L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Motivating Learners: Gamification and the psychology of engagement

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

It’s no secret that not everyone is constantly motivated at work. It’s even less of a secret then, that many people are unenthusiastic about learning on the job. Often, the educational programs we create aren’t helping these problems. But by peering deeper into the psychology of our learners, we can invite them to craft their own story around their development. To explain the power of gamification to boost learner motivation, consultant, speaker and author Karl Kapp joins us on the show this week.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential and building a culture of learning in your organization. Today we speak with Carl Kopp. Carl is a speaker, consultant, author, and practicing knowledge broker whose mission is to fuse learning, technology, and business intelligently. As a globally recognized thought leader on the topic of gamification, he has written a number

of books, including The Gamification of Learning and Instruction, as well as Microlearning, Short and Sweet. As a graduate-level instructor at Bloomsburg University's Institute for Interactive Technologies, Carl teaches courses such as managing multimedia projects and e-learning concepts and techniques. His teaching style, in the classroom and in the boardroom, draws heavily from his expertise using interactive methods and practical applications for problem solving. Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Carl Kopp. Carl, it's a pleasure to have you.

Thank you so much for joining. Yeah, Tyler, it's great to be here. I'm so glad that we're having this conversation today. Yeah, great. I'm really happy to have you here because I think your world-class expertise on gamification and learning through technology is obviously very pertinent today,

but for one specific reason. I think that we are in the middle of maybe a motivation crisis is what I wanna call it. People are dealing with post-pandemic woes, kind of a hangover effect, as one of my recent guests described it, of just emotional challenges in addition to the concerns of layoffs and just all kinds of challenges that we're facing as organizations, as individuals. And many people are calling for changes to our extrinsic sources of motivation, if you will, the things that motivate us externally, things as simple as a reconsideration of wages and a new dedication to sustainability and ethics

from large corporations. But there's also the intrinsic motivation component, all of this, what sort of motivates us internally as individuals and how we see ourselves in the grand scheme of things. And that's where I want to start the conversation with you. We will dive in, of course, to gamification and maybe a little bit on micro learning if we have the time later, game based learning and all things related to those topics. But I'd like to start off with SDT and self determination theory. This plays a pretty big role in your book. It's clearly something that impacts how we learn, especially when it comes to technologically learning through gamification. Would you mind giving me a quick overview of SDT, self-determination theory?

Sure, yeah. So, self-determination theory really is the idea of being a meta-theory of motivation. And one of the reasons why I was really gravitated towards self-determination theory in the book on gamification is because this motivational theory has been used for everything from playing instruments, from working at a job, from deciding for education. So, it has a broad appeal. And basically, it consists of three key elements. So, the research is saying, okay, people are motivated by three key elements. The first one is autonomy, which means the ability of people to feel like they're making their own decisions. It's very important. And the other interesting thing is because it is a meta-theory, lots of other theories contribute to this. So, if you look at Ark's theory of motivation,

if you look at Leper's theory of motivation, if you look at Maloney's theory of motivation, all those go around. So, one is that sense that we make our own decisions. The second is this sense of mastery. So, the idea there is we feel motivated when we feel we can master something. So, I think what some people get wrong is if things are too easy, people are not motivated. So, if you make something very basic and they're like, yeah, anybody can do that, then people aren't going to be motivated to do it. But if you make it too challenging, like, oh, Carl, I want you to do brain surgery tomorrow. You know, I'm not even going to try because I can't do that. But if you can do something in the middle where there's a little bit of challenge and there's a little bit for me to overcome,

that's that sense of mastery. And the final is the sense of relatedness, which was basically your social connectedness with other people. So I always joke around, that's peer pressure, right? We do stuff for peer pressure. We do stuff for recognition from others. We do stuff when we feel that we are connecting and have a purpose. And all that's relatedness. So those three things working together are what motivate us in an organization or playing a game. And to your point before about the pandemic, I think some of those items are missing from folks' perception of work, right? So for example, when people are forced to come back to work, they feel like they have no autonomy and then they might feel like, yeah, I don't want to do this. Or if people are put into a situation where, hey, I want you to do this and this and this, and they're like, well, I don't really feel like I have the capability to do that. So why are you putting me in this position? That is a problem. And then the other interesting problem with the relatedness and the social connectedness is that lots of people, especially

in the tech industry, who were really great performers and doing great jobs, all of a sudden found themselves without a job. And so, the social connection and the social agreement of, hey, if you do a good job, you'll be employed by our company, suddenly people go, well, wait a minute, you know, Mary got laid off and she was the best programmer we had. Like, what was that all about? And then they feel helpless. Like, I can't make any decisions because it's out of my control. The company makes the decisions. I don't make the decisions. Therefore, I'm powerless. And there's a whole thing in psychology called learned helplessness. And basically, where people are unable to make decisions that are meaningful in their lives,

that they start to feel that they're helpless and that they can't do anything. And that demotivates them. So, there's a lot going on with motivational theory that is getting ignored by organizations. And the extrinsic example I always give is when my son was younger and I wanted him to brush his teeth. I said, hey, I'll give you a star if you brush your teeth. And he's like, yeah, that's awesome. And he ran upstairs. I never saw the kid move so fast. Ran upstairs, brushed his teeth. And I turned to my wife and said, I don't know what's so hard about raising kids. This is like really easy. I'll just give him a star when he wants to drive. You know, two days later, hey, Nate, go brush your teeth.

No, I don't want to brush my teeth. Like, oh, well, why not? Don't you want a star? No, I want two stars, right? Because the problem with extrinsic motivation is you have to keep upping it for people to remain motivated. So we were eventually giving a candy bar to brush his teeth, which doesn't work. That's all external motivation. So organizations really need to tap into things that motivate people internally, the sense of purpose, the sense of working with others, the sense of having a decision, the

sense of being able to master the job. And I think some of that lack of focus on self-determination theory is really undermining a lot of motivation of people in organizations. Yeah, I actually had a similar conversation with Terry Hart just last week, actually. She has also written a book that cites a good amount of psychology as well. And she gave the example of running an Ironman and how her training for that became a part of her identity, you know, the way that she woke up and trained and then the way that when she completed it, she was declared an Ironman by the sort of leader of the organization.

And there's a lot of control there. I think control is where I want to start off, because as you mentioned, organizations don't offer as much control as one has over their own decisions and own life. And you give a few examples in the book on gamification that I can relate to very directly. I'll go ahead and jump right into it. So you and I have both played World of Warcraft in our past. And I think this is a really good example to just jump into. There are guilds and there are clans and a lot of video games and people become leaders of those organizations within the video games that

they play. They play with their friends and their peers and people that they don't know across the world. And however it happens naturally, or, you know, maybe democratically, people become leaders of others through communities like this, be it video games, be it message boards, other digital virtual communities. Leadership develops and leaders are developed in these communities. And you point out in the book that that's a really intriguing way for somebody to actually be trained to be a leader in perhaps a real life work setting. And in fact, that might be a better way to train a leader than to give some sort of a fabricated training program or something along those lines. And this is my way

of jumping into the general gamification question. So I want to keep that example in mind here, but I would like before we get too deep, if you don't mind, can you give sort of your definition of gamification? Because I think a lot of people are going to come in from different levels of understanding here. So if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to just kind of start with the basics. Right. You know, I always say you ask five people for a definition of gamification and you get seven different answers. So for me, gamification is using game-based mechanics, aesthetics, game thinking to engage people, to motivate action, promote learning, and solve problems. So basically, it's the application of parts and pieces of games

to help people become more motivated to do all kinds of things. Gamification sometimes can be a continuum. So on one side, I always say you give somebody points for doing some mundane task, very basic form of gamification. Loyalty programs, a very simple form of gamification. On the other end, you have gamification of... So I always give the example like Ender's Game, right? Where they were gamifying the battle against the enemies in space, right? And so that's a fully immersed environment, which is really, really like a game and really hard to tell the difference.

And the reality is kind of in the middle, right? People add game elements, add game pieces, add those. But one thing I want to emphasize is it's not necessarily like, oh, we'll add cards or, oh, we'll add a game piece or we'll add aesthetics. It's really the psychological elements behind the game, which I think is what some people miss. Some people say, oh, well, if we make it look like a game, you know, bright colors and characters and avatars and all that kind of stuff, then naturally people will love it because it's like a game. And it's hard. Gamification is using the psychological motivators in games. So what are some of the psychological motivators? Well, the sense of progress is a psychological motivator. The sense of overcoming obstacles is a psychological motivator. The sense of awareness

of your surroundings and what's happening around you is a psychological motivator. Awareness of how you're performing versus others, it can be a psychological motivator. That can also be a demotivator. Virtuous loops, right? You do something positive and you get positive reinforcement and you do something again, you get more positive reinforcement. So all of those elements are what make gamification. So I caution people to not just say, oh, gamification is sometimes we call it the evil trifecta, right? Points, badges, and leaderboards. Nobody really plays a game just for points, right? You don't. You play the game to overcome the challenge, to see how you are versus someone else, to see how your wit is, to see how your skill is, to see how much progress you've made over last time you've played the game,

to see if you can best somebody. So the points, badges, and leaderboards are artifacts of games. They should not be the main tenets of gamification. They should be results. It's not that you can't use them. They have some value, but I call deep gamification or more meaningful gamification is what people really need to focus on because I think what happened in gamification 1.0 is everybody said, oh, all you got to do is add points and the employees will love it and have a throw in the leaderboard there and we'll be fine. But that's really not what gamification is about. It's about the underlying psychological sense of belonging, the sense of overcoming challenge, the sense of making progress,

the sense of being better than I was yesterday. Those are elements of games that keep people coming back again and again. The sense of exploration, the sense of newness, the sense of novelty, like all of that. Not, you know, the points, badges, and leaderboards that became very popular at one time. I think gamification companies and companies in general are becoming a little bit wiser to that, but still it happens too often to ignore. I have to admit, in two previous careers of mine, I wasn't directly involved in the first one, but I did occasionally work with digital education developers. And more recently, I did work with another educational platform actually

prior to Get Abstract. But when we were looking into gamification, it was quite literally points, badges and leaderboards. It was as simple as that. But I think that's probably just because of accessibility, like in terms of the features that the platforms that we were using, or the technological capabilities of the people that were working at those places, you know, those were probably the easiest things to implement. And maybe statistically, they would have, you know, pretty quick short term reward as people would say, Oh, that's a cool new feature in the short term, but probably ended up as more of like a vanity metric. So I see why it appeals. But today still, even though gamification has been around for a while now, it still seems to be the norm as to what people think. So I'm glad that we're able to talk about

going beyond that, of course. Yeah, it's not value less. So if points, for example, give you a sense of how well you performed versus just like a random getting points, like 10 is the best, five is in the middle, one is poor. Oh, I did five. Okay, I'm in the middle. Like that's helpful to me as a person doing it. But if you're just randomly giving points, it's not helpful. So they have to be intelligently tied to extrinsic motivation in order to be worthwhile. And I'd like to briefly return to my World of Warcraft example, because my ultimate point there was that that example that you give in the book is interesting to me because the person who had that experience going from guild leadership to work leadership in real life, they made that decision to play World of Warcraft and to join

that guild and to go through that process. Whereas if they were to be given some sort of an educational opportunity in their workplace, in their organization, it wouldn't have the intrinsic motivation built into it. Or theoretically, it wouldn't have the intrinsic motivation built into it. Or theoretically, it wouldn't. But, you know, hopefully what our goal here in this conversation is to demonstrate how that can be done. So I think a good question to start off is, what are the types of learning that are best achieved through gamification? So again, on that continuum, if we move closer to actual game type experiences, this is, I think, what's really kind of missed.

So we have points and badges and things, and those help with gamification. So motivation, those types of things. Mostly that's declarative knowledge, right? I need to know this. I need to know that. I get rewarded. Factual knowledge. Yeah, factual knowledge.

When we get to complicated subjects, a gamified version has been used like forever. Now, this is where games and gamification, there's a little bit of overlap. But I always think about a good example of World War II. So Japanese, the Americans, the Allies, the Axis powers all war-gamed almost every situation possible from a strategic perspective. And then in the 60s and 70s, that was also big. They call them strategy games or whatever. And that's kind of interestingly has fallen off a little bit. But I think those types of games for teaching what-if scenarios, for predicting the future, for having leaders think the unthinkable, like, hey, what if our competitor launches a product next week? Are we

prepared for it? And those type of strategy games help people prepare so that if they do launch a product and you're not prepared, you'll go like, oh no, what do we do? Oh no, we got to think about this. But if you played a game, you've already thought about it. You've already had those ideas and concepts. So if you get closer to game, and I have three types of gamification. One type is the structural gamification, which is adding game elements without changing content. So you might have structural gamification for declarative knowledge, maybe conceptual knowledge, maybe in a call center, that kind of gamification works well. But as we move up to continue and get a little bit closer to game, we have this thing called content gamification, where you take the content to be more game-like itself.

And I think that content gamification in boardrooms, in company-to-company integrations, when companies do mergers, that's really valuable from a corporate to corporate perspective. Getting the leadership team together to have an experience where there's a common thread that's focused on the business, but is a little bit lower stakes than the actual business, you know, board game environment. So for example, I did a board game environment for a client one time, and there were teams of nine, and there were like 10 teams of nine. And each team had three groups, had operations group, sales group, HR group, and they all had dilemmas that they had to deal with. And based on a dilemma, you would increase customer satisfaction, decrease customer

satisfaction, all that kind of stuff. And the goal of that game was to teach the people that you shouldn't optimize your department at the expense of every other department, which happens. People do that all the time. And how do you see the big system? How do you see the big picture? Well, gamification can help to do that. Something like, as you mentioned, World of Warcraft, when you join a guild or a clan, mentioned World of Warcraft, when you join a guild or a clan, you've got to work with people all over the world who owe you nothing. They could walk away at a moment's notice. And guess what? There's never enough loot for everybody. So it's not a democratic system. So how does that work? Right? Well, people decide to suboptimize their own interest for the interest of the group. And they learn to lead by influence instead of being

dictatorial or instead of being a crazy person like Leroy Jenkins or something like that. So the idea is that there's a lot we can learn from the studies again. In fact, before the big layoffs and everything and the pandemic, there was a lot of companies that were actually using World of Warcraft and other kinds of games as an after work get together. And what a great way to help people learn about the other person, learn to work with people, learn leadership skills in a matrixed organization. So there's a lot of value, I think, that people overlooked or ignore because games aren't serious. But if you look back at the history of games and gamified learning, games are used for the most serious human endeavors ever,

to prepare for war, for medical care, for simulating problems among troops or tribes or people or cities, and games can help resolve that. So it's really important that we think of games and gamification as a methodology for helping corporations be successful, anticipate possible negative outcomes, and work to mitigate those outcomes. Thank you for making the Leroy Jenkins reference so that I didn't have to. Again, though, my thought is that World of Warcraft, generally, it's fun. You know, we do that. We play it because it's fun. Whereas simulating a business, you know, mergers and acquisitions type scenario probably isn't

as fun. I mean, I have to say that sounds like it would be exciting and there would be some high octane nature to it if you're really like going into a large negotiation there, for sure. But it still lacks that, you know, I choose to go and do this with my friends and with random people in the world because it's just a fun thing to do. And there has to be some sort of source of energy there, I think, which you do discuss in the book. And I do think a lot of this comes from storytelling. So storytelling is an important

component, important thread throughout much of what you write. And I guess that's my next question is, how should instructional designers invest in the storytelling of their gamification? So especially I think this category of conceptual gamification, sometimes in the book, you actually talk about the roles that you might need to create a proper gamification process. But how seriously do we need to take storytelling when it comes to all of this? And what can we expect to achieve from creating a really great story around that thing that we create to give learning to our people? Yeah, that's a great question. Let me just go back for one second. So I absolutely believe that one of the things that makes games so attractive is the voluntary nature of having to play the game and of people freely saying, yeah, I think this is a cool game. So I won't

say never, but reproducing that in a corporate environment is really, really hard. But if you contrast kind of a game environment that you play in a board game versus a lecture with PowerPoints, it's definitely more engaging than the PowerPoints. It's a degree of engagement that's not the same as signing in and playing World of Warcraft on your own, but it's definitely more engaging than kind of a PowerPoint or traditional type of instruction. So no one mistake like, hey, corporate learning with a game is going to be as much fun as World of Warcraft or any of those games because it's not. But one of the things that helps make that game like the merger and acquisition or helps make those more engaging is the idea of storytelling. So what storytelling does is it sets the context in which the activity is going to take place. And so if you have characters that you care about that are similar to you as an executive or a

manager or a supervisor, if you have characters that are similar to your clients, characters similar to your competitors, there's a level of relatedness that is often not talked about in like a corporate PowerPoint presentation. When you tell a story, there's that sense of making decisions about what should happen to the character, what's going to happen as we do this particular item. There's a plot, there's tension, there are scenes, there are situations, and a lot of these allow the learner to anchor their learning in those situations. We know from research looking at scenario-based learning that people actually can gain expertise by reviewing scenarios and situations and absorbing them as if they happen to them. So what makes an expert

different from a novice is that an expert knows about lots of different situations. So games can walk you through kind of a mock situation, but with realistic elements, realistic characters, realistic story, realistic context. And that mock situation then actually gives you the real-life skills you can apply to the situation. Now, games require a reflection period. So as we launch games into organizations, one of the things that we absolutely need to have is give the learners opportunity to reflect on the experience that they had, on the outcomes that they achieved, and then try to transfer that to the actual situation. But story is really a compelling element and often overlooked, right? If we think about how humans pass down information before the printing press, it was all story-based.

And so we have a natural affinity for understanding, digesting, and providing stories. for understanding, digesting, and providing stories. And those different types of stories that we use give us the ability to convey messages that are beyond just statistics. And I've read a lot of research that people do, let's say they're going to buy something, right? They do all this analysis and they look at the numbers and they run all this stuff.

And in the end, they make a decision on which salesperson they liked. It's motivated by our human interactions. And that's one of the reasons why the pandemic was so damaging. Because the human interactions, you learn a lot from looking at somebody shifting their body weight, or twiddling their thumbs or looking at their watch, right? But those are things that you don't necessarily get to see on a video call, right? We're only seeing people maybe from the chest up and we're seeing them at a distance that is a fixed distance.

And so we don't get perspective. And we lost a lot of that in the sense during that pandemic. One other thing, if we go back to the pandemic, I think what happened a lot of times, since we're just doing Zoom calls and sometimes one after another, it became very like just the facts, ma'am. Oh, what do we need to know? Okay, boom, boom, boom, I'm done. And we lost the sense of sitting around the water cooler, telling stories and engaging in activities that build the culture of the organization. Now, I'm not saying that we have to be at work to do that, like face-to-face, we don't have to, but it does help and also helps

if we make time for stories and those type of interactions and the leadership works on a culture of storytelling, of interaction. It doesn't always happen, but when organizations do that, it becomes a stronger organization. Mark Lepper's design principles for intrinsic motivation in the book as well, just before the section on SDT actually. So his fourth principle is contextualization, and we're talking a little bit about fantasy in there. So fantasy is another way of kind of extrapolating storytelling, but I just want to follow up one more time. What is the extent to which we must go as storytellers when creating these scenarios or these learning opportunities? I'm sure the answer is it depends, of course. But is it sometimes justified to go out and hire a professional storyteller? And at the end of the book, you give some roles. There's, you know, artist, game designer. It really seems like you encourage people to dive deep into these sort of things. Do we need to get a dungeon master to help run our learning programs? That would be fun. Yeah. How do we think about this? How do we think about

the different kinds of learning and where it might be important to dive deeper into storytelling and where it might be important to just stick with the resources that we have? Any advice for how to navigate that? Yeah, that's a great question. I think if you're looking at training your employees in an area that is a strategic advantage for your organization, so maybe it's the way you deal with customers, maybe it's the product that you have, maybe it's the way you do R&D, whatever you view as your strategic advantage, even if it's cost, right? So the stories can become representative of your strategic advantage. So FedEx, for example, very early on told stories about drivers who forgot their key to the pickup box and would lift the box into the truck and take it back to where their key was, right? So that it wouldn't not get delivered, right? So that's a corporate legend.

And what those corporate legends do and stories do is they build the culture. One of the things I think is the problem with corporate training is we want to teach everybody everything. Like, oh, we'll teach them what to do in this situation, what to do in this situation, what to do in this situation. Well, guess what? Nobody taught anybody what to do in a pandemic situation, right, until it hit because we can't anticipate every situation. So, if you look at a strategic driver of your company, every situation. So if you look at a strategic driver of your company, that's the time to hire a professional storyteller. That's the time when you get somebody who understands the intricacies of conveying the story and of conveying the message, and that will have a huge impact.

So I would strongly recommend that situation. And then I would also recommend having that professional storyteller train you a little bit, your organization, your L&D folks, your executives, your managers on the art of storytelling themselves. I mean, we've all suffered people that like tell a story like, yeah, I'll wait for the movie, right? But we've also had people that like weren't captivated by it. Wow, he just told me about walking into his mailbox and I am enthralled about what kind of mail he picked up. This is amazing. So people can learn to tell impactful stories

and they need lessons just like anybody else. You know, we're not born great storytellers. We have to learn how to do it. And some of us learn on our own happenstance, but some of us can learn from professional storytellers. And as an organization, we tend not to have a chief storyteller. But if we want our message to our clients, to our customers, and as importantly, to our employees, then having a good storyteller

is paramount and critical for the future. I mean, especially, you know, you can't have a conversation in 2023 without AI, right? So let's just throw AI in there. But now that you have AI creating all kinds of content, automatically, the art of storytelling is going to be more critical than ever. The subtleties, the nuances, the attentions to detail, people are going to want that. And in fact, I think in the future, you're going to have things like this was a certified story created entirely by a human, right? You're going to have this dichotomy. And organizations, especially right now where AI is, are not going to be successful unless they still employ humans to do the subtlety, the attention to details, the Easter eggs, the red herrings that aren't in chat GPT or any kind of AI. So yeah,

I would definitely say if it's a strategic initiative, strategic advantage, you need a storyteller. So that's the macro. What about the micro really getting into the technical solutions and the tactics and the strategies here? So I want to start off with a simple example. So just as simple as a nudge, which is a broader concept, I think a broader idea. I mean, there's a whole book on it, but a nudge, you know, a simple change in something that changes the behavior of the people who engage with that thing. Basically, it's probably a bad way to describe it. But there's a cool nudge example that you give in the book, which is the musical stairs.

Do you want to just give an overview of that and how maybe that can be implemented as a component of gamification? Yeah. So there was an example of a subway system. You have stairs that you go up the stairs on one side and you have an escalator on another side. And this group decided that we're going to paint piano keys on the stairs and we're going to make them musical. So if you climbed up the stairs, you could make music. You know, people know they should exercise, but who wants to exercise when there's an escalator right there? So that little bit of nudging got more and more people to walk up the stairs, sometimes sprint up the stairs or dance up the stairs because you gave them that little bit of external or extrinsic motivation. We talked about the internal-external is external motivation can be helpful when it works with internal motivation.

So one of the things when I did research for the book that really surprised me was a lot of the earlier research in motivation said you can be internally motivated or externally motivated, but you can't be both, right? Pick one, right? The scales they created actually created a dichotomy. Turns out in real life, it's a combination of both, right? You might go to get your master's degree because you want more money, that's external, but you also are really curious about the subject, that's internal motivation. So these nudges can be just the

right. So for example, I like the app Zombie Run, right? And so you're escaping from zombies. And you know, you don't feel like running, but you've had 10 missions in a row. You don't want to give up on your 10th mission. Or it's kind of fun because you're out running by yourself. And all of a sudden, there's a zombie behind you. And you have to kind of sprint, right? You know there's not a zombie behind you, but you look anyway. And you verify.

So the idea is these little nudges can be very helpful. And it's a little bit like good UX design, right? can be very helpful. And it's a little bit like good UX design, right? It allows you to have that little bit of encouragement to do something that you know you should be doing. Now, if it's something that you shouldn't be doing, then a nudge isn't really going to move you in the right direction, right?

You really would need a huge push, maybe not a nudge. But for things that you know you should be doing, nudges can really be helpful for moving an individual forward. And advertisers use this all the time. When they create a website, they nudge you to click on buy, they nudge you. Order before midnight is probably one of the most famous nudges ever, right? Limited supply, time is running out. Like these aren't new techniques, but there are new ways of employing those kinds of techniques and clever, like creating a piano is clever, right? Or there's another example where they gave you high praise for driving the speed limit, right? You know, that's a nice little nudge, a nice little reminder. So there are lots of

different ways that we can create these. One interesting one from a learning perspective is a right answer streak, right? Not necessarily a nudge, but if you get all five questions at the end of this module correctly, you're done. If you miss one, you get five extra questions. And everybody was like, oh no, nobody wants five extra questions. So they all paid extra attention so they wouldn't have to do the five extra questions, right? And the long run, it's not a big deal. And there's other gamification examples of people spending literally hours learning new material so they could be successful, so they could win a Starbucks gift card. But the fascinating thing about that was the amount of time they put in to

earn that Starbucks gift card was so disproportional to the value of the gift card. You know, what you make in an hour, you could buy 20 gift cards, yet you spent 17 hours learning about that. So you get a free gift card, you know, so those kinds of things, those kinds of little nudges really can move us in the right direction and really are an exciting way to motivate people to action. I did a workshop one time and I said, whoever answers this question gets a candy bar and you would have thought I was giving away gold, right? So little nudges are really important. To adults or to children?

It was adults. We were doing a project management class and I'm like, I've never saw people so enthusiastic about a candy bar. What about for actual behavioral change though? Like even if we're talking about like social skills, you do have a section in the book on that as well. But can simple nudges be used to actually create behavioral change? I feel like that's less in the category of

gamification and almost more in the category of like marketing and just behavioral science, psychology. But do you have any examples of that where maybe it's something social or just behavioral in an office environment where these sort of tactics are being employed successfully? Yeah. So, I always say it turns out your mom nagging you was actually a really good behavioral technique. There was a really interesting study of men in India who were predisposed to type 2 diabetes. And these men got two text messages a day versus another group that got their traditional, hey, take the stairs, traditional instruction. Well, the gentleman that got the two text messages a day versus another group that got their traditional, hey, take the stairs, traditional instruction. Well, the gentleman that got the two text messages a day, and there was no

gamification, just messages, and they were behaviorally focused, like don't eat while you're watching TV, go out and ride your bike tonight, that kind of stuff, reduced the incidence of type 2 diabetes by 36%. So that's a behavioral disease. And their behavior changed based on this nudging. And organizations do that. So a lot of gamification are like, oh, we've changed the behavior. There's less inventory shrinkage. There's more focus on customer service. There's better leadership. That's not necessarily the points. That's the reminder of a behavioral change you need to do every day. So these behavioral prompts, nudges, pushes can definitely have an impact on people's behavior. And nagging or reminding people of what they should be doing actually is a very positive way

to shape behavior. Can that create ill will though, if it's coming from organizational leadership or something like that? If it isn't cleverly written and if it actually comes across as nagging? Yeah, all this can. I mean, I've seen instances

where people rebel against gamification because they feel they're being manipulated. Micromanaging or even like, so I use Duolingo for a while and Duolingo, if you stop using it, it starts giving you like snarky messages. Well, I guess you don't want to learn Portugals, right? So after a while, you're like, yeah, I'm just turning it off because I don't want the notification. So it has to be the right balance. The other thing is we like games

because they're novel. Like, so take Exploding Kittens, right? At one point, that game was like all the rage, right? Now I haven't heard about it for months. Why? Because people have moved on to different games, right? So one of the things people like about games is the novelty and the difference and the excitement of learning something new. And you've got to do the same thing with how you're going to gamify some actions within the organization.

If you don't, people will soon get bored, tired, and stop doing it. There's actually, there's two points that I want to make that relate to this question of novelty. The first is that you write in the book that certain types of extrinsic motivation can actually directly undermine intrinsic motivation, which you touched on at the beginning, right at the top of the show, actually. And you actually list a few different categories of extrinsic motivation. But I think the ultimate point is that there are certain things that really matter when you're either rewarding somebody or acknowledging positive behavior and variability in reward is very important.

I think your initial example was you gave your son a star and then he wanted candy bar for brushing his teeth. That obviously doesn't work. But variability in reward. I actually remember I made some content with Nir Eyal, who wrote the book Hooked. And variable reward is like the fourth part, I believe, in his hook model, which this is obviously a pretty well understood thing among researchers and experts like yourself. Can you explain the importance of over and over again, it actually becomes less attractive for us to get the award and less motivational because we know what it's going to be. If a reward is variable, think of it in a game, in the chest, you're either going to get a piece of coal or you're going to get a piece of gold. When you first discover the chest, you get a little shot of

dopamine like, hey, this is kind of exciting. And then because it's variable, when I open it, I get another shot of dopamine, whether it's gold or coal, because I don't know what it's going to be. And I'm like, oh, but if I know every time it's going to be gold, I'm like, yeah, it's gold. Okay. Who cares, right? Oh, that's good. I'm glad I got it.

So that variability actually physically makes an impact and also adds this sense of uncertainty or unknowingness. And as humans, we react and pay attention to things we don't know. So, a good example is this, you know, if you've ever driven home from work and all of a sudden you're home, you're like, how did I get home? I don't even remember driving home, right? Because our mind kind of blanks out things that we do every single day. We couldn't pay attention to everything, but that's why our mind pays attention to anomalies or things that are different or outliers because, hey, that's weird. What's with that, right? Somebody has a different hairstyle that we never saw before. We immediately pay attention because it's not like anything else.

But all day, we see people with shoulder-length hair, we never pay attention. So the idea that variability adds is this sense of unknowing, uncertainty, and this physiological excitement because it's something like we don't know what it's going to be. In fact, Las Vegas is built entirely on variability of rewards, right? You never know if you're going to get the big jackpot or not. So we can use that variability to help drive people within organizations, if we use it ethically and fairly, to help keep them engaged in what's happening and what kind of things that they're concerned about. Now, the whole other thing, as we've talked about, is all these rewards and everything

has to be tied to something that, again, a sense of purpose, a sense of helping, a sense of looking at the future, a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself. All those intrinsic elements are only enhanced with these things. We can't live forever on just extrinsic motivation. The other novel item I wanted to discuss is the fact that most courses, especially videos, don't last very long from an organizational learning perspective. There was a survey I cited recently on another episode as well, but most people in organizations see their courses, mostly the video courses, they see them as lasting between one and four years at most.

And I think most actually said less than three years, like more than half people said, you know, this isn't going to last more than three years. And I think that's indicative of the times and the way that technology changes and how fast the way we work itself changes with AI and with all the different platforms that we use to accomplish our work, things change and the courses need to change as well. But do you see gamification or any of the work that you do as allowing educational content to have a longer shelf life just because the design is more effective,

because it's more exciting? Anything like that? Yes, I think what well-designed gamification does is adds a level of interactivity and engagement to instruction that's not typically there. And so when things aren't engaging, people don't watch them, people don't pay attention, and somebody goes, hey, nobody's watching this, nobody's paying attention, let's get

rid of it. Or hey, this is old school, or this is old hat, or it doesn't make sense. But what gamification does is it puts more on the learner, because the learner has to now think and process and do something. And that level of engagement helps make content longer lasting because the lecture in the video isn't creating all the content. You as the learner is creating content because you're required to, and you're asked to. And so that I think adds a lot to the longevity of it. And I often say about gamification, I say, I don't really, you know, game, gamification, whatever you call it,

what I'm more interested in is are you engaging the person in a meaningful way? Whether it's just an activity or an exercise or a full-fledged game or gamification, being engaged in an activity is what helps motivate, invest, and instruct somebody who's interacting with that content. I think we can finish up by asking the really important question here, which is how do you introduce games and gamification into organizations? I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if some find this, like you said earlier, you know, maybe not serious enough, or they're just unfamiliar with games and the history of gaming overall. So what would you say? How do you introduce this sort of thing? How do you get buy-in in an organization? Yeah, that's a great question.

I often say, you know, game is still a four-letter word in a lot of organizations and that needs to change. But basically I do it in a couple of ways. One is I strongly recommend running a small pilot in your organization with a manager or somebody who's really into games. And the nice thing is you'll find more and more people willing and open to say, yeah, I play games. I like games. I'm into games. Yeah, let's give that a shot. They kind of come out of the woodwork and they say, yes, I'm a gamer.

I'm also in a World of Warcraft. Right. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Now there's different types of gamers, right? You've got, you know, people that play bridge and people that play World of Warcraft. Right, exactly. Yes, yes. Yeah. Now there's different types of gamers, right? You've got, you know, people that play bridge and people that play World of Warcraft. And you got the Minecraft group and you've got all kinds of everything in between. So

recruiting people to do a pilot on a subject like a manager, somebody that's a good way to do it. The other thing is you don't have to go like full blown, all out, perfect gamification. I think gamification, it's not a set and forget, right? You do it, you modify it. Every culture is a little bit different, even subcultures within a company. I did a card game one time at a conference and one woman up front is like, I hate this card game. It's horrible. I don't know why we're playing this card game. What are we doing? I'm like, okay, well, that's valid. Anybody else have opinion about the card game? One woman's in the back goes, I love this card game.

It's the greatest card game I ever played. I'm like, were you two playing the same game? Like, what's going on? Well, it turns out it was a very competitive, highly competitive kind of cutthroat. The woman up front was from HR and felt this was not an appropriate game for her group of HR.

Woman in the back was sales. They're cutthroat anyway. So you've got to know your culture and subculture in your organization of how to create the game. Are you creating cooperative game, competitive game? Are you creating a game that the person compares themselves to their score from last week? Are they comparing themselves to others? Like what is the culture of the game? So figure that out. Do you actually recommend introducing into maybe a team or a department that is competitive by

nature just because that might be easier? It's a great place to start. Yep. Gamefication recommend introducing into maybe a team or a department that is competitive by nature, just because that might be easier. It's a great place to start. Yep. Gamification started there a lot. And the other thing that I recommend is people forget cooperative games. And so they're like, oh, every game has to be competitive. No, it doesn't. There are lots of cooperative games that you could use in departments within your organization. The other thing is make sure the core dynamic, like what's the game goal? Like why are you playing the game? Are you racing to the finish?

Are you outwitting your opponent? Whatever. Make that congruent with what they do on the job, right? If time isn't of the essence, why are you putting a timer in the game, right? So you need to really carefully think about what's happening on the job versus what's happening with the game.

Then pilot it, make some changes that need to be made, get people involved. And the other thing we did at one organization that wasn't used to games is before we even implemented gamification, we did like a free play Friday. So we just gave them access and sent out links to just games that they could play just to get them used to playing games. And then when it came to the corporate game, they were kind of like comfortable with it and allowed that. I've worked with platforms that give people the opportunity that, hey, you can play a little game or you can answer this multiple choice question. It's up to you.

And the fascinating thing to me, I did that study was I would think gamers 100% would always play a game. No. Every once in a while, they were pressed for time or whatever. And so they just answer the multiple choice question. And you would think that people that never played games would never play a game. No, every once in a while, instead of answering multiple choice question, maybe they're having a bad day or whatever, or just want to, they play the game. So to think somebody is consistent a hundred percent of the time, isn't the case. And giving them options and choices, we go back to autonomy, is a really good way to motivate people to learn the content and reinforce the content to do the nudging, to do the games that way.

So those are some recommendations I give to people who are thinking of implementing games into their organization. Awesome, thank you. Well, before we wrap, can you just let our listeners know where they can learn more about you? Yes, so one good place to find me is on LinkedIn, just Karl Kopp, you can look me up there, LinkedIn.

You can find me on LinkedIn Learning if you have access to LinkedIn Learning. And you can also find several of my books on Git Abstract. So if you don't have time to read a whole book, go ahead and grab one of those. It's a great way to beef up on the information, find out if it's the right publication for you and get key points of what you want to do.

And then I have a YouTube tube and I have a really cool series called The Unofficial Unauthorized History of Learning Games. And that's been just a fun series, kind of my pet project right now. So if you have time, check that out. I have a lot of fun with it.

And if all else fails, you can find both of us in Valdraken, the latest main city in the World of Warcraft expansion, Dragonflight. Just kidding. Again, Carl, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. You've been listening to L&D in Action,

a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating, leave a comment, and share the episodes you love. Help us keep delivering the conversations that turn learning into action. Until next time.