Virtual Organizations could learn from Online Games

One of my sons is a keen player of World of Warcraft - which led me to wonder what, if anything, the leadership and team development world is learning from such massively complex online activities.

Well, I came across this blog from Aidan Higgins. He writes ...

"Why do we play? We play to learn then we play for fun. But let’s look at the first one. We play to learn.

Organisations consistently talk about the challenges of continuous learning, teaming, training, and more recently about the issues for and against the Virtual Organisation. As the improving infrastructure of communications allows working from home and Virtual Offices so also the need to build trust and co-operation increases as these are the tenets of a successful Virtual Operation.

I recently had the opportunity to play a role in a co-operative game called World of Warcraft. This is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game or MMORPG for short (short?) with 8 million players. This means to you and me that the game is played with others players, over the internet via computers that provide the interaction required to enable the software (client) on your PC to create the virtual world with all the players in it.

So these are real people you are playing with or against. All very well you say. Yes, however there is a very interesting teaming element needed for many parts of the game. This to me exhibits some very interesting characteristics. Groups take can be from 2 to 5 (Party Group) to 10 to 20 (RAID Group). The interesting bit comes when you have to work together with others in the various roles your characters (or toons) dictate. A party is never successfull on a tough Quest if the group is not multi-skilled - a team of the same or even similar skills can almost never complete the task.

So put your Virtual Organisation or Virtual Team hat on and lets go through the mechanics of doing a Dungeon Quest with a group of 5. See if you can as I did , spot the learning points and opportunities therein."

Read the rest of the article ....

Virtual Leadership in Second Life

Second Life Challenges Real World Bureaucracy - from Wired by sonia zjawinski.

"We all know how long it can take a governmental body to complete a project -- Operation Iraqi Freedom anyone? Frustrated with the lack of movement and community involvement with a plan to build a new garden in the central Halles area of Paris, local residents started a competition within Second Life to come up with possible designs for the real world location.

While the association knows that the winning design (whose creator won 275,000 Linden dollars) won't be implemented because it doesn't consider real world conditions, they're hoping the competition will put pressure on the mayor to move this project along. It's been in talks since 2004.

The main prize went to Joshua Culdesac and Piper Pitney, who's idea included ambitious water features and an ice rink. Smaller prizes were also awarded, including 40,000 Linden dollars to a six-year-old in the children's play area category.

According to an article in BBC News: "Some of the participants in the competition spent up to a month working part-time on their entry, says Accomplir vice-president Gilles Pourbaix."

Photo above from the BBC