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The idea that organizations and companies don't handle change all that well is just
something that's really in the background of a lot of organizational research.
Say we go to some huge company tomorrow and
try to understand what's keeping them from adapting.
It's very difficult, as a scientist, to really know what's happening here and
how do I measure these different things?
And one evening I was just watching a video game tournament, and
it just kind of hit me that everything is observable in that world,
that things change relatively often in that world.
When I just encountered that eSports setting there was
just kind of a big a-ha moment.
The video game that I'm looking at is a team video game where teams of five people
just have to play together in a really coordinated way to win against other
teams.
You want something that has an organizational character to it, and
that is coordinated.
So I mean, there are lots of video games that are individual.
That wasn't really interesting to me.
The other aspect had to do with the data.
The fact that the data is just available in that game.
Every mouse click is being recorded, which is, if you like to play with data,
is pretty amazing.
There was also the fact that players are playing for millions of dollars, which is
important just to make a reasonable assumption that those people are actually
trying to win, they're actually trying their best to be high performing.
We can be pretty confident that whatever we're seeing here
has to do with just people trying to coordinate with each other.
And as a scientist, being able to isolate that, it's just pretty cool.
Organizations get faced by change all the time and
they have new technologies that become available.
I think very often the people who make decision those companies
tend to think of new technologies, new tools as a way
of improving what they're doing right now, just doing the same thing better.
And that's pretty much the exact same thing that I found in those video games.
What's changing in the game are the powers of the different heroes that
they're playing.
Their first reaction would be to just do the exact same thing, just with new tools.
They would actually explore even less than when you didn't have change.
They wanted to relearn their current strategy with those new tools.
Most of the teams really quickly adapt each of the pieces, but it didn't really
think about how that enabled them to just play differently as a team.
You could argue that it would make sense before doing any type of change,
you would try to get the fundamentals right trying to understand how that change
helps us do what we're doing right now better.
What I saw in the data is that
teams on average tended to forget about that second part, right?
They got the basics right, and then they just stayed with the business as is.
You could make an argument that it makes sense just because it makes you
more efficient.
What I saw in the data is that those teams actually tended to lose more.
The teams that did adapt more were those where everybody was communicating together
and really kind of seemed to share how the change was affecting them personally,
so that they can kind of brainstorm about what they could do as a team
to address that.
There's also a lot of changes that are more indirect,
that have to do one slow component of what you're doing changing a little bit, and
that having ripple effects on all of the rest of what you're doing.
The winners tended to be those teams that
at least didn't seem to assume Ttat because the change looks small,
the adaptation that we should make will be small as well.
That sometimes you had these very with seemingly minor changes in the code of
the game, in the heroes that were selectable, but
they still just try to play in a completely different way.
So in the video game world, it really seemed like the leaders that weren't
communicating too much and were letting their teammates participate
through decision-making were the ones that had the most success,
were the ones most likely to look for these new ways of working together.
Whereas the ones that the only one speaking tended to
be in those teams where you would see this very local reasoning.
Which suggests that really kind of crowdsourcing some wisdom from your
employees seems to work quite well.
Now, one thing to keep in mind is that in those teams,
the people who are the leaders are also players, right?
So you could make an argument that is just harder for
them to think of the big picture.
Maybe people in companies that are managers, and it's their entire job
to be a manager, might have a better visibility over the whole team.
But I think there is an argument to be made for the fact that they would still
benefit from trying to understand how their employees work together, and
actually asking them how they think change is affecting them and
how that made impact how they work together.
Doing the incremental effort of thinking okay,
how does that impact the entire team, how does it impact not just that person but
how that person can work with others, maybe how even our unit is working with
the other units in the organization, I think can yield a lot of payoff, actually.
One piece of the paper that should make us hopeful is that when I was
comparing the teams at the beginning of the observation period to
those that had gone through several changes and had just aged over time,
the latter ones actually seemed to do better.
Over time, it seemed like the teams that had those sort of changes just seemed to
know that adapting system maybe had some value.
So over time, teams just got better at adapting, not just at the local level, but
at the system level.
Which kind of suggests that this can be learned, right?
You're not doomed to always adapt locally.
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