Collaboration & Technology

Client:

Fortune 1000 Public Utility Company

Impact:

Created alignment and a shared understanding among leadership about the mindset needed to drive the organization forward. Provided a space to practice and embed new mindsets and behaviors.

From Caution to Confidence– A Utility Company’s Journey Toward Smarter Risk-Taking

The Challenge

Seeking to strengthen their leadership team’s risk management acumen and sharpen their competitive edge, a Fortune 1000 public utility company partnered with XPLANE to design a gamified experience that pushed leaders beyond routine thinking. The interactive format provided a dynamic environment to practice strategic decision-making and calculated risk-taking—key capabilities for navigating a rapidly evolving industry landscape.

XPLANE's Approach

To create a targeted, gamified experience that would challenge conventional thinking and strengthen strategic decision-making, XPLANE co-created a board game to simulate everyday decision-making in moments of crisis, opportunity, and growth.

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. Gamified tools are proven to accelerate adoption, they maximize engagement, support group exploration, and bolster learning outcomes. XPLANE game development experience is a highly-iterative creative development process, driven by XPLANE ‘s Game Development framework.

To start, we developed a deep understanding of users and defined meaningful learning objectives, empathizing with them to develop a set of guiding design principles. These principles helped us explore game mechanics and select the experience architecture that is right for goals and requirements.

Next, we developed early concepts for the game, ensuring game mechanics reinforce key learning objectives before selecting any one direction or mechanic. Discovery at this point shifted towards content development with the project team to ensure we captured real scenarios that could be used to advance the game narrative and challenge players to solve problems together and share their diverse perspectives and experiences.

Before moving into final production, play testing was the key to effective game mechanics. Testing, iterating, testing, and iterating the game prototype with as many groups as we could. Throughout the concept and design phase, we applied design principles and refining mechanics to create a testable prototype. Each iteration of the prototype advances the game content and mechanics to the final production stage.

In the final stage, the board game was built for an in-person offsite. The objective of the game was to provide groups a safe space to face moments of crisis, opportunity, and growth. Pairing leaders and managers in teams, groups were challenged to move across a board together facing new and increasingly more critical challenges while trying to stay ahead of the competition. Groups won or lost as a team by taking smart risks, making strategic decisions, and investing wisely to minimize loss, avoid catastrophe, grow capacity.

After its initial success, the game was adapted for remote play and expanded to across the utility company. XPLANE also created an expansion pack with escalating scenarios and added level of difficulty.

Over time, we have seen games have a tremendous impact on those who play. That success is the result of careful and thoughtful discovery and a healthy investment of time in the play testing process. Ultimately, a great game is one that has an immediate impact on the players. Inspired, energized players become promoters who drive the excitement and desire to play the game in all corners of the organization.

The Results

Created alignment, cohesion, and a shared understanding among leadership about the mindset needed to drive the organization forward.
Provided a space to practice and embed new mindsets and behaviors.
CEO asked it to be included in their High-Performance Leaders executive training.

"XPLANE's board game created an engaging, interactive experience that allowed us to draw out important lessons and critical insights."

— Principal HR & Organizational Effectiveness Partner

"I shared it with our CEO after the event. She was so excited by it that now our Principal HR & Organizational Effectiveness Partner is facilitating sessions with High-Performance Leaders."

—VP, IT & Supply Chain, Chief Information Officer

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