Harvard Business Review Highlights Seriosity, IBM Collaboration
Lead Article in May, 2008 Issue on Leadership in Online Games
Palo Alto, CA, April 28, 2008 - Businesses are advised to look to online multiplayer games as a source of inspiration for grooming the next generation of leaders, according to the lead article in the May, 2008 issue of the prestigious Harvard Business Review. The findings report on a recent collaboration between Seriosity, Inc. and IBM (NYSE: IBM) and are reported in an article entitled "Leadership’s Online Labs". The article is available at no charge for a limited time at www.hbr.org.
"Since we began work in 2004, Seriosity has been studying design principles and player behavior in the most successful multiplayer online games, with the intention of bringing the best of these ideas to the world of enterprise information workers. HBR has been early to recognize that this may be a fertile area of exploration," said J. Leighton Read, Chairman and co-founder of Seriosity.
The work being reported in HBR began with conversations between Seriosity and the Services Research Group at IBM’s Research Center in Almaden, Calif. This led to a sponsored project with IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook. Byron Reeves, also a Seriosity co-founder and a Professor of Communication at Stanford University led the project, in which elite-level players described their work inside the games and provided extensive video documentation. These observations were carried out in the context of theoretical frameworks of leadership provided by co-author Thomas Malone, Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School and a Seriosity Director and Tony O’Driscoll, then a member of IBM’s On Demand Learning team. The IBM and Seriosity joint report can be viewed in its entirety at http://www.seriosity.com/leadership.html.
Key Findings
The article notes that business success is increasingly dependent on the effectiveness of global teams assembled for short-term objectives and composed of people with highly diverse backgrounds, many of whom meet entirely via electronic media. These conditions mirror the experiences of millions of players competing and collaborating every day in games such as World of Warcraft, a title published by Blizzard Entertainment. Leadership behavior that emerges in the game setting has many of the desirable properties of leadership in business. Some of the game conditions that contribute to this success include a framework that encourages risk-taking, fluid role changes between leading and following, and experimentation with a variety of economic incentives.
Lead author Byron Reeves says, "These findings are more than a curiosity. New forms of media have always found a way to reshape human interaction in business and I believe that the level of engagement and socialization in today’s most successful multiplayer games point the way to dramatic changes in the way people work and collaborate."
Companies Need a Game Strategy
In addition to the potential upside of adopting successful game design ideas, companies may find that they have no choice but to adapt to a new generation of workers who are steeped in highly engaging computer interfaces. This workforce may not be satisfied with enterprise software and collaboration tools that feel outdated, intrusive, or inflexible. Seriosity is helping over a dozen large enterprises formulate a strategy around these issues via presentations, consulting services, and deployment of its first software product.
"Business leaders ask us what they can do 'today' to take advantage of Seriosity's findings." says Simon Roy, Seriosity CEO. "Our first product, Attent™, is designed to help solve the problem of information overload by introducing compelling game elements in an enterprise-appropriate manner." Attent is based on a synthetic currency called Serios™, deployed via email to target the problem of information overload in the enterprise. Users can assign values to messages based on importance by "spending" some of their Serio balance. This shifts some of responsibility of swollen inboxes back to the senders, by encouraging people to reflect on the value of their message by dipping into their virtual account balance to signal importance. The result is a lively economy, as Serios circulate among workers seeking attention, providing feedback, reward, and encouragement. Attent also provides a variety of tools to analyze communication patterns based on importance, rather than simply frequency of contact.
About Seriosity,Inc.
Seriosity's mission is to change the way people work together in today's information-intensive business environments. Its software products and services improve collaboration, innovation, communication and leadership. Using economic, psychological and gaming principles that create focus and motivation, Seriosity's solutions enable organizations to better align individual user behavior with corporate goals. Until now, these design elements have been missing from traditional enterprise software applications. The company combines a unique blend of intellectual property and thought leadership with enterprise software experience. The company is located in Palo Alto, CA and is privately held. For more information, please visit www.seriosity.com.