World Building in Real Life: Unlocking the Secrets of Tabletop Role-Playing Games to Level-Up Leadership

• In Event: Creative Strategies for Leadership Development

Short Description

In viewing the collective experience of leadership, play can be seriously considered as a process that allows creative experimentation and development. A phenomenological framework of leadership is applied to development and creativity that opens new unexplored areas of focus for leadership development through gaming. Games can serve as concrete experiences that enable learning and development for players and researchers alike.

Detailed Abstract

The complexity and difficulty of the urgent challenges currently being faced by humanity reveal an absence of leadership needed to address these challenges and mandate that approaches to understanding leadership evolve in order to develop leadership that can overcome barriers and live fully into the future of humanity. In an attempt to understand this, I turn to understanding the nature of adaptive challenges, leadership phenomenology, relational sociology, Freirean education, development, and creativity. Taking an experiential approach to leadership development and creativity has led to questions about another topic: human interactions in tabletop role-playing games (TRPG). Experiences of playing TRPGs have been associated with personal transformation and collective creativity, among other topics relevant in leadership studies. This line of inquiry has prompted me to ask what potential might exist for integrating TRPG studies and leadership studies.
This presentation begins by establishing a framework for understanding leadership by focusing on development and creativity from a phenomenological perspective. Existing leadership philosophies are synthesized with aspirations toward leadership development that can help achieve much needed social change. Literature on leadership development and creativity is reviewed and critiqued. Relevant TRPG literature is then discussed with implications for integrating TRPG studies with leadership studies, namely in leadership development, given the established leadership framework.
The emergence of adaptive change as a common thread among current leadership problems indicates that our understanding of leadership is limited. Historically, leadership studies have relied on ‘great man’ or trait theories and positivist methodology that focuses on individuals as leaders finding or providing answers. Only recently have critical or integrative approaches to understanding and studying leadership been disseminated in Western literature, let alone implemented among masses of practitioners. People who care about enacting leadership to make a difference in their organization understand it to be a dynamic and vibrant force quite different from the sterilized accounts found in the literature (Ladkin, 2010). Academic understandings of leadership need to be expanded in order to transform leadership praxis and confront the urgent challenges facing humanity.
Our current systems of education can be examined as the cultural context in which learning and development happen, or don’t. Freire (2003) describes the lack of creativity and transformation in education systems as preventing us from being fully human. To be fully human is to be creative or generative rather than being controlled by systems. In other words, our education system inhibits our development by omitting meaning making processes and subsequently our ability to fully understand leadership or address humanity’s urgent challenges. The banking model of education limits us to the belief that knowledge is a gift bestowed by authority onto impotent masses, institutionalizing ideologies of oppression (Freire, 2003). Meaning, in the banking model is not made but decreed based on rigid structures supporting the status quo. By definition, this model is inherently incapable of addressing adaptive challenges which are not solvable through authoritative expertise alone.
In order to conceptualize phenomenological leadership in education as meaning making in social context, the redefinition of education must incorporate play and creativity. Freire (2003) insists on resolving the teacher-student contradiction by becoming simultaneously both teachers and students and thus transforming the quality of these relations. This places co-creating as the central process by which leadership and leadership development happen. The more this happens, the more critical consciousness is developed, which results from individuals’ interventions in the world as transformers of that world (Freire, 2003). This social justice model centers on the quality of the relations between individuals (teacher-student) and contexts (education system) in which leadership can be socially construct and transform reality.
Designing for the use and development of creativity can have many potential benefits for those concerned with the impact of creativity on learning and leadership. One fitting arena for this inquiry is in games. Games can be used for both game-based learning and as sources of inspiration for gamification: the application of game design elements in non-game contexts like business or education (Karagiorgas & Niemann, 2017). Game-based learning has been used to enhance deep learning in higher education but requires further investigation (Crocco, Offenholley, & Hernandez, 2016). Games (even for game-based learning and gamification) are broad, diverse, and include interdisciplinary subjects (ranging from psychology to sociology and many more), necessitating that more meaningful research attention be paid to games and gaming. Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TRPG), in particular, are unique phenomena that can serve as a meaningful subject of focus within the topics of game-based learning or gamification of leadership, to see if they do improve learning, stimulate creativity, and foster development.
TRPG experiences share similarities with the phenomenological leadership framework discussed earlier. Emirbayer’s (1997) relational sociology perspective prioritized the role of agency. Creative agency is a major factor in successful TRPG experiences (Bowman, 2010; Cover, 2010, Cragoe, 2016). Additionally, agency emerged as a prominent theme in a recent pilot study I conducted that investigated learning environments in TRPGs. The myriad of ways in which players interact in successful TRPG experiences is worth considering as a model for the kind of relations that leadership should embody, fostering collective creativity and development. TRPGs can be intense social meaning making experiences that foster identity development, leadership, community, collective creativity, and transformational learning (Bowman, 2010; Cover, 2010; Daniau, 2016). TRPG experiences are naturally formed around imaginative play, storytelling, and problem solving. Thus, they are relevant phenomena in the quest for viewing leadership development as experiential, playful, enacting meaning making, stimulating collective creativity and capable of transformational learning.

Participant

• Joe Lasley, University of San Diego
  Presenter