Carana: Adapt! Game as “holding environment”

President Langata calmly explained that the traditional donors were no longer necessary—this is the dawn of a new age of prosperity and self-reliance for Carana—and then she promptly rolled a 9: success!  Even with the modifiers imposed for the complexity of the proposed action, the dice predicted       success—and I marvelled at the smiles and shouts of celebration around the table.  Four hours ago when we started, few of these people knew each other well and no one knew Carana… and who would have predicted they would care this much in this amount of time?       

How did we get here, you ask?  Now that my friend Laura and I don’t work for the World Bank anymore, we recently dusted off Carana and updated it with our friend Marc for use in an experience we’ve designed that introduces the concepts of adaptive leadership to people working in fragile and conflict-affected developing countries – we’re calling it Carana: Adapt!  

Gary and Laura SimMastering (standing) for a recent delivery for the UN at NYU-Silver

Where the old Carana had a (rather clunky but fun) post-conflict needs assessment exercise designed to teach the basics of security and development mandates and sequencing in a complex developing country, the new Carana is lean and light, built on a super-simple matrix game, with some pretty sweet tokens and chips representing power and influence and a nice simple map and board to draw players in.  The whole design gives us the ability to quickly switch between scenes we keep ‘in our back pocket’ and choose scenes that offer the greatest simulation of real-world drama based on player actions … all unfolding over a six-scene story arc we deliver in a day.  And while players engaged pretty enthusiastically in the ‘old’ Carana, this one creates much more energy, and the pause between each scene lets players assess and adapt how they’ll pursue their goals.

What I found most interesting about the success we’ve enjoyed so far with Carana: Adapt! is how easily it serves as a holding environment. In adaptive leadership, a holding environment is the “cohesive properties of a relationship or social system that serve to keep people engaged with one another in spite of the divisive forces generated by adaptive work”. That is a little technical for me, I think of a holding environments as the artificial constructs that people create to explain why they are willing to stick through some occasionally painful work.  The foundations for a holding environment can be as simple as norms or rules – “golf has 18 holes”, as practical as timelines – “the meeting ends when lunch comes at 1” or as profound as values – “a family sticks together through thick and thin” or, as my grandparents used to say “never go to sleep angry” (creating some late night holding environments).  There was something intuitive that I think Laura and I sensed when we started designing Carana: Adapt from our 14 previous deliveries of Carana – when people get in a game, they care.  So we set out to figure out how to design a game immersive enough that people would care enough to do hard adaptive work.  

I think this is an important point.  Here on PAXsims, we have a lot of reflection on the value of games and simulations for experiential learning and for analysis, admittedly with limitations. But, I think, as gamers, we often take for granted the immersive quality of games – they make people care.  

And it isn’t just that they care – they invest. They get a light introduction to a fictional country and      information about their roles (we encourage players to inhabit their roles inspired by their professional experience, without deep roleplaying or regression to cliché).  What we see is that even with a fairly low threshold built for scoring or victory like ours has, suddenly people care about chips, about die rolls, about problem-solving in the fictional country … and they’re willing to invest their energy and time. Most interestingly, they’re not just invested in ’winning’, but they zero in on pursuing better outcomes, taking risks and applying what they are learning from the introduction to adaptive leadership that is embedded into the experience.  

In formulating the concept of the holding environment, Heifetz and others are telling us how difficult the work of adaptive leadership can be – if the holding environment isn’t strong enough to maintain the “pressure cooker” people will abandon the work. Somehow a game contributes to that resilience – perhaps the tokens remind people that it is not real, perhaps the play of inhabiting a role gives them more space to take chances, or maybe the catharsis of a die roll for victory (or loss!) gives them the release they need to accommodate that stress – whatever the case, games don’t just make people care, games keep people engaged.  

This engagement is an important and often overlooked element of gaming.  We’re using it to wring every ounce of energy and attention out of our participants and at every Carana:Adapt! delivery we’ve done so far people stand around and talk for an hour after.  Our next challenge is to begin to build a network of Carana: Adapt! veterans who support each other in trying out some of those risky interventions in real life.  Let us know if you want to visit Carana.

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Comments from Laura Bailey and Marc Manashil are gratefully acknowledged.