Balazs Fogoly is the Managing Partner and Chief Play Officer of Ember Associates, a consulting company he founded 7 years ago. Together with his business partner, Zsolt Tokoli, he uses the game of poker to break open fixed adult mindsets in how to see and solve challenges.
In addition to running his consulting business, Balazs is an Adjunct Professor at INSEAD where he helps with teaching a course, called Your First 100 Days. In this popular roleplay-based course, MBA and EMBA participants have to make difficult decisions with scarce resources during the simulation of the first 100 days of an entrepreneurial acquisition.
He is also an alumnus of the INSEAD MBA program and the president of the school's Entrepreneurship Alumni Club in Singapore.
Although Balazs has spent over 10 years mostly in the dealing rooms of several banks, entrepreneurship has been in his blood throughout his career. He cut his teeth in entrepreneurship by founding Hungary’s first online hotel reservation business in 1996.
Learning Through Playing Games
When we play games, we often make mistakes, but it's part of the process and helps us improve. By embracing failure and viewing it as a learning opportunity, we can develop resilience and enhance our problem-solving abilities.
Learning decision-making skills is essential in both personal and professional life. Making sound decisions can greatly impact our success and help us achieve our goals. One interesting and effective way to develop decision-making skills is through playing poker. In a workshop designed to improve decision making, participants are taught how to play poker and then engage in practice rounds and a poker tournament.
During the workshop, the facilitator freezes the game every 15 to 20 minutes to discuss and introduce concepts related to decision making. These concepts can range from the psychology of decision making, such as biases and heuristics, to probabilities and system thinking. By observing the decisions made during the poker game, participants can see firsthand how these concepts apply and learn from them.
Why Use Poker to Teach Strategic Decision Making?
There are three main reasons why poker is a great game to use to teach decision making:
1) Playing poker is fun! Learning becomes much more enjoyable when we have fun doing it. Poker creates an unpredictable environment with risks and clear goals, which triggers "flow states". And when we're in flow, we learn better and are more productive. So using a game-like environment, like poker, helps us learn effectively.
2) Playing poker could be similar to being in a flight simulator. Just like pilots learn to fly in simulators before getting on an actual plane, poker provides a simulated environment for decision making. In real-life situations, the stakes might be too high to make mistakes. But in poker, we can practice and learn from our decisions without serious consequences.
3) Lastly, poker provides immediate feedback. Every action we take in the game has a direct impact, allowing us to see the consequences of our decisions right away. This helps us develop a high level of decision-making skills and problem-solving abilities.
A Fun Strategy Game vs. Gambling
One of the biggest "a-ha" moments that students experience in these gamified learning sessions is the realization that poker is not just a game of chance and luck, but rather a fun strategy game that requires skill and decision-making.
Many people are initially hesitant to try poker because they associate it with gambling. They assume that it is all about risking money and leaving everything up to chance.
However, once they attend the gamified sessions, they quickly understand that there is so much more to poker than meets the eye. It's a game that combines luck with strategy, where your skills and decisions play a significant role in determining the outcome.
Finding the Right Level of Risk
While it is crucial to have an appropriate level of risk when using poker as a learning tool, it doesn't necessarily mean playing high-stakes games.
By playing with a small amount of money, participants can introduce enough risk to make deliberate decisions. For example, a buy-in of just $10 can create a sense of accountability and engagement.
Another way to add risk and rewards to the learning experience is by setting clear goals. If certain objectives are not met, individuals may choose to withhold certain privileges, like drinking coffee for two weeks. On the other hand, when goals are achieved, they can reward themselves with a nice meal or a social outing.
The combination of risk and rewards in the game of poker, as well as in the learning process, helps individuals stay focused and motivated. It creates an environment conducive to the "flow state", where participants can fully immerse themselves and make the most out of the learning experience.
The "Sunk Cost" Fallacy
One example that can be observed in both poker and business is the "sunk cost" fallacy.
Beginner poker players often struggle to let go of a hand even when it becomes dangerous. Similarly, many businesses have fallen into the trap of continuing a project that no longer makes sense simply because they have invested time and resources into it.
By analyzing these situations in poker and connecting them to real-life examples in business, participants gain insights into their own decision-making patterns and learn how to overcome them.
Evaluating the Quality of Our Decisions
One of the most important aspects of decision making is the ability to evaluate the quality of our decisions. Just because we win a tournament or achieve a desired outcome doesn't necessarily mean we made the right choices.
It is essential to analyze our decisions from a different angle and seek feedback from the process itself. This is where gamification comes in. Through gamification, we can create an environment where we receive feedback on our decision-making skills and learn to make better choices.
Leveraging Gamification to Improve Team Decision Skills
Gamification, when used correctly, can be a powerful tool to improve decision-making skills within a team. However, it is important to understand that gamification is more than just creating a leaderboard and assigning scores.
It requires thought and intentionality. One effective method is to create a story arc around decision-making.
An example of that would be to use the concept of superpowers to engage participants. The workshop facilitator can create an alter ego and then build a superhero community. If someone makes a good decision but has a bad outcome, you can organize a mini game where volunteers act as lawyers and prosecutors, with the rest of the participants acting as the jury. This way, you are able to simulate a mock trial and let the audience decide on the fate of the decision-maker. By using gamification effectively, you can supercharge the learning and the teaching process.
Embracing Mistakes and Failure
One key takeaway from this discussion is the importance of embracing mistakes and failure. It's okay to "suck at something" in the beginning. The crucial part is to have a deliberate mindset and a determination to get better.
Learning from our mistakes, seeking feedback, and not being afraid to fail are essential components of personal growth and development. Whether it is struggling at a board game or facing challenges in other areas of life, we should remember that we can't be the best at everything.
Surrounding ourselves with people who challenge us and push us out of our comfort zone can help us continue to learn and improve.
So, let's play more games, make learning fun, and embrace the process of learning from our mistakes!
- Hello, and welcome to episode 11 of my podcast.
- After a short break, we are resuming our series of episodes where I invite friends and business associates with expertise in various areas that could help sales and marketing executives become better leaders, coaches, and marketers.
- Today's interview is taking place at a rather late hour of the day. It's almost midnight here on the east coast of the United States. I'm getting ready to interview someone on the other side of the world, in one of my favorite places on the earth, namely Singapore.
- My guest's name is Balazs Fogoly, born and raised in Hungary. Balazs moved to Singapore to study business at INSEAD the same MBA program where I graduated. He brought with him an interesting mix of entrepreneurship and analytics based on his past experiences, as both the founder of an online hotel reservation business, and a former banker, Balazs has developed an interesting method for teaching innovative problem solving and decision making. He uses the game of "Poker" to break open fixed adult mindsets in how to see and solve challenges. He's also an adjunct professor at INSEAD.
- I've invited him to give us tips on how we can improve our ability to deal with incomplete information and make difficult decisions. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to my virtual stage, Mr. Balazs Fogoly.
- Hi, Balazs. How are you?
- Hi, Emil. I'm doing very well, thank you.
- Great, great, great to hear that. Thank you very much for joining me from the other side of the world, one of my favorite places, Singapore,
- always to talk to people
- Pleasure to be here.
- that live in that place. And it always reminds me of the good old years when I was there. Today, I have prepared a few questions that relate to your very unique methods that you've developed over the years in teaching people how to do better decision and, you know, better decisions, how to overcome challenges, how to solve problems. But before we do that, as a housekeeping item, just wanted to point out to those of us who are watching this interview, that more information will be made available on Cerebrations.info as usual. So everyone who's interested in learning a little bit more about you and what you do, can go in there, and read a little bit more about you, find your LinkedIn profile and any additional information that we may have. And also they can find also other interviews that I've recorded as part of different podcast episodes. So again, go to Cerebrations.info for more of that. So let's get started. You know, one thing that I wanted to ask you, the moment I found out about what you do is what, you know, what did you do? How did you get into teaching decision making to business professionals?
- Hmm, interesting question. I can dissect the answer from different angles. I think the one of the most important part is exposure, right? So I am not in academic, I'm a business professional. I started out as an entrepreneur, as an internet entrepreneur back in Hungary where I'm originally from. And eventually, I ended up in dealing rooms of different banks. So I spent about 15 years in this kind of high risk, plenty of decision making kind of environment. And one thing I noticed that, first of all, people are overconfident when it comes to decision making. We believe that we are better decision makers than we actually are. That includes me, right? I made plenty of bad decisions and I didn't really learn from them. And that started a quest on understanding how my mind works and how our mind, in general, works and how we can make better decisions, how we can perform better in really volatile environments like my business. Then I got the purpose around this as well, the fun. I believe that decision making is the foundation of everything we do, right? Whether we, it's how to solve problems, whether it's how to negotiate, how to do sales, right? Everything is built on decisions, either our own or something that we need to facilitate for others to do, right? So when we are doing sales, for example, we do make plenty of decisions in the process, but at the same time, we have to facilitate the decision making of our clients as well. So things like that. And eventually I found this environment where I felt that everything started to fit together, that I can not just learn how to do this better, but actually, I had a huge amount of satisfaction from teaching it. So that's why I arrived.
- Great. All right. So it makes sense. One thing that very much resonates with me is that we all think that we can make decisions, and a lot of times, we know that we're gonna make a mistake and we're still overconfident. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of people that are so afraid of making decisions that also they get stuck in no action. So, I think you have
- Yeah.
- these two extremes, and it's interesting that you're trying to solve the problem and, you know, create some order in this chaos. And teaching is always
- Let me,
- rewarding. Go ahead.
- Let me just interrupt a little bit here, because that's an interesting aspect of decision making, right? We believe that, oh, I'm not good, and I'm just postponing, postponing decision making itself is a decision, right?
- Yeah.
- So, it doesn't help us and gathering more information, sometimes it's too expensive, sometimes it's too time consuming. So we need to learn. When is it? How much information do I need? And if I don't gather more information, but make a decision, how to just fine tune that decision making as after we made it, right? So, there's so many aspect of decision making, that we can get better at.
- Absolutely. Yeah. And that's a very interesting thought that you just brought up, that deciding not to make any decisions, that's, it's a decision, it's a conscious decision that you're making. So it's an interesting point. So, I mentioned this a little bit in the intro section when I was recording the intersection for this episode, but you've developed a gamified approach to decision making and it involves the game of "Poker". So just for sake of providing the right context for everyone here, tell us about your "Poker" game sessions and, you know, how do you tie those to teaching decision making and problem solving?
- Okay, so first of all, I cannot take full credit to what I'm doing. I have a business partner and very good friend of mine who I've been working for about 10 years now. The concept was his, I have my blueprint on it, of course, and I have my way of teaching these things, but we do both, both of us do these little bit differently, but basically based on the same concept, the same framework, his name is Zsolt Tokoli. I will put his contact details as well in, in that people can reach out to him as well. He's a brilliant guy. He lives in Vietnam. And so, over the years we've been developing this concept together, and, those who don't know "Poker" will understand in a little bit why it's such a brilliant tool to teach decision making. But let's step a little bit further and let me tell you the three reasons why I'm using "Poker" to teach decision making. First of all, it's fun and I believe that having fun while we learn is not just possible, but it's absolutely important, right? One of the reasons is that the kind of environment, which is a bit unpredictable, there's risk involved, there are clear goals or feedback is immediate. These are the things that trigger flow, mind flow states. And when we are in flow, we learn significantly better. We are a lot more productive. So using a game, and it's not just "Poker," a game in general, and an environment that is game-like will help us learn whatever we are teaching. The second thing is that "Poker" will function as our flight simulator, right? When we learn, when pilots learn to fly a plane, they don't learn it on actual plane, they learn it in a simulator because it's just the risk is just too high in that environment. So we need to find something where the risk is manageable and "Poker" is going to be an environment like that. We don't want to learn new concepts and then go back to the office and try out immediately in a client meeting whatever we are learning, right? We need to be able to find an environment that is relatively similar to business and try out these new concept, experiment we did. Figure out what works for us, what doesn't, and how can we fine tune this, get that kind of skill, easier to that is, is then transferable to business. And that's where the similarity of the two environment comes in. I'm using "Poker" because the environment is extremely similar to business environment. And that's why the learning is transferable. If you think about it, people who play "Poker," they are in a highly competitive environment where they make plenty of quick decisions. They are under pressure, they usually have less information that they feel comfortable with, and at the same time they managing scarce resources, their stack of chips, right? And every decision they make is going to create an environment where, which is shaped by their decisions, the actions of their competitors. And there's also an element of luck, and they have to change their strategy to navigate this environment with a clear goal, which is winning at the end, right? And winning at the end means at the same time that you're sacrificing certain hands, you cannot win every hand. You cannot, even if you make good decisions, it doesn't always work out. But the goal is very clear, and it's achievable.
- So basically, you're looking for an environment that is high stakes, lots of stress where you don't know certain, you don't have full information I guess, like it's incomplete information in front of you.
- I would tone this down, right?
- Okay.
- so not high stakes, right? We are are not going to put participants in a $10,000 "Poker", tournament, right?
- No. But the game itself leads to that.
- The game-
- Yeah.
- So, so you can play "Poker" high stakes, and you can play "Poker" as a, as a social friendly game, right? It's your decision. There's risk involved and that's crucial for learning.
- Right.
- But we don't need high stakes. We need appropriate amount of risk that is really helping us to be in a flow state. And we can achieve that for, in two ways. One is that we play with a little bit of money, we don't need much.
- Yeah.
- $10 equivalent of buy-in is more than enough to put enough risk that I'm going to be deliberate about our decisions. The other thing is we can also have clear goals. What I want to achieve from the learning and create for myself some form of risk that, let's say, if I'm not doing those things that I decided on for the learning, I'm not going to drink coffee for two weeks, but when I succeed, I'm going to go out to a nice meal with some of my friends, right? So there's a risk and rewards that we can put into the game itself, which is the nature of poker, but at the same time into learning, which we can decide what is that helping me to really get better at it.
- Okay, so the learning part, it's very important here, right? 'Cause at the end of the day, you said, I mean, it has to be fun because fun makes you remember better those moments and learn more, but at the same time, you have to learn something. So how do you, I guess for those who haven't seen this in action, I assume I haven't been in any of your sessions, but I assume you stop the game at certain points and you provide a little bit of context of what's happening or what kind of decisions are being made. Is that how you provide
- Okay?
- the learning moments or is there anything else you do?
- Okay, so let's divide it into two parts, right? So one thing is in the session, people get better at "Poker," right? So most of my participants, I would say something like 70% of them never played "Poker" before. And they definitely get better and learn and get better at "Poker." And those who've been playing regularly, they also learn from the session from a poker perspective. But being better at "Poker" is really just a side benefit of the workshop. My goal is for them to get really better at decision making, especially in the context of business. The way I can do that is after a short intro, I teach everyone how to play poker, and we start a few practice round just to get better and confident with the flow and the rules of the game. And then we start the "Poker" tournament. Clear goal, everybody wants to win the tournament, only one person can win it, right? And through the process, we start playing the game. But roughly every 15 to 20 minutes, I will freeze the game based on what happened at one of the "Poker tables. And then I can explain to the participants what happened here, why is it relevant? And introduce concept from decision making. This concept can range from psychology of decision making, like biases, noise, heuristics, things like that. It can be probabilities, it can be gross mindset, it can be system thinking. So there are lots of things that is relevant to decision making, to learn, to make better decisions that is so visible in certain decisions we make around the "Poker" table. So the "Poker" itself will influence the learning, and I don't know which one will come up when, so I have to be really agile and improvise on bringing this concept. So I have a narrative, I've framed out a flow, which I would love to follow, but reality is different, right?
- Yeah.
- Whatever happens at the "Poker" table, I can't influence but I will find things and I will introduce these concepts based on what's happening around the table. But then we take those concepts, explain, okay, this is what happened. Now here's the learning. So then we learn about it, and then we translate that for business, right? So for example, if somebody is having a good initial hand, invest into that hand, and then the environment changes, there are new information on the table and the environment changes and the hands becomes dangerous, toxic hand basically, right? But they cannot let it go. Most of the times beginner poker players, they cannot let hands go, I already invested so much in this hand, I need to win this, right? And it's very, very prevalent in business as well. Sunk Cost fallacy, right?
- Yeah.
- We've been, we've been doing this project for months, we need to finish it even if it doesn't make sense. So many companies went bust because of this kind of mentality, right? So I can show them, okay, this is what happened, this is why it's relevant. I'm asking questions from the participants, why they made that decisions, right? So, it's so visible from "Poker" what we are talking about in the context of general decision making. But then through the stories that I can bring in from businesses, we are going to see that in context of business, and then we can learn how to overcome this kind of natural way of making decisions. And then I can through with this, we can go back to the game. So what we learned now will influence how we continue to play in the game. So we get better at "Poker" and the different types of decisions will come up in the next few runs and the next 15 to 20 minutes, and then I can introduce new concepts again. So this is basically the flow of the workshop. So game, learning, game g learning, but unlike at a typical game and learning, here the game will influence the learning and the learning will influence the game. So they feed off each other.
- Right? Okay. Yeah. And you actually, you mentioned already kind of like one of the insights that you often bring up, especially with beginner level players, where they kind of go down the rabbit hole and they can't cut their losses and they keep going and going. And you made the analogy of this, being like sunk cost in business. So my next question was gonna be, and you kind of preempted some of that, what are the biggest aha moments that your students experience in your sessions?
- Probably the first one is that, oh yeah, "Poker" is indeed fun, right? So a lot of people don't know much about "Poker". They happy to try it in a game, in a learning setting because it's something new, something different. So they are excited about it, but most of them still have this kind of mindset that "Poker" is gambling, right? So if they believe that after the session, they're never going to play "Poker" again, it's will be a fun session, but that's it. The aha moment from that is "Poker" is not gambling. It's a serious, very fun strategy game. It has an element of luck, but your skills are significantly more important. And lots of my participants, they start to organize friendly games, right? So the benefit of that is that they bring, it's my something like a refresher project from learning, right? They get back together again and again and again. They keep playing the game, they keep learning about each other's decision making style and even if they do it really well, at the end of the games, they debrief each other on what they think they, how, what kind of decisions they should have made differently and what they learn from it, right? So that's definitely one of the aha moment. The other one is we need to be more deliberate in our approach to decision making. So many of the things that we do is on autopilot, which is perfectly fine most of the time, but we need to know when to intervene, when we cannot do these things based on pattern recognition, which we are really good at it. Humans are really good at pattern recognition. But certain times when the stakes are high, where the situation is pretty complex or when very intense emotions are involved, these kind of pattern recognitions are not useful, they usually lead us make bad decisions. So we need to really slow down. For example, when we are hiring a candidate, we often hire the candidate we like, right? Because that's an emotion. and we ask easy questions then. So, and that's not helpful, right? So every single candidate we should interview the same way, right? Because then it's, we make sure that we don't start asking easy questions from the candidate we like, and difficult questions from the candidate we don't like and so on. Then the other thing is that we really need to, we really need to know ourselves, why we do certain things. And so many times I see ego being a huge aspect of, how some of my participants make decisions in the session. They want to be right. So for example, if they believe that their opponent is bluffing, they will put so much money on uncovering that they are right, even if they don't have anything themselves. So they still lose a lot of money, but they're right. So that's as Ryan Holiday points out, ego is the enemy, right? So we should definitely make sure that we understand why we make certain decisions. And I would say probably the last very important aha moment, which I often hear is that it's okay to make bad decisions, if we own it, right? So it's not about, oh, I was so unlucky this night, I only had bad hands. It happens, right? But what we do with those bad hands, if we keep not playing bad hands and wait, and because of that we didn't win in the end, it's definitely better than I'm just frustrated that I have bad hands, but I keep playing it because I just, you know, I'm bored, I want to play. So we shouldn't rationalize it, but because it stops us from learning from it. So growth mindset is a huge part of what I'm teaching and a huge part of the aha moment. We shouldn't really justify the quality of our decisions based on the outcome, right? So for example, if some of the, if one of the participants wins the Poker tournament, it doesn't mean that, that participant made plenty of good decisions because there's an element of luck involved. Most of the times, the person who wins the tournament, they were the one who made consistently good decisions, right? But the outcome doesn't mean that the decisions were correct. We have to analyze the decisions from at different angle and getting feedback from the process itself that how we made these decisions and hopefully corrective feedback from our peers on what can I do differently? So these are probably for me, the most important aha moments that I've been, I keep hearing and the beauty of the workshop is that there's no one thing that comes up. So it's basically throughout the whole session, so many different things are, it's, it's the learning, is spread out through that whole session. So everybody finds different angles of it that they feel it's really useful for them. And I would say the reason for that is because I firmly believe that yes, we suck at decision making, but everybody has a superpower when it comes to decision making. The problem is that we tend to over rely on the superpower. So if I'm really good at estimating probabilities, I will start using that in context, then that's not the right tool. If somebody is really good at using their intuition, they will start using intuition whenever it's actually leading them into the wrong conclusion. You cannot use intuition when you want to do an M and A deal, right? When you want to buy a company, please don't buy it on intuition, right? So, because of that, people start to have compliment their existing superpower with other skills, and usually those other skill sets are where they have these kind of aha moments that I didn't know that, that I'm actually so into estimating probabilities because I always felt that, I'm a gut decision maker, but it's using probability. This is actually not just important, but it's a lot simpler than I expected. So things like that.
- Mm-hmm, Mm-hmm. Interesting. and you mentioned your workshop a few times. So I guess the question I was gonna ask is, I mean, at the end of the day, the reason why I have this podcast is to help business executives and primarily sales and marketing executives, because that's the area that I'm focusing on, become better leaders, managers, coaches, whatever, like basically be better at what they do. And I always try to find a way to tie it back to what they do on a day-to-day basis to improve their teams and themselves. So short of them organize, inviting you to organize an actual session for them, which will be great, but they may not be able to do that given geography or budgets, et cetera. How can a leader leverage gamification to improve his or her team's decision skills? So.
- Gamification is to me it's a tool. It's almost like a steroid, right? If it's used in the right context, the right way, it can make everything so much better, but most of the time it's overused the wrong way. Just because we have a leaderboard and we give scores for something, it doesn't turn something into gamification. So what we have to understand that gamification can be used in learning in so many ways. Other than me using "Poker," one of the things we use is a story arc. So there's, when I told in the beginning that I believe everybody has a superpower, right? When it comes to decision making, I started to use that as the story arc. I created this alter ego for myself, who is the facilitator, that's professor B. I created it originally because my name is difficult. Everybody was misspelling it and they don't know how to pronounce it. So that's why Professor B was born. But then I started to create this kind of Professor X and the X-Men kind of story around the, that I'm mentoring these people with superpower around decision making. I created the beehive community instead of the B man, because that would be too much stealing from X-men. And also it's, we need to be more gender neutral. So that's why I created beehive as the superhero community around my workshops. And then every single slide I do, it's like, it was a frame from a comic book, right? So it gamification is not just scores and, and leaderboards. It's the story, it's the unpredictability, it's the randomness. So for example, sometimes I do games within the games, so somebody makes a really good decision and has a bad outcome. I can do a mini game where we create a mock trial where two volunteers will be the lawyer, and the prosecutor to this person's decisions, and then the audience will be, the rest of the participants will be the 12 angry man deciding on the fate of the person who made the decision. So it gamification is really, if it's used correctly, it will supercharge your learning and your teaching as a leader. Now, there are so many games you can use now "Poker" is definitely not the only one. Whatever you are comfortable with as a leader, it builds the team. But the most important part of it is that you have to do it deliberate, not just play a game and then hope that okay, now we have a nice team together so everybody learns from it. You have to be really deliberate what you want to teach and then how you debrief after the session, right? So for example, I would say one of the best games that you can use is rowing games in general, so for example," Dunngeon Dragons," because it's shared storytelling, it's creativity, it's problem solving found. So you can create an environment where you play mini games that are not as long as, as a typical Dungeons and Dragon session, but there are so many different type of role playing games that you can finish in about half an hour, and focusing on the ones that helps the skill sets, which you want to teach. For example,, if you want to teach storytelling, especially improvise storytelling, then there's a role playing game based on the modern Hansen books, which you have to really tell a story, improvise immediately on the spot based on a question one of the audience asks. And then will, you'll be interrupted and you have to run with the story. And this is perfect to teach salespeople, for example, right? Because when a client interrupts you that, oh, but don't tell me you are the first one to do crypto based on whatever, right? Then, you cannot say that, oh no, you're wrong, I'm the first one. It just really creates a kind of resistance and breaks up that kind of rapport that you've been building. You have to run with their objection. You can say, yes, you're absolutely right, and let me tell you why it's important. So, so you just bring that energy forward, even if it's something that you want to avoid. The other things, when it comes really to decision making and you want to avoid Poker for whatever reasons, there are so many card games, especially collectible card games and living card games like "Magic The Gathering," which actually my business partner was the Hungarian champion of, Back in the 1990s. But there are other ones that, for example, based on Game of Thrones, there's, which, which I really like actually, and one of my other favorite is based on the Arkham horror stories. And these can be either competitive or cooperative. So there are different ways to play with these games. And then there are board games that they can use, depending on the size of the team to, to teach decision making and build the teams at the same time. But we should find games where it brings the teams together, right? So I would say "Monopoly" is probably not the right one,
- Right?
- And certain games are too conflict oriented. So we need to find ones, which the conflict is not something that we bring back from there to the environment. So it's not about deceit or lying because some of the games are, the team is based on that.
- Right?
- I would say one of my favorite board game when it comes to making good decisions, but this is only a two person game, is Twilight Struggle. In Twilight struggle, very single decision you make, it'll benefit your opponents as well. So you have to be really strategic on how to use those decisions.
- So you're basically trying to augment the pie so that each of you has a bigger slice of that pie rather than redistribute the pie between the two of you, right? Basically, it's not a zero-sum game, so-
- It not a zero-sum game,
- Yeah.
- right? So in some decisions, you clearly benefit, but it's really bad for you from the open ends decision aspect as well. So, what can you do with this, right? So it's very similar to business. Everything you, every single decision you make, it has a system effect, right? It will impact something else as well.
- Great. So one question I ask every single guest to my podcast is to recap at the end, if people watch this or listen to this episodes and they find it interesting, what would you like for them to retain if you were to meet them again three, six months down the roads, what are the key takeaways you, we want them to remember from this episode?
- Okay, so probably the first one is play more games, right? Even if you play for the sake of the game, it's fine. But unfortunately, especially during the pandemic's been so stressful, we've started to have less fun. I think it's very important to bring back the fun into our lives, not just into learning.
- Right?
- The second part is that, is built on this one is that learning not only can be fun, but it's should be fun. And even the most boring topic can made, can turn into something that is fun. It just needs a little bit of creativity and good grasp of design thinking.
- Right. How to create those? And probably the third one I would ask them to, I would hope that they can remember is that it's totally fine to suck at something in the beginning, if you really deliberate about, okay, what do I want? How do I want to get better at it? And you learn from the mistakes you make in the process, get feedback and you will get better, no matter what.
- Hmm. So the important thing is not to get discouraged because you're not successful in the beginning. Just keep trying. Don't be afraid of-
- Yeah.
- And not just not get discouraged, but be totally fine with making mistakes, with this kind of failure, right? You just, because you are the one who is the worst in a board game in the beginning, you don't get something, it's totally fine, right? It's the same in every kind of other situation. You cannot be the best in everything. If you are the best in everything, then you are probably in the wrong environment.
- Yeah.
- You need to be in an environment that the rest of the people challenge you to get better at, not just keep on being the best and not getting out of your comfort zone.
- Great. All right. Well, thank you very much. I think that concludes our episode. I really appreciate the time we've worked over the past few months to organize the session. I'm glad that we had it finally. Thank you. And I hope to host you again, another time for another topic. Really appreciate your time. Thanks.
- Thank you, Emil. I really had fun being here.