Episode description

Hello everyone! My name is Ladek and my guest for this episode is Alexandra Suchman. Alex is the cofounder and CEO of Barometer, a company that drives real behavior and culture change through games and play.

After a decade of experience working in operations and organizational development, Alex realized that building stronger emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills are key to organizational success. She noticed a gap in the industry for solutions that bridge the knowledge-to-action gap, and discovered game-based experiential learning for teams as an effective tool.

In this ‘game of a conversation’ Alex and I discuss

00:00 › Start

02:01 › Game On—How Alex stumbled into the world of games as a means for personal and professional development, why this is VERY different from gamification, and how she (and her teammates) get CEOs, CLOs and Directors to stop and listen to them

8:31 › Avatars—What the process looks like for bringing games into professional development, from the first icebreakers or proof-of-concept to massive complexity that really focus on achieving business or behavior change objectives

16:08 › Serious Fun—Alex describes how we can dispel the idea of games as just “silly fun,” to understand how there are opportunities everywhere for genuine reflection and learning, and how we play games differently, with different people

22:31 › Playtime—Alex tells us how she and her team help people to move past the potential cringe moments when playing games at work so that they really become something useful and powerful, and how this leads to tangible breakthroughs

28:13 › Game Over, Restart—Alex walks us through what it's like when a game doesn’t work as planned and you have to adapt on the fly; and why that’s often a magical moment

33:11 › Select, Start—Alex provides her advice on getting started with games for development in your organization or school.

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