Gamification Where You Least Expect It with David Dand | Episode 430

Summary

Professor Game Podcast – Episode 430

Gamification Where You Least Expect It with David Dand
Released: February 2, 2026 | Host: Rob Alvarez | Guest: David Dand

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the transformative power of gamification in unexpected places, focusing on recruitment, HR, and especially traditional industries like accountancy. Host Rob Alvarez and guest David Dand—an HR professional, career coach, and director at Chorus HR consultancy—discuss how introducing play, joy, and game-thinking into employee and candidate experiences can boost engagement, retention, employer brand, and business performance. They tackle both the potential and the challenges of gamifying recruitment, including bias, subjectivity, and cultural fit.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. David’s Background & Perspective on Gamification (02:10–05:27)

• David’s HR career spans 15+ years across multiple sectors; he now leads Chorus, a consultancy specializing in gamified recruitment and people practices.
• Advocates for applying gamification not just in customer-facing contexts, but crucially in the employee experience: “Where is that concept, the point of fun and games and engagement with staff as a way to motivate and retain?” (04:15 David)
• Observes a void in most organizations, where external sparkle fades the moment employees are onboarded.

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2. Gamification in Recruitment: A Candid Case Study (05:27–11:17)

• Example: Developed a gamified selection process for a small accountancy firm hiring senior managers/partners.
  • The process measured both technical skills (e.g., regulatory compliance) and behavioral attributes (e.g., dealing with monotony, accuracy) via technical questions and a custom interactive game.
  • Insight: The company gained deeper, more reliable insight into candidate fit, beyond the resume or interview.
  • Lesson Learned: Crafting questions is tricky—subjectivity can distort responses, leading to misalignment or misleading signals.
  • Quote: “...The phrasing of a question has so many leading, misleading, over hidden elements to it... the concept was there, our heart was in the right place, but the phrasing needed so much more consideration” (07:21 David)

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3. Gamification Builds Employer Brand & Candidate Experience (11:17–14:28)

• Unconventional approaches stand out: Candidates appreciated the process as “quality and different,” which improved company reputation and attracted high-caliber applicants.
• Even if statistical “predictive validity” isn’t perfect, gamification enriches selection as a complement to traditional tools: “It stood out as a quality experience…helped with recruiting and attracting [talent].” (10:21 David)

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4. Traditional Industries as Opportunity Zones (14:28–18:47)

• Accountancy, often perceived as a “boring” profession by outsiders, offers fertile ground for innovation via gamification.
• Rob shares parallel experience teaching “Quantitative Methods,” highlighting how “traditional” areas can become more engaging through playful, game-inspired approaches.
• David: “The spaces that you would least expect to engage in this subject are the ones where you can make the biggest splash and the biggest wave.” (17:40 David)

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5. Best Practices, Challenges, and Bias in Gamification (18:47–23:14)

• Best Practice: Both Rob and David emphasize the importance of selecting and fully following an established gamification framework before improvising. “Whichever one you choose…dive and go all in with a framework that you can stand behind…” (19:12 Rob)
• Cultural fit of the game/tool matters; what works in one context (pirate-themed games, e.g.) may flop in an investment bank.
• Critical Issue: Bias and Subjectivity
  • Gamified selection tools and AI introduce or amplify bias unless carefully designed and monitored.
  • David: “Bias within gamification and AI is a problem…how can candidate selection, recruitment and gamification work to reduce bias rather than encourage it?” (21:09 David)
  • Rob: “There has to be a lot of intentionality there...” (22:02 Rob)

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6. Inspiration, Book Recommendation & Personal Motivation (23:14–29:15)

• David would like to hear the Director of Talent Acquisition at McKinsey discuss their global gamified recruitment tool.
• Recommended book: Smart Recruiters (French CEO author; recommended for smart hiring and integrating gamification in recruitment).
• David’s Superpower: Keeping a “people experience” lens at the core; obsessed with building and preserving high-functioning, joyful workplace culture.
• Story: One poor leadership hire can unravel a whole positive team culture, underscoring the stakes of great recruitment.

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7. Games that Inspire – and Why Rules Matter (25:46–28:42)

• David’s favorite games: Chess and Football (Soccer)—for their blend of individual responsibility, clear goals, teamwork, competition, and joy.
• Rob expands on the metaphor: “If you don’t have any rules, there’s no fun to it…all the nuances, that is actually what makes the game fun.” (27:44 Rob)
• In business, clear, consistent goals are equally critical.

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8. Final Advice & Where to Find David (29:15–29:57)

• David’s advice: “Have fun. Joy, joy, joy, joy. Happiness, fun, funny, funny. Humor. There’s not enough of it, especially in professional services.”
• Contact: Chorus.co.uk or find David Dand on LinkedIn. Look out for their “wit and wisdom” campaign tying famous quotes to the people experience.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On bringing fun to HR:
  “A lot of my focus around gamification has been less…about the customer experience as it is the employee experience…Where is that concept, the point of fun and games and engagement with staff as a way to motivate and retain?”
  —David (04:15)

• On selecting the right framework:
  “Whichever one you choose, I would say dive and go all in with a framework that you can stand behind…”
  —Rob (19:12)

• On bias in gamification and AI:
  “How can candidate selection, recruitment and gamification work to reduce bias rather than encourage it?”
  —David (21:09)

• On the transformative power of gamification:
  “Spaces that you would least expect to engage in this subject are the ones where you can make the biggest splash and the biggest wave.”
  —David (17:40)

• On advice to professionals:
  “Have fun. Joy, joy, joy, joy. Happiness, fun, funny, funny. Humor.’”
  —David (29:15)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:10 – David’s background & company mission
• 05:27 – Real-world recruiting case study & first attempt lessons
• 11:17 – Building employer brand & candidate experience through gamification
• 14:28 – Challenges in “boring” or traditional industries
• 18:47 – Best practices & advice for launching gamified projects
• 21:09 – Addressing bias in gamified selection & AI
• 23:31 – Future guest wish: McKinsey recruitment team
• 24:07 – Book recommendation: Smart Recruiters
• 25:46 – Favorite games & business metaphors
• 29:15 – Final advice and contact details

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Tone and Style

Both speakers maintain a mix of enthusiastic, conversational, and practical tones—balancing excitement for gamification’s possibilities with candid reflection on its technical and cultural challenges. There’s an undercurrent of advocacy for more fun, creativity, and intentionality in places you might least expect—like recruitment, accountancy, and HR.

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Further Resources

• Chorus.co.uk – David’s HR consultancy with a gamification specialism.
• Smart Recruiters by Jerome Ternynck (book)
• Connect with David Dand on LinkedIn for insights and their “wit & wisdom” campaign.

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This detailed summary captures the essential discussion, insights, and actionable takeaways for anyone interested in practical gamification, especially within traditional or overlooked business functions.

Transcript

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Rob]

AT&T business Wireless connecting changes everything.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Hey y'.

[Rob]

All.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

As a growing family, my husband and I love game night. Especially when it's Wayfair edition.

[David]

Let's do it.

[Rob]

You gotta name as many Wayfair furniture.

[David]

And decor categories as you can.

[Rob]

Ready, Go.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Sofas, barstools, beds, ottomans, outdoor seating, bookshelves, kitchen tables, garden sheds, mid century modern lamps.

[David]

Time. Nice.

[Rob]

You got nine out of ten.

[David]

A lot. Not too bad.

[Rob]

Keep practicing by visiting Wayfair.com where you can shop every style for every home.

[David]

Wayfair Every style, every home. Isn't that exciting that the spaces that you would least expect to engage in this subject are the ones where you can make the biggest splash and the biggest waves.

[Rob]

Yes, we will be diving into the splash and the waves very, very soon with David. As you know, this is Professor Game. It's a show where we discuss how games gamification game based strategies help us boost retention, maximize loyalty, engagement and build strong communities. And I'm Rob. I'm the founder of Professor Game. I'm also a coach and I'm the head of engagement strategy in Europe for the Octalysis Group, the prime leading gamification consultancy. And I'm also a professor of gamification and game based solutions at IE Business School, efmd, EBS University and many other places around the world. And before we dive into today's conversation with David, I just wanted to know if you are in any way struggling with engagement, attention, loyalty churn in your business or your product and you want to turn that around. Let's have a quick chat. All you have to do is click on the link in the description Engagers. Welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game podcast. And today we have David with us. But David, we first need to know, are you prepared to engage?

[David]

Absolutely. Yes.

[Rob]

You have David. Dand. Dand is the right, right way to say it. So we have David.

[David]

Siri says darned, but that is, that's not right.

[Rob]

Okay. Darned. Darned. That sounds a lot more British. Right?

[David]

I didn't get that. There you go. Thank you, Siri.

[Rob]

So he is an HR professional with over 15 years of experience in people focused roles in professional services, education, charity. And he's certified licensed career coach, PTTLS certified teacher and post second 16 education and director of an HR consultancy in the talent acquisition consultancy Chorus. Talent acquisition, Is that still accurate?

[David]

Yeah, that's bang on. Yeah, it's. Well, you could say core us, but the point is, is that human people, quality people practices should sit at the core of the business. And quality recruitment, the idea that you want the best people around you should be at the core of the business. And the second part is music. Ideally, what does great recruitment give you is that starling murmuration. But it's their fly. You know, you're working with people, it's joyous, there's loads of movement. You know, the communication is almost. He didn't. You just get it. You work well with people and that's what that point is about chorus and being in harmony with each other.

[Rob]

And chorus has a gamification specialism, providing personalized recruitment services for senior and C level gamification positions. They're a guide in using gamification to optimize the talent acquisition journey from talent attraction to streamlining selection and ensuring seamless onboarding. And they provide career coaching and career counseling support to gamification professionals in transition. So, David, are we missing anything in that intro that you want to make sure we highlight?

[David]

No, I think that's great.

[Rob]

Amazing, Amazing. So, David, if we were to sort of shadow you or follow you around for a day or a week, whatever you want to go for, what would that look like? What would that feel like to be in your shoes for some time?

[David]

So I think it'd be fun. I think if there was something missing from that, it would be the strain of fun and joy. And I feel like work should be fun. So, you know, I think a lot of my focus around gamification has been less. It's all you know about the customer experience as it is the employee experience. And I feel like there's a slight void there with gamification, with a focus. If you go to a big conference, there's lights and bells and noises attracting customers to the stand. That kind of lights and bells and whistles stops for a lot of employees when they come into a business. And where is that concept the point of fun and games and engagement with staff as a way to motivate and retain, you know, and refine where we're all going. So I think that's a, that's a real shame. And I think you would find that if you followed me around for a Week is a lot of the concept of how can we, how can we make this an effective, you know, project with the using fun games.

[Rob]

So David, talking about using fun and games, what would you say is a time where actually this failed or you had a first attempt in learning, as we like to call them, where you know, you were trying something, it just didn't work. How did you react to that? What happened? We want to be there and live that experience with you to see especially what we can take away from it and learn for the future.

[David]

So obviously I have a business that's in the hiring space. We work with companies that are struggling with, with hiring. And an example is we worked with a smaller sized accountancy firm who were hiring two senior managers who were going to go on to become partners. And these as a, to be a partner in accountancy firm like a senior leadership position, you're setting a tone for how people should work, their behaviors, the culture. And so there's some sensitivity around that hire, rightfully so. And we built a game with a Hungarian group that we could use to go to market that had two sides to it. One which was this kind of technical element of do you, what do you know about the latest government rules compliance within the accountancy, specifically within the audit space. And then the second part was this game element where applicants would move a cursor around and together they would give the leadership team, the hiring team, a picture of one, the person's technical competence, but also their character benchmarked against core competencies useful within the accountancy sphere. So things like dealing with monotony, things like accuracy. And I think this was highly successful. But what we learned, what maybe on reflection could have been better was the level of subjectivity with some of the questions which were open to interpretation. And so like anyone that's done a big piece of research, the phrasing of a question has so many leading misleading over hidden elements to it that isn't that amazing is the concept that was there a heart was in the right place. But the phrasing needed so much more considering consideration before, you know, creating what would be candidates going left instead of right.

[Rob]

I've seen so much going on on this one. At least two or three projects I've seen from the outside or from the inside of people trying to the recruiting space actually saying oh you know, I want to beyond. Because technical competencies are so varied as well. It's like, well how would this person fit into your organization? How do they look in terms of, you know, being more individualistic person who, you know, pushes forward by himself or, you know, more of a team person. There's. I'm saying this one because it's. It's easier or clearer to see where the tension is. You're either more on one end or more on the other. And it doesn't mean you're good or bad as an employee, just means whether you fit or don't fit in your organization. Right. So it's a complicated one. And even just determining whether you're one or the other always depends on how you ask the question. And the question being the right thing to ask or you don't ask the question, you see a behavior and how people react and so on. So it's a very interesting space to me. It's also a very complex one, technically, from a technical perspective.

[David]

Yeah, I think there's lots there, isn't there? That's super interesting. What you've said is an organization being kind of open and true about actually who they are also. So a great thing in the gamification space, and I bet your listeners this will resonate, is an organization might say, we love and value creativity. Well, that sounds great until you hire someone who's neurodiverse or highly creative and you find out that they're an absolutely, you know, very difficult to manage or they don't toe the line. And I think what was great is, you know, an organization saying, yeah, do you know what? We don't really want highly innovative in the accountancy space, for example. We don't want someone who's been doing something kind of crazy ways of working. What we want is someone who's very traditional. And so I think there's a truth there. If that organization can be clear about what their truth is and also how they want to manage, what do they really want? And that's what that organization got by partnering with us, is that kind of deeper, more reliable way of, of hiring someone who's going to stay and is going to perform and lead others that's in harmony with that, with. With that organization. I think the, the second part I think is really cool though, Rob, is that they, you know, you wouldn't think gamification in accountancy. Accountancy wouldn't be one space that jumps out at you as radically welcoming to something like Gamify. And because of that, it stood out in the market. Candidates loved it. Kind of connecting back to the challenge, although some of the questions turned out to be not as objective as we would have liked. Ultimately, people come away with an impression, and the candidates loved it. It stood out as a quality experience to them that was different to anyone else. So it helped with recruiting and attracting. And so yeah, in the selection it wasn't. You couldn't put your life on it that that tool was going to be 100% valid as an insight to whether that person's going to be a high performer or not. It was in kind of also connecting with the way, you know, their cv, their, their history. The other selection tools that were used as a way to understand their fit.

[Rob]

I don't know if there's a, there's a game developed by McKinsey for recruiting. I don't know if you checked it out. I've just seen the, seen it from the outside. I haven't played it, but I haven't seen that.

[David]

Is that new?

[Rob]

It's got a few years but they use it. They use it or used it, I'm not sure. Again, I Never worked at McKinsey but they use it or used it for recruiting. And it was more of a global tool rather than specific technically for specific needs. It was more of oh, are they a good fit for McKinsey? Which is very smart if you ask me because it's more scalable.

[David]

I love that. And that's why we have this gamification because I believe in it wholeheartedly. And there's a number of organizations that have, you know, introduced, developed really excited gamification tools for talent attraction, not just customer acquisition. So you know, large defense groups, GCHQ put puzzles out things like Christmas and that attracts people that's minds think in a certain way. KPMG in the accountancy space primarily at chorus our target audience, our target customer are smaller sized professional services businesses that are struggling with recruitment and retention. And there are so many of these organizations that are highly profitable. They're great and for them I feel like there's so much opportunity to do something gamification. But like we were talking about earlier, it seems to be larger enterprises are the ones that take the extra step.

[Rob]

Indeed, indeed. So David, I'm guessing we could also talk about this in the sense of how it's been successful or another initiative in terms of gamification and fun. Would you guide us through one of your experiences in how that went? Well in the case of sort of a proud example that you guys would like to share.

[David]

Yeah, I mean it would be for. I think the same example actually would be. It was an outstanding success for the reason I'm conscious of time but just conscious that it made a wave in the accountancy Space which is critically short on skills, on key skills. So there's the element of a technical skill, but also a soft skill. And you know, I think what was an overarounding, overriding success in that particular project is it boosted brand reputation and recognition for that accountancy firm as doing something that was exciting, different, that was human. And you mentioned the word individualized earlier. That gave something back that was highly individualized about that candidate's potential fit. So, you know, for not a costly, not a huge investment is able to do something that, you know, really hasn't been done before in, in a space that is maybe seen as more traditional being accountancy, you know, that's not accountancy advisor, is not investment banking. Some people might think, oh, it's financial services. But it's, it's a completely different sort of ball game.

[Rob]

It's the boring side of business for most people. I have.

[David]

Boring, boring, but issue rich and exciting. I would say completely different. I would say it's exciting. An accountancy space provides a really secure and stable career for lots of people. And accountancy on the kind of the end of the phone from the pandemic for lots of businesses saying, my goodness, where are we going to go? Should we go right or should we go left here? And so the accountancy space has been. It's got so much change at the moment, there's even more reason to double down and think about one of the organization's biggest assets, which is his people, as a way to reduce turnover and reduce the costs of replacement.

[Rob]

No, I was saying that because I had a stint of teaching what used to be called statistics, now quantitative methods sounds a little bit more exciting. At some point, somebody took a strange decision. I'm not going to judge it, but they called it something like strategic decision making or something like that. I was like, well, there's no strategic decision making and teaching, you know, decision trees and that kind of stuff. So I had, you know, as a business school professor, I knew I had one of the two subjects that nobody came to the business school looking forward to, which was quantitative method statistics, or however you want to call it. And the other one was cost accounting, I think is the one not financial accounting, which is, you know, more financial and finance. So not the exciting stuff, right? Not the sexy exciting stuff. So I can speak to that side of things. And not to say you can't survive without accounting, you can't survive without statistics and most of the times as well, but it is the kind of thing that people from the outside see as boring people on the inside. Don't get me wrong, people who really enjoy this see this as one of the most exciting career paths in the world. But even if you're not in marketing, you can kind of convince somebody that marketing is exciting, right? Even if you're not, you know, a, you know, operations is probably on the lower end, but you can still say like, oh, there's all these exciting things. The most exciting accountant, the most exciting statistician can come up to you and say, oh, this is so exciting about my job. And most people will say like, yeah, I'm not excited at all. Right? So it is tough in that sense for, for that. And when you were saying it's one of the traditional industries, I related very much that experience I had where it was tougher. Like students were expecting, they come to a business school looking forward to their marketing, to their finance, to some of them, even to operations, entrepreneurship, for sure. Innovation. None of them came looking. In fact, I had a student, funny enough, I gave Quantitative Methods and Statistics. There's a student who came from legal and his only remark on that first class was, my objective in this class is to stop being afraid of numbers. It was that far, like he was afraid of numbers. He ended up working in marketing using all of the statistics and all the stuff we saw in Quantitative Methods because now marketing is very quantitative oriented. So he's now super excited about everything we saw. But it's more post mortem, so to speak, that people get to see the interesting side of the, of that in many ways.

[David]

So anyways, isn't that exciting, therefore, that the spaces that you would least expect to engage in this subject are the ones where you can make the biggest splash and the biggest wave. So, you know, one of coming back to my frustrations here is that often in these traditional spaces you've got the leadership team who say, we don't want to talk about games, when in fact you can challenge them by saying, you know, what do you enjoy doing on the weekend? You know, it's, oh, I play golf, you know, and you're like, okay. So, you know, and the concept of what they're doing that really gets the best out of them, where they are at their very best. Yes, they could be walking around in nature, but it's the idea of competition having a goal. You know, how can you bring these concepts back into work that enables you to lead more effectively and engage staff and avoid the costs of unnecessary, unhealthy staff turnover and retention. And likewise in the recruitment space, to recruit in spaces where they are Desperately short of key skills. Really exciting. There's so much opportunity to make a difference.

[Rob]

Absolutely, absolutely. So in terms of gamification bringing excitement even to, as we can call them now, traditional spaces, do you have any, I don't know any best practices? I don't want to say silver bullets, but anything that you think would, you know, just thinking about it in those terms would bring, Would bring significant benefit to almost any project.

[David]

I mean, I would turn that around. I'd love to know what your thoughts were best practices.

[Rob]

For me, the, the, the main one is going to be very general, general, generic. General and generic is if you have never approached this before, you know, pick one. There's many frameworks out there. Of course I can recommend the one that I use. But beyond which one you choose is choose one, try it out fully, right. To its full extent and see what worked, what didn't work for you. So you can then adapt or say, you know what? This framework is not for me. Look for something else. Rather than read, you know, a thousand papers and articles and 10 books, try to piece it together all by yourself without having any prior experience and saying, now I have come up with a better framework that I can use because that's where, you know that statistic of 80% of gamification projects fail? It's usually, I would say most of them are in that space or just piecing like, oh, points, batches, leaderboards. Let's just put it there and throw some game elements inside. Whichever one you choose. Again, I have my preferences, but whichever one you choose, I would say dive and go all in with a framework that you can stand behind for whatever reason, you have credibility on that one and choose it and use it.

[David]

Yeah, I like that. And I think that kind of feeds an experience I had which was within an insurance and financial services organization where they were wanting to embed gamification in their talent attraction and selection process. And the options were tricky. So talking, when you were talking about McKinsey earlier, what model are you going to go with that actually represents our culture effectively? So what game actually feels, you know, valid in terms of, in the financial services space rather than how could we create this pirate game which kind of ends up with debts or something as an example? So, you know, it's not going to work in an investment bank or an insurance firm.

[Rob]

I have an example.

[David]

Maybe there's an opportunity to make a difference and create something really bespoke. But the point there is really, you know, our clients, we work in the professional space, so technology, fintech, Accountancy, legal providers. There has to be a vibe that is at the core of what you're looking to do here. But I think the other thing that is, I'm really mindful of is bias. And I think this comes back to this concept of, like, subjectivity in terms of the questioning used. But bias within gamification and AI is a problem. That's maybe a whole nother level of subject here. But how can candidate selection, recruitment and gamification work to reduce bias rather than encourage it?

[Rob]

There has to be a lot of intentionality there as well. It's one of the first things. It's really hard. Bias is one of those things that we can't run away from, not even now with AI and.

[David]

But even more so, that's one of the biggest challenges with AI, and it's something really exciting and difficult.

[Rob]

It's funny with AI, sometimes you know how the mistakes it makes and you have to point them out. But if you don't realize and you're not conscious that there is going to be bias, it's even harder to spot it. And if you don't spot it, it's going to be there. You can say, oh, you have this bias and AI is going to agree with you. Most of the time it's like, oh, yeah, of course, I didn't realize. But, you know, it's just bringing in the bias that it finds in the Internet. So we created the bias. It's still going to be there. Unless we disappeared and from the Internet, it's not going to disappear. So AI is LLMs, to be more specific, are pretty much always going to rely on the Internet and there's always going to be bias on the Internet. So that's not going to disappear from ll is my overarching theory or bias.

[David]

Leading or misleading, you know, misleading. It's a dull, gray area.

[Rob]

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. David, after hearing these questions and what we've been discussing, is there anybody that comes to your mind, you say, well, I would be curious to hear this person answering these questions. I'd like to know what they think or, you know, how they approach these problems that you would like a future guest, essentially?

[David]

Yeah, well, I think the kind of the Director of talent acquisition at McKinsey, I would be really. I'd love to know how that project rolled out. What were the successes, what was, on reflection, could have been done better and what were the challenges they experienced during it. I think that would be a really exciting, fresh, you know, insight.

[Rob]

Sounds like an exciting one for sure. And Keeping up with inspiration. Would you say that there is any book that you would recommend for the engagers? Remember this crowd of people thinking, oh, gamification sounds exciting. How do I do it? What do I do? Or how do I improve my practice? They're already doing it.

[David]

I mean smart recruiters, there's a French CEO who wrote that book and I think that's really exciting. So maybe we can put a link to that at the end of this podcast and that looks at what smart hiring looks like and, and there'll be many opportunity to add gamification into that.

[Rob]

Sounds amazing. Love that. And in this space, in the space of gamification, what would you say is your superpower, that thing that you do at least better than most other people?

[David]

So yeah, ours is on the lens on the people experience, which really matters to me. And I think our starting point is always this idea that you've got. Great. It's from personal experience working in a really high performing business, high performing team that was growing. Everyone was having fun, communicating in an amazing way and a senior leader was hired who took down that office. Everyone started communicating different. The vibe in the office changed. People were giving blood, sweat and tears working on the weekends to deliver something great. They were innovating with their customers, improving conversion, reducing risk, improving efficiency and one person was able to change that. So I feel really powerfully about the risks and the opportunities to great people practices and that's our starting point. You know, how can you invest in your current staff in a more fair and exciting way and also help attract the great people who stay and perform and add to that business? That's something that feels important to me.

[Rob]

Certainly is. Certainly is. David, we get to the difficult question now. What is your favorite game?

[David]

Chess. Chess and football. And yeah, isn't that a joy? Football, brilliant. I was doing some training this week with an organization and sport comes into and it's forgotten that concept of joy. How you can bring that into the work, the common themes between conditions where people are at their very best and sport is something there. But chess, I can get lost in for hours. Football, I just love it.

[Rob]

As a player, as a fan, what's your side?

[David]

Mainly as a player, I just think you've got an individual responsibility to do Michael Jordan quote, there's no iron team, it's an iron wing. So you individually are accountable for, for executing. But the working in a team, fun competition, a bit of risk, a bit of aggression, speed, brilliant clear goals, brilliant game.

[Rob]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, sure. I use it as an Example, when there's Americans, I say soccer, which I don't. I don't like too much.

[David]

Yeah.

[Rob]

Where, you know, when explaining the rules of a game and how detailed it has to be, I say, imagine an alien comes, lands here, and you need to explain to them the game. Football. Say, well, the objective is to pull the ball on the net and they just grab the ball and put it there. So no, no, no, wait, wait. You can't touch. Use your hands, right? Like, oh, okay, no hands. You can use only your feet, your head. Oh, fantastic. And then you put some adversaries, the other team in the middle, and they pull out their laser and start shooting them. No, no, wait, wait. You can't use violence either. So, you know, it gets into all these rules, all the nuances, and that is actually what makes the game fun. If you don't have any rules, there's no fun to it. I'll put the ball in the net. You grab it, you put it there. How many times can you do that?

[David]

I completely. When we were young and we would always have to take the mickey out, my sister, because she would start a game, a board game, whatever, and she would say, all right, okay, right. The aim of the game is. But what really is frustrating when you're an employee is this kind of unrealistic changing of what we're doing. You know, and, and, and as a senior leader, sometimes we're coming up and advising businesses where they're like, expecting the impossible. Oh, generally it's true that most people thrive. They're at their best when there's a clear goal. Now you can change and people are. They need to be adaptable. You know, post Covid life, everything is changing constantly. But that the fairness starts with this. Clear, what are we doing? Where are we going? And then we can start to prioritize about what else is really important that.

[Rob]

Fits in with that and what is allowed, what isn't allowed as what's the.

[David]

Aim of the culture as a starting point? Are we clear on this? As an employee and as an employer?

[Rob]

Yeah. And you can be clear about it. You can have it written everywhere. And still that's not part of the culture because nobody really applies it from leadership down. So what is it? What is it really? What are the unwritten rules? And that's what makes it a lot harder than football. You can have the rule book, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure, for sure. David, it's been a pleasure having you on the podcast. I don't know if there's any final piece of Advice, of course. Let us know where we can find out more about Chorus, about you, the work you're you guys are doing before. Before we finish off.

[David]

No, I mean what else? What final bit of advice? God. Have fun. Yeah. You know, joy, joy, joy, joy, happiness, fun, Funny, funny. Humor isn't, is. Is. There's not enough of it, especially the professional landscape professional services, SMEs. So you can find [e-mail] or chorus.co.uk you can find me on LinkedIn. We've got quite an amusing wit and wisdom campaign which we've been doing with famous quotes and relating that back to the kind of people experience. But yeah, I'm really happy to hear from anyone and have a confidential chat about their career or opportunities.

[Rob]

Yeah, amazing. Thanks a lot again for your experience, your insights and everything in between. However, David and Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it's game over. Hey Engagers and thank you for listening to the Professor Game podcast. And since you're interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty using game inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game On School. You can find the link right below in the description, but the main thing is to click there. Join us to platform called School. It's for free and you'll find plenty of resources there. We'll be up to date with everything that we're doing, any opportunities that we might have for you, and of course, before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there. Working across teams is tough, but Asana helps you handle it. That's because Asana is where humans and AI coordinate work together. AI can spot roadblocks and assign work in a snap. So everything and everyone stays on track. That's how work gets handled. That's Asana. Visit [e-mail] that's a s a n a dot com Asana well, the holidays have come and gone once again.

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