Brexit: What’s the game plan? Christine Elgood, managing director of Elgood Effective Learning, thinks leaders need to get back to playing games if they are to ride out Brexit with a solid plan.
Monopoly. You either love it because you can take risks and it makes no difference to your life, or you hate it with a passion because it takes so long to play out. It’s a bit like life: Full of ups and downs, chance and luck.
For many of us, playing games as children made learning life skills fun and interesting, and it often helped us learn about ourselves, whether we realised it or not. Fast forward a few years and in a work environment playing a game provides leaders with the perfect excuse to observe how people work together and how they follow or break rules. It’s also a hunting ground for ideas.
And let’s be honest, as we move towards Brexit, ideas are what we’ll need. But planning for something you haven’t experienced is hard. It plays on emotions. All the practical knowledge of how a business or a market works is undermined. It’s an uncomfortable place to be.
With Brexit we are dealing in concepts and a multitude of ‘what ifs’ hence business acumen will be challenged in a way it’s never been before. How we behave will also be tested, indeed a big question mark hangs over ethics as people face the pressure of competing in new situations and under new rules.
So if dealing with the unknown is going to need huge amounts of conceptual thinking, something that won’t come easily to a lot of people, shouldn’t we get back to creating a safe place to play with our ideas to find the way ahead?
Playing a game based on the new Brexit world will unlock free thought and help people escape long-held and often sub-conscious assumptions that limit thinking. It opens up communication and a shared understanding of the nuts businesses need to crack and why.