a blog called thinking dot seven stepsahead dot com where you can find my latest thoughts and articles on organizational behavior and the ways to improve decision making, leadership and team building. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: Well, Steve, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time and the value you've shared. Steve: Well, thank you very much, Joe. I've really enjoyed this. Joe Abreu - GLOVISOR.com: You're welcome. Thank you everyone for listening. If this episode inspired you, make sure you share it with someone who needs it. And don't forget to follow the Glovisor podcast for more conversations that make an impact. Till the next time.