Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD
Stephen Balzac, PhD, organizational development consultant and president of 7 Steps Ahead, shows why LARP in business settings exposes the dynamics that meetings hide. He explains how a fantasy role lets teams argue about goals and success without threatening anyone's business identity, and shares what a pandemic flu simulation taught him: people who played themselves took fewer chances and defended their decisions harder than people playing a character. He also tells how a game full of his coworkers turned into an x-ray of his own company, and why he builds story before mechanics. Listeners come away with a clear case for using roles to surface real decisions and give people room to practice new behaviors.
Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD
Stephen R. Balzac, PhD is a consultant, author, and speaker, and president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm that uses live-action roleplaying to help leaders develop strategy, surface real decisions, and build teams that learn faster, act braver, and perform better. He founded the MIT Assassins' Guild, now the longest-running collegiate LARP organization in the United States, and designing live games led him from a career in computer science to a doctorate in psychology. With over thirty years in high tech as an engineer, manager, entrepreneur, and consultant, he is the author of The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development (McGraw-Hill), Organizational Psychology for Managers (Springer), and The LARP Effect: Creating Connection and Competitive Advantage Through Story, Ritual, and Roleplay (Springer), and a contributing author to Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play. He also appears in the Monopoly documentary Under the Boardwalk, with the distinction of being the only guest personally panned by a New York Times movie critic.
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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,
Rob