My full-time work is leadership training. I am a corporate trainer and I specialise in the topic of leadership. Leadership is about leading and managing people. It is about understanding people, being able to communicate well with people, and being able to influence and motivate people. There are techniques and methods that can be applied. I have been a boardgame hobbyist longer than I have been a leadership trainer. Attending training can sometimes be dull. For learning to be effective, the lesson needs to be engaging. As a learner I want to know how I can apply theory to practice. I designed a business simulation activity for my training courses called Rivers and Lakes. It uses many concepts from boardgames and it plays like a giant boardgame.
The Activity
Rivers and Lakes is a weird name. It is a literal translation of the Chinese word "jiang1 hu2" (江湖), which refers to underground societies. The setting is Hong Kong gangster movies of the 1990's. Imagine The Godfather in Asia. In the activity there are many Hong Kong movie and TV celebrities, and also scenes from gangster movies. You play gangsters from two powerful clans, the Kong family and the Woo family. If the number of students is high, I add a third clan, the Lee family. There is a hierarchy within each clan - the bosses, the seniors and the juniors. Each clan has a reputation level. That's your victory points. At the end of the game, a clan wins by having the highest reputation. Individuals in the game have three personal stats - money, skill and relationship. Every player has a secret personal goal, and usually it is to gather as much as possible one of the three stats. So the team has a goal, and the individual has one too.
The game is played on a giant map of Hong Kong. Part of the game is area control, like Risk. At the start of the game, each clan chooses a base. You get that territory for free. For the rest of the game, you need to commit resources to capture any new territory. Every territory has four stats. There is a reputation value. Capture the territory and your clan reputation goes up. There is a personal stat, i.e. money, skill or relationship. Capture the territory and everyone in your clan increases this particular stat. However, if you lose this territory, everyone decreases the stat too. The last two stats of a territory are resistance and defence. Resistance represents how hard the territory is to capture when not yet controlled by any gang. Defence refers to the defensive bonus when a gang controlling the territory defends it against an invading gang.
Before the activity starts I ask my students to select a character to play. Every clipboard is a different character. The profile photos are all Hong Kong celebrities from the 90's. So Jackie Chan's photo is from that era - you get to see the young Jackie Chan. The characters have various starting stats - money, skill and relationship. Picking a character is pretty random. People just choose based on the celebrities they like, because at that point I have not explained the stats yet.
You get to choose your own name for the activity
There is no fixed number of rounds for the game. I normally play around 6 rounds. I adjust this based on the situation during training day, i.e. how fast the students are in making decisions and completing rounds of play. Every round, the clans simultaneously decide a territory to attack. They can invade uncontrolled territories or another clan's territory. Sometimes they end up attacking one another's territories. I announce a crisis at the start of a round. There are many types of crises. For example there is one called pirated VCD's. If a certain number of members of a clan participate in resolving this crisis, the whole clan gains some benefit (e.g. more money). Otherwise, they get nothing, or they may even be penalised.
Every round, the most important procedure is the circle. This is a voting mechanism. Here's how it works.
Every student gets three pebbles - red, white and brown. When performing the circle, all members of the same clan stand in a circle, hold one stone in their fists, and extend their fists towards the centre. They then open their hands at the same time. Now you can discuss all this and coordinate who to hold which colour beforehand, but you still have to go through the procedure. From a gamer's perspective, this seems weird and unnecessary. In practice, I do see students making mistakes due to miscommunication or misunderstanding. It takes conscious effort to coordinate the actions of these big groups.
The stone colour in your hand means different things. If you have a brown stone, you participate in resolving the crisis. The outcome will be different for your clan depending on how many commit to this. If your stone is black, you participate in offense. If your clan is attacking an unoccupied territory, you need to have enough attackers to overcome the resistance. If your clan is attacking an opponent clan's territory, only members holding black stones may join the fight. If your stone is white, you are a defender. When being attacked, only defenders may participate in defence. There is a fourth option - holding out an empty hand. No stone means you are going for training (self improvement). You may increase (not by much) any one of your three personal stats. When your clan attacks a territory or resolves a crisis, the stat you gain may not be the one which is your personal goal. Only when you go for training you can choose which stat to increase.
There are several different crises. There is one about internal strife. Some members get promoted while others get demoted. There is one about betrayal. Some members are forced to join another clan. Crises are my way of creating different scenarios and presenting tough decisions.
Normally in the first few rounds the clans expand peacefully, because there are still many unoccupied territories. But the map is not that big. Sooner or later they will clash. They will try to capture one another's territories, and they will fight. Fighting is simple. For each battle, a die is first rolled to determine which personal stat will be compared - money, skill or relationship. Attacker and defender simultaneously assign three fighters (who have the corresponding stone colours), and their personal stats are compared in a series of three one-on-one fights. You need to win 2 out of 3 to win the battle. If the attacker is victorious, they capture the territory. They gain reputation and the personal stat of that territory, and the defender loses these. This is often a huge swing. However if the attacker fails, they have just wasted one round achieving nothing. That is painful.
The white vans are attack markers
When the time is about right, I declare that the next round is the final one. I have designed quite a number of rounds. If I were to play every round I have designed, the activity may take 6 hours. Normally I will play the first 5 rounds or so, and then I skip to the final round. The final round is specifically designed to create a climax. Unoccupied territories have their resistance lowered to zero, and clans get to make three attacks instead of just one. This change can result in a major shake-up.
At the completion of the last round, the reputation levels of the clans are not yet final. There are still some bonus points to be awarded. All students are grouped according to their personal goals and then ranked. For example students whose goal is to be as rich as possible line up from richest to poorest. Those in the top 30% earn bonus reputation for their respective clans. After these bonuses are awarded, the eventual winning clan is declared. Only at this time I explain who the true winners are. The true winner needs to be in the winning clan, and also need to be in the top 30% in their category. If you fulfil only one of the two conditions, you are only a partial winner.
If you think of Rivers and Lakes as a boardgame, it's not very complicated, at least from a gamer's perspective. It's just a little unusual because it is designed to accommodate a big group. I have played it with around 15 players at the lowest, and around 90 at the highest. Based on the many sessions I have run, the ideal count is 20 to 50. With too few, the game is not challenging enough. I designed it to simulate difficulties in communication and coordination in large organisations when people have different agendas. With a low player count, the activity is not as challenging as it is intended to be. At a high player count, the activity becomes difficult to manage. To non-gamers, this is not an easy activity to learn. With a large group, some will fail to keep up, and they give up. They let their teammates handle the activity, and they go sit at the back of the room to chit chat. This is the bystander effect. People feel that there is someone else who will handle the problem, so they don't need to contribute. This problem is often too much for the students to handle. The activity itself is hard enough for them to need to also manage this behaviour which emerges in large groups. However there were groups which managed to keep this in check. I salute them when they can do that.
I use slides showing movie scenes
The Learning Topics
Having fun is good and all, but this is a training activity, so the objective is learning and not just having fun. This activity explores leadership by putting the students into a difficult situation. Learning the game is not easy. Organising themselves is not easy. Managing communication is not easy. All this while they also need to compete against the other teams. All this simulates real-life situations, when we need to work under stress and uncertainty. We need to keep learning and stay flexible. When people come together to solve a complex problem, they learn something about themselves. They learn what they are capable of. They also learn what their weaknesses are. Whether they succeed of fail in the game, they gain insights that can be applied to real work.
In the activity you have organisational goals and individual goals. The message I want to convey is the importance of aligning them. As a leader, if you want your team to be motivated to work towards the organisational goals, the organisation too much help the individuals achieve their personal goals. When these two goals align, the individuals will help the organisation succeed. Some individuals pursue wealth. Some pursue personal growth. Some want to belong. When a leader is observant and supports their people in achieving their personal goals, they will earn the respect and support of their people. They build strong teams.
When I run this activity, I always pose this question at the end: Do you know the personal goal of your teammate? Very quickly someone will object: But you said our personal goals are secret! I then say: I said you must never show your personal goal card to anyone else, but I never said you cannot tell your friends your personal goal. At the start of the activity, I intentionally mislead my students. At this point, there will always be a few who tell the group that they do know the personal goals of their teammates. They know not because their teammates have told them. They know because they have been observant about the choices and suggestions their teammates made. When there is mutual understanding in an organisation, people are able to collaborate more meaningfully and effectively. Everybody wins.
Rivers and Lakes can be used to explore many other leadership related concepts. For example the different roles which top executives, middle management and frontline workers play. Why is it that in the activity when the bosses decide on which territory to attack, there is still the need for a certain percentage of clan members to show a black pebble for the attack to be successful? In the real world, if most people in a company do not believe in the direction the CEO sets, the company probably won't be successful in pursuing this direction.
The Design Considerations
Designing an educational game or a training activity is very different from designing an entertainment-only game. The objectives are different. A training activity is meant to teach concepts and foster learning. When people learn through a game, it is much more engaging and memorable. The experience is immersive. You get hands-on experience. Doing is always more effective than passively listening. You understand better, and you learn to apply. The design for Rivers and Lakes started with the learning objectives. The game mechanisms were all built around that. I chose the gangster movie setting simply because it was entertaining. Also I do believe running a criminal organisation takes just as much leadership skill as running a business organisation.
One challenge in designing this activity is how to keep everyone engaged. How to make everyone feel they play a significant enough role. The circle mechanism is one way to try to achieve this. Doing the circle properly requires everyone to understand the mechanism. The clans need to work out a way to coordinate. Everyone must pay attention. Even just one person messing up can completely ruin the clan's plan. Everyone having their own clipboard to manage and their own personal stats to update is another way of creating ownership and engagement. The personal goal is something you have to be responsible for, and no one else can do it for you. It is also a core part of the learning objective.
Many training activities out there are boardgames, supporting about five players at most. If there are 30 attendees, you need six sets, and the attendees will be playing separately at six different tables. When designing Rivers and Lakes I deliberately wanted to create something which everyone played together. Not at separate tables. I want my students to face the challenge of managing complex organisations and conflicting agendas. There are difficulties that come with this design direction. There is less individual contribution compared to if students play at tables of five. If there are only five people at your table, you will have more opportunities to speak up. If there are fifty, it's more challenging. And that's part of the point.
I use a giant map for the sake of visual impact and presence. The photos I take at the training sessions look great! You feel like some general or tactician poring over the map of a battlefield. I bought two chopping knives for the sake of immersion. Sometimes I flash a knife when running the activity. That always invokes wows and laughter. The background music I play are Cantopop songs mostly from the 90's. That's the era of Alan Tam, Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, George Lam and Aaron Kwok.
When I got into the boardgame hobby in 2003, I would not have imagined that boardgames would become part of my work. For many years boardgames have been just entertainment. Now, they are also a teaching tool and a communication strategy. They are part of my livelihood. This is great fun and highly satisfying for me. I look forward to creating more such games.
If you are interested in my leadership training, contact me.
Email: cs@simplifypeople.com
Website: simplifypeople.com
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