Does anyone learn anything by playing video games? I think there are some Level One/ Amateur Level answers, “It improves their motor skills.” Then there are some answers which are Advance Amateur/ Level Two responses, “It teaches them to stay focused on a task for a while.” Then there are what can be a  Level 3 response, “I noticed my kid getting interested in history and science because of the video games they play.” I came across this response which is from a parent – clearly one that will be categorized as Masters of the Universe response endorsing games, “I’ve got a 9 year old and two 7 year olds. All boys. They are allowed to play Xbox about once a week, sometimes more and DS on occasion. What do they get out of it? Well they get to think creatively, whether building their own levels and environments (working with each other to build a level in Lego Indiana Jones for a few hours, or a track in Trials HD) that they then get to test. They have to learn/work on communication skills in dealing with each other and negotiating not only what they are going to play next but what they are going to do in a particular game.”

Read more responses here

Most disagree and say “Most  popular games  don’t require analytical thinking or planning or creativity…  MW2 (Modern Warfare for the uninitiated), probably the most popular game in recent history was just basically a rail shooter. Even the competitive component favors twitch reflexes over actual planning and tactics. WoW (World of Warcraft), the most successful game to date does not require analytical thinking or analysis.”

I have always been interested in exploring what Corporations can learn from Video Games.  Here is what are top reasons:

1. How to design the work content/ an activity that people willingly come back to regularly.

2. How to design the skill level of the task such that it is tough and yet people strive to improve their skills by working at it regularly.

3. How to design a task that is so engaging that people are motivated to sneak back to give it a shot one more time with the hope of improving their odds of success – even when they have come back home  REALLY tired.

4. How to create reward systems that are intangible and yet meaningful enough to motivate people to excel even as the tasks become harder and harder. Any game designers reading this? I would really like to get your insights.

5. How to effortless teach people to collaborate and compete with people across the world (think online games) and raise each others skill level.

The biggest insight I had was when I read that a focus on remaining (vs. completed) actions increases the motivation to move up to a more advanced level.

But the focus on completed (vs. remaining) actions increases the satisfaction derived from the present level.

The organizations would do well to perhaps motivate the high potential employees by pointing them to what remains to be achieved. This could be the approach the coach takes to motivate the high achievers as well. The feedback should focus on what hey could have done better. What are some of the opportunities they should utilize in future to go to the next level.

The rest of the steady achievers that form the majority in any group would get motivated by having them celebrate the results they have achieved rather than on the tasks that they did not complete. Their managers should take time to celebrate the current achievements much more. Their coaching would be more by looking back in time over what they have done to come to the level they have.

Does that mean that high achievers look ahead while the rest of the people revel in nostalgia? What is your take? If you know game designers who have worked on one of the top 10 games, I want to talk to them. Mail me at abhijitbhaduri@live.com

The Wikipedia told me about the “Chinese water torture”. This was a torture that was supposed to drive its victim insane with the stress of water dripping on a part of the forehead for a very long time. It was characterized by the inconsistent pattern of water drips. Supposedly, the desire for the human brain to make a pattern of the timing between the drops will also eventually cause insanity to set in. That was then. Today that method is replaced by subjecting unsuspecting colleagues to horrible presentations that makes the water torture look almost benign. There are many reasons why presentations go haywire. You have probably suffered through many sessions where the speaker reads through what really looks like the pages of a book – except that all 5000 pages including the graphs and tables of research data – all put into one slide. The font is small enough to inspire people not delay any more the decision whether to wear specs or not. Worse still many presenters feel that the slide is like a teleprompter. They read it out line by line and imagine that the audience is either illiterate or so lazy that they will not read stuff even if it is in front of them.

Here is the big secret -

1. If you have sentences to share with your audience, use a Word document
2. If you have data and graphs to show – use Excel. Give them a printout that they can either read ahead of the meeting or can deliberate upon out after you have gone home
3. If have a conclusion to share or an idea you want them to remember use PowerPoint

The Slide Rule (pun intended): Have a single point on a slide – preferably with a visual. The visual should be about the story that goes with the slide. The slides are for the audience to remember as key take aways. Slides are not speaker notes. It is not about the slides anyway.

There are some people make presentations that makes the audience ask for more. Here is what I have learnt. There are three elements which are needed to make great presentations. Make sure your arguments have Clarity, know the audience ie Concern and present with Confidence.

CLARITY: If you could make only three slides – each slide with three words – what would they be? Till you have those three key slides don’t add any more. It could be 3 key ideas the audience should take away, 3 reasons why your idea deserves funding etc.  More than three ideas is wasted on the audience. Try asking people immediately after the presentation what they recall. You will be surprised how widespread amnesia is. So keep it simple. Here is a fascinating talk by Steve Jobs given to students at Stanford for their commencement address. Notice the title: How to Live Before Your Die

Ways to Build Clarity in Your Presentation

i)   Structure the talk around some questions.

ii)  Three most popular questions that help structure your presentation : Whats the big idea I am suggesting; What data or evidence led me to that idea; How will it improve your life?

iii) Use three four words that builds a mnemonic for the audience to remember your slide.

iv) Clearly think through what you want the audience to do after you have done the presentation.  What is the objective of giving this info to the audience? Is it to inform, convince or entertain? Hence what information or anecdotes will prove that point.

v)  One slide for every 2 minutes of talk time is a good thumbrule. Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule is a good guide. Here is what he says.

CONCERN: Become Persuasive, Insightful and Inspiring – not pedantic. You can do this only if you understand the audience and tailor the message. Ask yourself if it was a different audience you were presenting to, how would you structure your presentation differently? What do they know about the subject that you can build upon or challenge? How about starting with three startling and unknown facts about your topic.

1. Encourage participation by asking some opinions. Questions initially should not be to “test” the audience level of knowledge. You are the expert and the audience knows it. That’s why you are a speaker. Get them excited about your idea.
2. The whole presentation is like a story. Make it memorable. Adult learning is more when they feel they will use the information to become better. Share how that could benefit them. Tell them how to do it in easy steps.
3. Learn to use multiple media – maybe a short film clip? A screenshot of blogs that they could read later?

CONFIDENCE : It is not about the slides. It is just your turn to tell a story. Begin with interesting/ fascinating factoids. Here is Professor Clay Shirky talking about What is Cognitive Surplus? If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. That’s why you should listen to him. Watch him present like a master storyteller. His first words are the first lines of a story. That’s how he explains this stuff in a manner even someone like me can understand

Did you notice how he began with “The story starts in Kenya…” He proves the point that skillful presenters can make a complex concept easy to understand. They just use stories to feed their audience with their idea – a morsel at a time. That’s why I am a big fan of the TED.com site. It is a collection of stories that explain interesting ideas. Each speaker gets 18 minutes to engage the audience with their story.

I love the talk given by author and diplomat Shashi Tharoor on The Soft power of India. Notice how he connects the TED elements of Technology Entertainment and Design to what India is about to make his a very compelling presentation. Remember the old saying, “Tell them what you will tell them (intro), tell them what you have to tell them (your main idea) and tell them what you just told them (recap of key ideas).”

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Some related stuff

Download my cartoon. Click Here … ok… CLICK HERE instead

Why do TED talks last for 18 minutes? You must watch the video for some good insights Click here

My talk at TEDxGurgaon on What Makes People Happy. Click Here

Guy Kawasaki lists making a good PowerPoint as one of the ten things you must learn (in school).

We have all grown up in a world that clearly values rationality and rational behavior. Being emotional was frowned upon. Whenever someone displays emotions in public view it makes news (Think of Maradona’s expressions as the team played and lost) and the world turns its cameras to look at the person who just “lost it”. When I studied Science in school, I was told by my teacher that if there was something that cannot be explained by Science it was not worth knowing and that it was obviously irrational. Such was the vehemence with which I was nudged towards being rational. As I grew to develop my own view of the world, I got fascinated by the limitations of rationality. Rational stuff had a logical sequence and clearly activated that part of my brain that I had difficulty accessing. You try this one and you got to do this real quick: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Write down your answer. If you said that the ball costs 10c, then you are part of the majority. That is the good news. The bad news is that the correct answer is 5c. Shane Frederick, Prof at MIT Sloan posed this question to more than 3,000 students at eight different universities. Fewer than half gave the correct answer. The trick is to not go by your instinct which gives the wrong answer, but to take a second more and reflect on it. Shane has developed a 3 question test – that question is one of the three – that can be almost as accurate in predicting characteristics that other tests like the SAT, ACT, or the Wonderlic Personnel Test. He also found that those who do well on the cognitive reflection test tend to be more patient in decisions between smaller sooner rewards and larger later rewards.  Before you pat yourself on the back (your own or anybody else’s for that matter) remember, they are also more willing to gamble in financial domains.

Now let us check the other half of your ability. Try saying the words in the visual. The top line would read red, blue, orange purple. That is easy. . The task is to quickly name not the word itself, but the color of the word. As an example, for the word “green” printed in red ink, the correct verbal answer is “red.” Because of a phenomenon called directed attention, this is hilariously difficult to do. You must actively inhibit the automatic response—reading the word—in order to do something else. This is not the only way in which we can understand the power of the irrational. There are many examples that have been done to show how we all do dumb and irrational things despite taking pride in our rational selves.

Take for instance Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment. How far would you go giving what you thought were electrical shocks to another human being simply for a study about memory? What would you think when the learner went quiet after you apparently administered a shock labeled on the board “Danger: Severe Shock”? How far would you go? The majority, at least 63% of the participants continued right until the end – they administered all the shocks even with the learner screaming in agony, begging to stop and eventually falling silent. These weren’t specially selected sadists, these were ordinary people like you and me who had volunteered for a psychology study.

Magic tricks work in the same way. Rationally speaking you would of course agree that there is no such thing as a color changing card. If you picked one card from a deck of cards, how could a magician change the color of the card while you are watching the trick on camera. The camera never lies, right? Wrong.

My hypothesis is that you need to learn to develop the irrational – also known as the “creative” aspects of you. Writing a story is a good way to develop your irrational self. Stories are boring when they are straightforward and predictable. For instance try this for a rational (aka BORING as hell) opening lines of a short story.

A boy and a girl sat on the same bench in the Physics class. The Professor was teaching (what else) Physics. The boy and the girl were trying to think of what the possible question paper would be like…

Now try this one on

A boy and a girl sat on the same bench in the Physics class.While the Professor was teaching Physics, the girl’s mind wandered. She was thinking of options. What protection should she use when the boy would meet her that evening. Would it be better to carry a small revolver or should she just use the sharp kitchen knife, she wondered. The boy was telling himself, “If only I had known that she was vegetarian, I would not have poisoned the fish…

The best storytellers are magicians who use the same principles of psychology to lead the reader to a path that is perfectly rational and logical, but wrong. The purpose of every story is to coax the reader into suspending their disbelief. Good cinema does the same. See how much more interesting a life you would lead if you stopped resisting the irrational aspects of human beings. For instance, if you knew that groups fail to share information with each other that is known only to themselves and simply repeated what others already knew, you would put less faith in decisions made by the group. People are seen as more capable when they talk about shared rather than unshared information. To be on the safe side people prefer to stick to repeating things that everyone knows and, bizarrely, others like them better for it. Heck!! I am not suggesting that you drop all opportunities to be rational. Merely suggesting that the next time you do something irrational, maybe there is an opportunity for you to learn about stuff most people have learnt to ignore. For instance, by knowing about the 7 Psychological Principles of Scams you can protect yourself from scams that makes 3.2 million people each year in the UK into handing over £3.5 billion to scamsters.

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If you like to try more tests that check for cognitive skills, try a logic and reasoning skill test here

Or this interesting piece on Ten Social Psychology Studies

What do you want to be when you grow up? The answer is very often influenced by the kind of person who you view as a role model. Role models inspire. Role models resonate with what we want to be. A role model has to walk the talk. Authority figures are inevitably burdened with the task of being exemplary in their conduct at all times. Parents of very young children realize that the children tend to emulate their behavior whether or not it is appropriate or even safe. Many parents have walked in to discover their three year old trying to apply lipstick like Mummy or shave like Daddy – sometimes with disastrous results.

We learn our values from the role models around. There probably aren’t too many parents who tell their children to be dishonest or to take the crooked path. Yet, enough youngsters have learnt that their parents do not follow the advice they dish out. While the parent tells the kid to tell the truth, they find the parent lying (“Tell him Daddy is not home.”). BBC quotes research to say seeing violence perpetuated between parents was found the be the greatest risk factor for being the victim of a violent partner as an adult. Both men and women who witnessed domestic violence were likely to grow up to abuse their partners.

We pick up a lot of our values, attitudes and beliefs from the influences around us. A lot of our beliefs about love, marriage, punishment, work ethics etc are what we saw around us as we grew up.  A study of 226 families by Plymouth’s Peninsula Medical School found obese mothers were 10 times more likely to have obese daughters. For fathers and sons, there was a six-fold rise. But in both cases children of the opposite sex were not affected. A Department for Children, Families and Schools study quoted by BBC suggests children from heavy-drinking households are more likely to use alcohol themselves.

In the words of Graham Nash

“Teach, your children well
Their father’s hell
Did slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick’s
The one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would die
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.”

Values are what we choose to do when no one is looking.  Of course there is a change in behavior in all of us when we believe someone is watching. Research completed by Newcastle university demonstrated that people put almost 3 times the amount of money into an honesty box for hot drinks when the poster with prices featured eyes rather than flowers.

Do we look for role models even in the workplace? The resounding answer to that clearly is a yes. The first manager is surely a role model for those who are starting their careers. At Wipro we recently did a study on 60 people who were voted as the Best People Managers. What made them the best? One clear differential was the low attrition in their teams. Even in a market where demand far outstrips supply, departures from their teams seem to be negligible or certainly way lower than in other parts of the organization. What makes people give up the options outside to stay with these managers? For one they tend to do all the ordinary things like goal setting, communication regularly and with sincerity. They celebrate the success of their team members – often in innovative ways. The people managers clearly spend a lot of time building talent. They coach team members by having regular feedback and developmental discussions.  What was the one big insight for me in doing this study? When you ask them where they learnt all this, they all say that they saw their managers invest in others careers. So clearly managers do become role models. Those who invest in others create an impact that lasts well beyond themselves.  The greatest role models are those who make us what we are capable of becoming.

Anyone who works for a “staff function” or a “support function” will tell you that the nature of this function is advisory. The people belonging to this function investigate, research, and give advice to their line managers or clients. The value of the function really then lies in becoming a trusted advisor to the business. Being a trusted advisor simply means that the “clients” value the deep subject matter expertise that the specialist brings to the table. All advisory professions have to earn the trust of the client without which they are not relevant. That view is as true for a Human Resources professional as it is for a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant … the list goes on.  The feeling of professional self worth of such service providers is very directly linked to how valuable they and their advise is, to the others. The more they are consulted the more valued they feel. A doctor who sees a crowded waiting room outside her clinic feels good about how valuable her service is to others.  So what makes a person a trusted advisor? What makes us trust someone?

We trust people in varying degrees and for different reasons. You may trust your friend with money or a secret. Yet, you may not trust the same friend to administer an injection to you. You could also then argue that we may trust a doctor to give us medical advice or trust a surgeon to perform a complex surgery on us but may not trust the person with our deepest darkest secrets. So trusting someone has an implicit element of competence built in. We all evaluate this competence instinctively and then decide whether or not we want to seek the advise of the specialist. If the specialist’s knowledge level is not substantially more then we are unlikely to seek or follow their advice. For minor aches and pains or the common cold we may not feel the need to visit a doctor. When you visit a chemist’s shop and seek their advise on some of the over the counter medication, you will no doubt get advise that may well match that what a doctor may have (and charged you for it as well!). But when you have a more complex medical problem, you do not rely on the chemists advise. A skilled doctor maybe able to look at your symptoms and suggest diagnostic tests and procedures that the chemist may not be able to. A superior level of competence leads a specialist to have insights that an enthusiastic amateur may not have. A trusted advisor is one who is perceived to have deeper knowledge and uses that knowledge to find solutions to issues that create complexity in the lives of others.

The internet has led to a lot of information being available to amateurs. That has changed the nature of interactions between the specialists and the amateurs. Medicine is one such field that is in transition. The doctor or the specialist is no longer the sole keeper of the knowledge. Many doctors will tell you that today the patients and their relatives will all routinely come armed (an sometimes annoying so with half baked information) with their own alternative diagnosis, opinions about medication, side effects, pricing options thanks to sites like webmd.com or even patientslikeme.com that enable patients to compare notes. So the doctors’ role is now changing in learning how to deal with a reasonably well informed (and also sometimes a partly or wrongly informed) patient. The widespread availability of information has changed many other relationships. Parents no longer are the only ones controlling the shaping of values and opinions of their children. Teachers are routinely using sites like turnitin.com to check plagiarism. The site crawls 2 billion Web Pages and flips through over 100 Million Student Papers and over 80,000 major newspapers, magazines & scholarly journals to find out just what has been cleverly swiped off from someone original work without proper acknowledgment.

In the workplace, an advisor is trusted only when the colleagues believe that there is a degree of expertise the specialist has which someone else does not. For instance interviewing a candidate is a skill that needs training and many years of practice. If the HR person is able to make better hiring decisions based on better skills of interviewing or get insights than others, that is a way of being a trusted advisor. If the HR person can help create an incentive system that improves business results dramatically while improving retention of talent, that is a step towards being a trusted advisor. When the Employee Relations specialist advises the employee(s) and or the organization to untangle complicated legalese and find solutions that others could not have, it is easy for everyone to see the value of the specialist.

1. Build Depth: So to be a trusted advisor build depth of knowledge that goes far deeper than what will a quick Google search will yield to others.
2. Keep Yourself Updated: Read the different blogs and magazines that tell you the latest buzz in your field. What are the old theories that are getting challenged and what is your opinion on that issue?
3. Write a Blog: Start putting your opinions on the web for others to see. The value of the specialist is to explain in simple everyday language stuff that amateurs can use to build their knowledge.

Try these three and you are well on your way to being a Trusted Adviser in your field. It takes much more today to be a trusted advisor these days.