What's in a Good Game?

Jim talks with Daniel Mezick about two books on leadership & social coherence, Michael Suk-Young Chwe's Rational Ritual & Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest... Jim talks with Daniel Mezick about two books on leadership & social coherence, Michael Suk-Young Chwe's Rational Ritual & Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest. They discuss ritual as a mechanism for large-scale coordination, mimicry in beer choice and Super Bowl ads, fragmentation of audiences through microtargeting, the relationship between common knowledge & ritual, China's management of common knowledge, America's weak-sauce rituals, meetings as games, how egalitarianism increases group decision quality, role-based vs position-based leadership, anti-puffing-up mechanisms, social values of hunter-forager groups, how weapons may have enabled egalitarianism, personal sovereignty as careful authorizing, Jim's guest selection algorithm, authority information as social glue, rapid adaptability of informal authority systems, Graeber & Wengrow's critique of Boehm, egalitarianism as a game, making role-based leadership scalable, leadership invitation, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP41 - Daniel Mezick on the Agile Organization Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge, by Michael Suk-Young Chwe Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, by Chris Boehm Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, by Rene Girard @Jim_Rutt on Twitter Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity - A Platform for Designing Business Architecture, by Jamshid Gharajedaghi Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, by Johan Huizinga JRS EP140 - Robin Dunbar on Friendship The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, by Jane McGonigal Coaching executives and teams in Agile since 2006, Daniel Mezick leads Improving Agility. Daniel has guided dozens of organizations in the art and science of Agile improvement. An author and co-author of three books on organization change, Daniel is a frequent keynote speaker at industry conferences and events. He is the originator of OpenSpace Agility, an engagement model for enabling authentic and lasting organizational improvement. He is also an Advisory Board member and co-Founder of The Open Leadership Network, a certification body and community of practice dedicated to implementing Open patterns and practices inside business enterprises worldwide.