Seth Godin & Ric talks about boardgame play and creating significance together

Join Seth Godin as we are talking about boardgames and how we can help kids, including that kid we all have inside us, by helping others level up in ways they want to repeat.

I really recommend you check out his newest book

The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams

https://seths.blog/Song

Transcription of our conversation to save you time if you don’t have time for a listen.

Ric

Thank you Seth for coming here. I'm humbled to have you with us.

Seth

Oh, you're a leader, you show up on the regular, you're so generous in the way you've coached and help people so its my pleasure.

Ric

Thank you, Seth. That’s mutual. I've learned from you and your books to just dare. Before I got older I was afraid of tension and the conflict there in and your way of leading helped me to realize that tension is actually helpful and the only path forward and I'd love to talk some about that.

Seth

Terrific, terrific. I mean, when we're talking about tension, people don't always understand. The simplest example I can give you if I […………]

I only paused for three seconds, maybe two, but it was still uncomfortable. That's a form of tension. It's not a physical thing. It's a way that we want completion to occur. We're wondering what's going to happen next. 

Industrialism has pushed us to want to relieve tension, and just get the memo done, meeting over with, the quarterly numbers in. But in fact, creativity always involves tension.

Ric

So right and again, now I fight daily embracing that instead of hiding from it because I want to fill that with the short term instead of reminding myself of the long term. And here, I struggle with figuring out how to help kids. I'm a board gamer and a computer gamer and I played a lot of role playing games. And I quite often sit as a leader of a meeting and realize - playing these games taught me so much to figure out what needs to happen here.

Why aren't they paying attention to what matters?

Whenever you talk about games, like Cosmic Encounter (a boardgame), or how you learn things from video games - its so good to hear. 

When did you start playing board games? Because you do talk about that every now and then

Seth

Well, I don't know if you know, but I'm friends with Peter co-creator of Cosmic Encounter. So yeah, so I know royalty. I probably started playing board games when I was five or six. 

I think it's very important to establish early on two things. One, like music, there's taste in board games. Just because you don't like some board games doesn't mean you don't like all board games. And number two, what goes to that is, forgive me, but there's good board games, and there's bad board games. And there are a lot of bad board games. You know, I grew up with Monopoly. Monopoly a bad board game. And there are a lot of ways that I explain why it's bad. Chutes and Ladders is a bad board game where you're just rolling dice and using luck to magnify it all the way around.

On the other hand, Rock Paper Scissors RoShamBo is an excellent game. The rules are super simple, you can play it at many levels of depth, etc.

I was a game designer in the early 1980s. I pride myself on doing game design still to this day. Not always on a board, not always with dice. Sometimes in the way of businesses designed, it's still a game. And for me, games are a set of rules. 

A way for individuals to bring intent to the table to see how their intent interacts with other people's intent when exposed to the rules.

Business is at its best when rules are clear and are about serving your constituents. But the play is not clear. Which is why we do business now totally differently than we did 20 years ago. Because people get better at playing the game.

Ric

Thinking absolut when we see the rules and understand the rules. One of the headlines for your current book is “Let's get real, or let's not play” and the earlier we can understand that you play around a rule set that I don't want to play around or that I nor you can succeed in when we play together the better both of us are.

Do you want to segway over to that?

Seth

Yes what does the phrase let's get real or let's not play mena and there is a great book with that title. That's not my book. That book is about selling. In that book, what they're arguing is that if you're doing a complicated multimillion dollar B2B sale, you're not going to make it by hustling people. You're going to make it by engaging with them to solve their problem. And if they don't want their problem solved, don't go on a sales call, right? Let's get real about why we're both here. I am not doing this to you. I'm doing this with you.

My book, The Song of significance takes us to a different level and says: look at work, we're here to make a change happen. If you just want an industrial job, where you take something from this box and put it in that box, go work over there. That's not what we do here. What we do here is we make a change happen. And there are a bunch of mutual commitments we need to make about how we will play that game with each other for each other, to get to where we're going. And what's happened at work, is we've enabled industrialism to creep in, and we pretend that's what we're doing. But what we're really doing is ordering people to do what we want. And I think we need to talk about it.

Ric

Yes and the better we become a talking about it and having empathy that it's hard to be a middle manager right now being told to play by one rule set yet being followed up on another rule set.

It goes back to board games. If you can realize that some people at this table want to play Monopoly, but you don't. The earlier you can have that conversation, the better off you all are.

I'm always, as a grown up who is often in conversations with kids asking myself -  What am I teaching whom right now here?

For example, what happens when we remove the dice from the game, suddenly, it's a very different game, and different skill sets being taught that is still play that are also very beneficial when we're talking to people reading people, understanding people, but also, everyone needs to have fun.

So if we're forcing someone to play a game that they find too complicated, or too scary, or whatever, they're not going to come back next time we invite them to play. Right? This is exactly the same for work outcomes.

Seth

Brilliant, and the key word you just said his invite, right?

That part of the mindset of capitalism is you got to work or you're going to starve to death. So there's not an invitation there. Part of the mindset of compulsory education is you got to go to school, or your parents go to jail. So those are not enrolled activities. Great work, great learning comes where people are enrolled in the journey.

We have to figure out how to create the conditions for people to decide that that's what they want.

Ric

Yes, and continuing with role playing, for example, as a Game Master. The stories my childhood friends still tell others about today (we are all still very close friends) is where they were part of the story, of making the story, of creating the story. They weren't necessarily the heroes of the story.

But it wasn't my story. I was just giving them a direction and creating a collaborate space for them and thus they turned it into their story. And support for the work, we do emotional work we need to do

Seth

Exactly, and you know, so it's interesting when we think about role playing games, how badly they've been pigeonholed for a certain group of nerdy kids when in fact our life is a role playing game.

The people who seem to get the most out of our lives are the ones who are the authors of that journey, as opposed to simply characters in it.

Ric

Yes and goes back to my previous fear of tension where I was reacting versus daring to proactively help people. Another lesson I learned from you, maybe 30 years ago was meaningful specific and small data. When I began my consulting career, 30 years ago, before buzzwords like big data, and stuff like that everyone was hungry for more data. And then I read a post from you realizing how could I not see this for myself? You need to be intentionally meningsfull  specific, embracing small data

Do you want to share some thoughts on that?

Seth

No, you please. You read it more recently than I did. Go ahead and riff.

Ric

it is about what's the purpose? What's the intention? What's the small action to commit to here instead of having too big targets, big actions that are too vague. I've also been coaching in your Akimbo workshops where it's like we ask ourselves: “Did it work?” where it's “you don't write a long thing and then think you can plaster it everywhere” you write a small thing for a specific funnel that buys permission to invite those you aim to help read another small thing that eventually will help them get to where they want to go.

Seth

Right.  So I think what they all adds up to is choosing to be on the hook. This goes back to the board game thing. Which is when you are playing certain kinds of board games, there is no doubt who is in charge of your pieces. It's you. It's not a group of people where you're just doing what you're told. You moved that piece. Well, if you write a piece of copy, and people didn't respond, you wrote the copy, and people didn't respond. That is really useful information. Whereas if 14 people are in a room for six months and come up with some crafted statement, that means nothing. And it doesn't do anything. We don't know who rolled those dice. We don't know who's on the hook, and therefore it won't improve. Because we need to understand that we're getting real, we're playing this game, we have a change we seek to make, are we going to do it or not?

Ric

Yeah, totally. And also, on the big data thing, it's always easier to go looking for more things to add versus going small and asking ourselves ”did it work?” putting ourselves on the hook, as you say. 

We're also living in a very fast-moving world. Something that piqued my interest that you talked about just now is learning from the edges, being willing to go to the edges, and learn and then teach others.

Seth

Well, so I'm struggling for a boardgame analogy, I'm not sure I have one here. So let's put that aside for a minute. The frontier, the edges, the places where the nerds, the people with problems, the folks who are seeking to make change happen is the juiciest most interesting place.

Because I have no doubt that it is vitally important that the people in the water department at my town get fresh, clean water to my house. But that's a Six Sigma problem. And the only way to succeed is to make it a little tiny bit cheaper than you did yesterday. And that work needs to be done. I am not minimizing it. We can't live without it. But it doesn't have to be done by you.

The problem with industrial work, where the only way to win is to be a little faster and a little cheaper, is you spend your day running on a treadmill. It's hard to feel truly significant. When you're not making change happen when you're not feeling like you're on the hook. It's harder to be respected is harder to find the thrill of looking forward to tomorrow.

As we enter this post-industrial age what we're hearing from people who have enough to eat who have a roof over their head is that what they miss in their life is significance is knowing that they did something that they alone could contribute to. The only place to find that work is on the edges.

Now they don't have to be the giant edges of launching a mission to Jupiter, it could be the edge of here's this patient, she just found out she has high blood pressure, she has never had this problem before. In the next five minutes, the tone of her future is going to be set. What is that interaction like? If you're just going to read it from a card, you're probably not showing up as a human.

But if you can see the pain in that person's eyes, and you can figure out how to offer that person solace. Well, then you've done something significant.

Ric

Yeah, and that is something we all can choose to do.

Seth

Right

Ric

But it is scary. But putting yourself on the line there to actually invite having that conversation or fighting to have the margin for five minutes for listening.

Seth

Right. Exactly.

Ric

I feel bad for bringing us back to boardgames after such an important topic.

Seth

Please do.

Ric

One example there is our garage is full of board games that I bought that didn't become ”something our friends play for 20 years”. But I also I am the one in in my friends group that come with something new. Let's try this. And one out of 20 is something we keep playing for that long that yet most aren't.  I enjoy trying those rules playing out and experimenting with them but with the intent that most of them won't get used. Anyone listening to this. This is the same thing for a software and automation, making time for having conversations. Not all of them was going to work out. And but it's exactly the same with board games.

Seth

Yes. Well said and you know, the people who are passionate about a hobby go into it knowing they're not going to be right every time. Same thing is true with music and with music, we solve the problem by inventing the radio station. We haven't figured out how to make a radio station for board games.

Ric

I would love that.

We do have something for our computer game players. There it's a lot easier because there you have it on STEAM that you can buy something as an early developer or a complete game  and then you can refund it.

So there it's starting to move, it's easy to try things early on the edges.

And you Seth for example, with Carbon Almanac -  you have a board game there. And you have the PDFs on line, so you can taste it, chew a bit, and then I want more, or you can say no, not me, not right now.

Seth

Exactly

Ric

And with 3d printing and board games moddig as well, soon that might be easy outside the edges there too.

But again, when you're talking about real life problems, and having that emotional work, it feels so bad bringing up board games. But if we can invite the kids to dare to experiment, to learn new rules. To reposition fast and easy when they realized what worked well for a previous game didn't work here.

Seth

Yeah. And you know, a couple of times, you've mentioned kids, kids is a chronological thing, but it's also a choice. And I act like a kid on a good day. That's my goal, act like a kid. And why wouldn't we want to do that?

Ric

I'm with you. I think we all have that inner child. And when we see it, accept it and encourage it,  good things follow. Both when my kid connects to your kid Seth good things follow. But also, if we can learn to see things 20 years before we need to show up for work, for fun, because we get enrolment with our friends having fun. Why not?  That is making life better for people I believe.

Seth

Yeah

Ric

I love to play a lot of board games with kids today, but I also play Minecraft and those kinds of games too. And something you also talk a lot about is coming together as a community to solve system problems. And kids do this today in Minecraft. I remember being a computer player meeting other computer game player. When I was a teenager and starting to work. We were kind of nerds and a bit ashamed of it. And then 10 years later. It was something something you put it put on your resume to illustrate that you helped elevate, teach work, automate stuff.  I'm so curious to see what happens with the kids growing up having that experience from Minecraft. 

Seth

Yeah. And a shout out to Cory Doctorow and his book Makers. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it. It's about communities of nerds coming together to play a game in real life that transforms the whole world.

Ric

Yes! I like that book and the book Walkaway and I pre-ordered his Red Team Blues

Seth

Yes. exactly

Ric

I want to read that and look forward to it. We can take what we get and make it better this modding that goes on in both board games and in cyber game. That mindset for works. It's awesome.

Seth

Yes, exactly. Well said.

Ric

But it can also be a bit much I know you've said a few times that you are mildly distracted. And I'm asking for myself now. 

Because I am like that and you have spoken for the need to put on blinders. So what is your advice, to stay on course and to dare to do the work?

Seth

Well back to the idea of the let's get real. People who are easily distracted don't seem that easily distracted when they're middle of a game they really are enjoying. So pick the game properly. And that is the discipline of my career is if I am in a game that I keep finding myself distracted from I'm probably in a game that is not ideal for me.

Part of the work of me being a professional is to pick a game that I can inhabit in a way that makes me feel more alive, not less. And I think that anyone who has the technological and economic privilege to be listening to this is in a similar situation. Pick a game. A real life game, a professional game, a game where you get paid. That's the right game for you.

Ric

Yeah, and if I can add to that also learning from you is also what do you want to become better at quite recently, that you could have chosen to become great at writing Twitter posts. Instead  you choose to become a long form writer or something like that? And I think having that insight that, what am I building here? What am I training myself in here? Is something we must darr Ask ourselves recurringly. Any thoughts on that?

Seth

Well, I mean, it, it turned out in retrospect that that was a really good choice on my part. But the purpose of that blog post was to point out that most people didn't bother to make the choice. Most people thought, oh, I can be really good at Twitter, and really good at medium and really good at having a blog, and Facebook and LinkedIn. So I'll just do everything because that's what these companies want me to do. And I said, it's extremely unlikely that in the time I have available for these tasks, I can get really good at all five of them. So I'm just going to put up a wall and not even do three of them, not even at all. And by doing that, I forced myself to spend the time playing a few games as opposed to be mediocre to a lot. And it's so easy to succumb to social pressure. And to say, Nope, I'm on Facebook, because I have to be, well, actually, you don't

Ric

Im totally with you that it was a great choice. And I'm grateful for that because I learned so much from your blog. But I think most are missing another important point.

And that is that the platform's control so much, but if you create something that's yours, you can learn, you can change, you can adapt. Versus if you're creating something following that tension of the plattforms nurges. that thing you should be, you need to be everywhere you need to be here. Then someone else controls what happens if they change or they decommission or upgrade or install or do premium, or whatever.

Seth

Yes

Ric

So having something that's yours, I think that is really powerful and really important.

Seth

Yes!

Ric

And speaking of which, I love your books. I wholeheartedly remember, I think I read audiobooks. You were really there for me when I started work in the early 90s. And now you have something new coming out that I want everyone to check out. Do you have any words before we wrap this up?

Seth

Well, the book is called The Song of significance. And it's personal, not just personal to me, but personal to each person who I've written it for. And what I'm arguing is that work isn't working. And then when we think about the best job we ever had, the way it made us feel alive the way we were able to bring more to it the way we felt a sense of meaning and importance. I want to understand why we aren't building more jobs like that. I want to understand what kind of commitment do we need to make to each other to our co workers, to our bosses to our employees, to permit us to get beyond being a cog in the system. And I learned a lot from honeybees in researching this book, honey bees are basically a human brain inside out. Each bee is a neuron. And when we watch how honey bees make choices, when we watch the lifecycle of the hive, we learned an enormous amount. And on the back cover, the bucket says the purpose of a hive isn't to make honey. Honey is the byproduct of a healthy hive. And I think when we think about our work, the same thing is true.

Ric

What comes to me when you say that it's also instead of looking at a goal, look at a habit that might produce the goal. Because you need to show up for the habits that might produce the goal. You need to practice, and you need to learn by real feedback.

Seth

exactly, and the last story in the book, is something I know you and I share.

It's about the Wizard of Oz. And basically one of the lessons we can learn there are a bunch but one of the lessons we learned is that the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly lion, were not compelled to go on the journey with Dorothy, they volunteered to go on the journey.

They went on the journey, because helping each other to get to where each wanted to go was a choice. It was in enrolment, it was a game they wanted to play.

When we say to people, you have to show up at the Zoom meeting, we're taking attendance or you're fired. When we say to people, you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this because I need to control you. Suddenly the voluntary nature of the game goes away.

The goal of significant work is to have a goal is to say we are all seeking to do this together. These are the rules. How do we bring a certain sort of energy with us to do it? So the goal of the song of significance itself the book is to give people who give me the benefit of the doubt a tool that they can bring to work that they can bring to their co-workers and say let's all read this So that's gonna take us two hours, and then decide if we want to get real. Because if we can rewire the rules of work, we can make magic happen.

Ric

And a better culture a better workplace a more fun way to help as well

Seth

exactly

Ric

A meaningful way to help. And, I read in your draft of this book that you talked about, what if we didn't have meetings for a week instead you did things you're proud of? Would you want to repeat that?

That is again putting yourself on the hook.

Seth

Right

Ric

We need to  create that because people who just comply and do what they're told will never be able to reach their potential for how good they could be in service for what they care about.

Seth

Exactly right. Well said,

Ric

I would love to hear you talk about the broomstick and how myself I've fallen prey to that mistake so many times in my life.

Seth

Oh me too.

That's why it resonates with me. So the key turning point in the movie is and I actually did the computer game version based on Frank Baum's original books.

I have studied the Wizard of Oz in great detail. The movie is very different from the books in really interesting ways. In the movie the key moment is when Dorothy shows up for the first time. And the wizard says “if you bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West I will send you home”. What we know is that the wizard didn't need a broomstick. He said it so that Dorothy would go away and not come back. And often in our lives, people send us out for a broomstick. We're making a B2B sales call. And someone says, Yeah, but do you have a spreadsheet showing baba, baba, baba?

We go get that thinking that if we bring it back, they'll say yes. No, they just wanted us to go away.

So what we need to understand is, is this a broomstick problem? Or is this real? Is this something that we're doing because people have a checklist and they're just trying to move on or is it because it matters? When I was busy helping to invent the first generation of internet media, people sent me out for broomsticks all the time. And I really felt like if I just collected enough broomsticks, we would be fine. And in fact, what I learned from the let's get real or let's not playbook is you can turn right back to the wizard and say “do you really need a broomstick? Because if you really need a broomstick, help me understand why. if not, let's get to work.”

Ric

Yeah, and I still get goosebumps hearing that story and for those of you who don't know. With Akimbo workshops I think I've been in 100 or so zoom calls with Seth.

And EVERY time he talks about that with our students, I get goosebumps.

But also, that we receive it for what it is, because it doesn't have to be that they just want you to go away consciously. It might also be that that's their excuse. Unconsciously, they're asking you for things. So we need to have empathy with them, but also help ourselves see, this is a detour that isn't serving either of us.

Seth

Yes, brilliant.

Ric

The earlier we can do that the better conversations we can have, right? I want to be mindful of your time though. Thank you again for joining us today talking about boardgames, play and creating significance together.

Seth

Ric, these are great questions and your contributions as coach, as student, as a leader, just such a privilege to know you. Thank you.

Ric

Thank you. Likewise, sir. I'm honoured.