NASAGA Member of the Month - Dr. Joe
Every month, we highlight one NASAGA member and the great things they’re doing. This month’s Member of the Month is Dr. Joe, Assistant Professor of Leadership and Organizational Studies at the University of Southern Maine, and Founder and Coach at Gamenamic Leadership.
What kind of work do you do?
I do research on leadership development and group dynamics in role playing games, I teach leadership development and group dynamics in all contexts, and I also use role playing games to do leadership development as a coach and consultant. And all of those blend together somewhat, so let me expand on them.
I use very traditional research methods when doing qualitative research (group observations, interviews, things like that). I'm not playing the game while using all the typical research methods for something like this. For instance, I've measured psychological safety in games and developed an instrument to measure the facilitation of game masters and their impact on group dynamics and creativity. So as a researcher, I’m very much examining the context of the game, and I’m trying to study that game as a leisure activity first and then see what qualities it has that might be useful for a formal intervention. I want to see what is in the game that gets everybody so excited about it. Specifically, I examine what's driving the belief that the interactions we have in these games produce a benefit on their own, or have some sort of quality to them that is desirable in an educational or professional context. And of course, human beings are human beings. So leadership is part of the human experience, as are games and play. So when you're studying people interacting in a role-playing game, you're still studying people interacting in a group setting and all the normal human stuff is gonna apply in maybe a unique way.
And then there’s action research. In action research, there's no separation between research and practice because the research itself is a real action that you're taking. The action creates a real change or a new understanding of something. Action research is very close to experiential learning in terms of how you would do organizational development and different kinds of leadership development that involve the same types of cycles: sensing what is happening, trying to understand the meaning associated with that, taking a further action informed by that information, and then the process continues with further reflection and analysis. The difference between action research and experiential learning is the analysis part; the intention and analysis that goes into it is a little bit more of a “research” kind of thing. But in my mind, that is leadership, right? If you're doing leadership, you’re learning. So that's part of the process.
When we do experiential learning in RPGs, they are an active leadership experience in and of themselves, but they are also a way to develop and learn about leadership. RPGs fit well into an action research methodology because you get a rich opportunity for meta-cognition. For example, I do Session Zeros and debriefs all the time: it's not just one at the beginning, I do them repeatedly. If you do Session Zeros to set intentions, create characters and games, play games and scenes, debrief those, and then set up new scenes, that lines up well with both action research and leader development processes. It's all very integrated.
Why are you a NASAGA member?
I got referred to NASAGA a few years ago. It’s a good fit to get together with others interested in using games for all kinds of things. I use games and simulations to do training and development, so I decided to kind of present some of the stuff that I do. When I use games for training purposes, my focus is the interaction of the players and the experience of playing. A lot of people do games where there's content in the game that's directly related to a task: we want to do disaster prep, and the town council needs to meet and see what happens when the power goes out. Those are great things where the content is actually what you're supposed to learn. I focus more on the interactions and the process that's happening among the people. I do have games where the content elicits particular dynamics in the players and that's a leadership learning outcome too. I can teach all the theories, but the interaction stuff is my focus.
I like being able to go to NASAGA and try out games that other people are doing. Our sessions are primarily us running (sometimes) miniature versions of whatever games that we use in a training context and getting feedback on them. I also like being able to run things that I'm working on that are finished ideas but haven't been field-tested very much. They're ready to go out into the field, but they would benefit from having a bunch of simulation and gaming nerds play it and say things about it. That's why I'm a NASAGA member.
What’s your favorite NASAGA memory?
It's hard to say…I've been to a bunch of sessions that I liked! The game nights have always been really fun, especially the Blood on the Clock Tower ones. I know a lot of people talk about it. There's not one particular memory, but what sticks with me is the NASAGA context: everybody there is already into the game before you started. That's the premise of NASAGA. When I do debriefing of my games, other people like educators or trainers might not be approaching things the way that I'm approaching them, and they might be working in very different sectors. But NASAGAns all understand that we're here to use games. I can show up and not have to worry about explaining the mindset that goes into playing a game, designing a game, running a game, or any of those things.
That's a unique space to be able to do that because I usually have to do at least one of those things when I'm talking to a bunch of senior leaders at a tech company about why role-playing games are very serious or I'm talking to a bunch of gamers about group dynamics and leadership development. A company probably already spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on leadership development every year. A bunch of companies have internal programs for that but games aren't generally considered part of work. On the other hand, a bunch of indie game companies are like, what's leadership development? So it’s great to have a space to go and try games with people who get this intersection of work and games, learn how other people are doing it, and make your own and bring those and play around.
NASAGA’s theme for the 2024 Conference was “Fair Play.” What does “Fair Play” look like in your professional practice, and what do you do to promote it?
My definition of leadership is when people come together to co-design a shared experience. This points to the experiential nature of leadership as an experience that we have. “Co-designing” is when people first become aware of the system that they are embedded within, whether it's an organizational culture or a social system. They can then gain the self- and role-awareness to have some agency in affecting that system, which is co-designing. The co-designing process requires groups and collectives of people to engage in that process. It's not just, I understand my workout routine and have the agency to do it better. That's the individual level. But on the social level, the group dynamics level, it’s more like I understand why the culture of the organization I'm in shapes the way that I think, see things, and the way that I perceive and react. How can I then use that awareness to engage intentionally with other people and become agents of change in the system we are in?
That kind of metacognition and agency at a group level is where the Fair Play theme comes in. The systems that we are all subject to are also systems in which we can have agency. We don’t have total control of those systems, but we don't have to just be passive recipients of the system either. Social justice or fair play is about creating an incentive structure (formal and informal) within an organization that gets the results that you want. What all the different versions of fair play have in common is that they are systems that we are subject to where we can gain some agency. If we have both awareness and metacognition about our role in that, we can create a collaborative process of telling our own stories as a group, not just as individuals. The fair play piece is about being able to see the system and our place in the system from within it.
The metaphor I use is the balcony and the dance floor, and going back and forth between them at a dance. On the dance floor, you're part of the motion, but you don't have that overhead view of what's going on with all these moving parts and people that are involved. If you go up to the balcony, you can see how everything is choreographed, how people interact with each other, and move from one way to the other. You can see the whole system, but you're not in it. So ideally, fair play allows you to move between the dance floor and the balcony when necessary.
