Expert Insight Series - Forbes’ “Grandfather of Gamification”: Data Creates a Culture of Growth

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In this installment of our ongoing Expert Insight Series, Jon interviews Chuck Coonradt, 5x best-selling author, CEO, and Fortune 500 consultant. Chuck wrote The Game of Work which has been foundational in Blue Margin's philosophy on the importance of #datavisibility for job ownership and accountability. Listen to them discuss how gamifying work transforms the workplace through employee engagement and job ownership

Blue Margin helps private equity owned and mid-market companies organize their data into dashboards to execute on strategy and create a culture of accountability. We call it The Dashboard Effect, the title of our book and podcast. 

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#gameofwork #scorecard #employeeengagement

Transcript

Jon Thompson: 0:04

Welcome to our Blue Margin Expert Insights Series. This series was established for private equity partners and mid market executives who are looking to use data intelligence to improve the accountability around the value creation plan throughout their organizations, and thereby increase the value of their companies. Today we're talking with Charles Coonradt, also known as Chuck. He's a consultant CEO and five time best selling author, including The Game of Work, one of our favorite books here at Blue Margin, and one that's foundational to our philosophy on helping companies to use their data more effectively. The Game of Work is also the name of Chuck's company founded in 1973. His team of management consultants has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Boeing, the US Air Force, Coca Cola, Nordstrom, Coors Wendy's, Sherwin Williams, Cisco, you name it. Chuck is a founding member of the School of entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University, and at the Marriott School of Management. Chuck was labeled by Forbes Magazine as The Grandfather of Gamification in 2013. He's a real expert in this, Chuck, thanks for coming. It's a

Chuck Coonradt: 1:14

It's an honor, it really is. And I appreciate pleasure to meet you. the work that Blue Margin is doing out there to maintain the improvement in how we use data and how we apply it in the human side. So thank you for having me.

Jon Thompson: 1:31

I appreciate that very much. So, I'm interested in your career path, just for some context for our audience, it would be great to know how you came to this point or this long career of looking at gamification, numbers, data and so on for helping companies to succeed.

Chuck Coonradt: 1:47

It's hard to know where that started, I've always been a big fan. I'm kind of, you know, I'm an 18 handicap golfer. I tried to walk on at Michigan State and did not make the team but I've always had this sense of interest in being a fan, watching my Spartans, which is pretty sad this year. And my Green Bay Packers, which is not much better, so. But that's where we got started and my degree people say, "What's your background degree?" My degree is in supermarket operations, Food Marketing Management at Michigan State. But when I got out of there, I was influenced heavily by two people. One, Paul J. Meyer, who started a company called Success Motivation Institute back in the 60s, and was one of my great mentors. And Paul's concept was that goal setting is that is the key, that that's what drives us. And as we look towards achieving goals, we have to have something along the way in terms of a measurement system, or a means of progress, of marking off how well we're doing on the path. And that's where I think the scorekeeping process came in. So for a while, we were strong proponents of Meyer, and used his programs until we started to write our own. Probably the best indication, the epiphany, if you will, for me, is a combination of things that come together in the following way. I was calling on a redneck. And, you know, he was mid 50s, mid career, not happy about either. And he was given me the "Kids Today Lecture. Kids can't work, kids don't care." Now, this was back in 1977, or something like that, when we were going from different generations. We say that today. We all have had that lecture in our lifetime. That's not the problem. The problem is the day you gave that lecture, because then you just become your father. So, like the Geico commercial, you know, you've fallen into beating your parents. And he took me over to a second story window where we were looking down on some factory workers building houses. And he said, "What are you in your magic box going to do about that?" And what that was, was eight young men siding a house, and to describe their work pace, you'd have to use words like arthritic snails and wet cement. I mean, it was mimes. It was like pick up a nail, pick up a hammer. And so, "What are you going to do about that?" Well, I wasn't a very experienced salesman at the time and so I just kind of froze, knew that I didn't have a comeback immediately, and then I was blessed richly by the lunch bell. When the lunch bell rang, those eight hammers just flew out of their hands like they were electrified. These eight guys took off down a factory floor, half of them taking their shirts off, like they'd been poked for the cattle prod, till they found a basketball hoop. And then I saw these eight fellows magically transform from mimes and arthritic snails into energized, everybody knew what they were doing, no strat plan, no management oversight, none of the stuff that, you know, we read about in the books, and everybody knew the score. And that went on for exactly 42

minutes. And at 12: 5:37

42 they picked up their cokes and their sack lunches and started walking back to the job eating the sandwich where, one o'clock, they were back on the clock, arthritic snails and wet cement. And I turned to Earl, I remember clearly, I turned to him and I said, "You know, it's not a raw material problem." In other words, "There's nothing wrong with those kids." And that dichotomy of work and recreation when they weren't being paid started off with the tongue twister of "Why is it that people pay for the privilege, skiing, golf, hunting, tennis, of working harder than they work when their paid?" And so to call what we did research would be an offense to research. We simply said, "What happened under the basketball hoop, what did or did not happen making the house?" And so we morphed, if I can jump around a little bit, we morphed into these five principles of the motivation of recreation. What we saw under the basketball hoop was the goals were clearly defined. You know, nobody's up there shaking the backboard. Everybody knew the rules. The scorekeeping was pretty clear. And it was consistent and it was dynamic, meaning it was measured with the process. People knew the score while the game was in progress, so they could change their behavior to win before the game ran out. So we got goals, got scorekeeping. Then we saw that even though there was not an official coach under the basketball hoop, they were coaching each other, you know,"Charlie, I need you over there, Jim, get this way." And then they were doing it. And this is maybe the biggest element that is interesting in gamification today, is that they had choice. By some mystical, magical agreement, all eight guys were playing a game, they knew what they were doing and went from there. So those five principles, as we started to look at companies, we said, "Where's that missing?" And that became the cornerstone of The Game of Work. So that was a long answer to a great question.

Jon Thompson: 8:07

That's fantastic. I really love that. You know, we're not exaggerating at Blue Margin when we say that The Game of Work is foundational to how we help companies. And specifically, your principle around, people need to know how to win and then need to know if they're winning. And certainly in that basketball scenario, if they didn't have a score, it would have been not nearly as compelling. We'll dig into the details as we go in, but at the highest level, why is score keeping, that one element you mentioned, so important for success in business?

Chuck Coonradt: 8:43

Okay, well, I hope this doesn't sound like a cheap plug. But, in my book Scorekeeping for Success, we made the statement that the primary reason for scorekeeping is for a coach and a player, manager/worker, pick your term, but for a coach and a player to decide when, what kind, and how much feedback is appropriate. So the scorecard, as one of our presidents and clients at one time, she said, "Well, the scorecard is just reason to have a conversation." And, you know, what brilliance, because even if you've got a coach who's not focused, who's maybe of my generation, you know, where, "My grandpa went through the Depression and you're damn lucky to have a job son, so shut up and do what they ask," you know, that Boomer mindset. We're saying that the more often you give the feedback, the better the performance is, both in quantity and quality.

Jon Thompson: 9:51

And do you mean the feedback that the scoreboard gives you itself or the feedback from the coach looking at the scoreboard alongside the player?

Chuck Coonradt: 10:02

And the answer to that is, yes.

Jon Thompson: 10:03

Yeah.

Chuck Coonradt: 10:05

But what you've touched on Jon, if I can expand, is the importance of the consistency. So if I'm looking at the scorecard, "mean days between sales? How frequently do I did a deal? How many widgets have we produced?" And I'm looking at scorecard as a player on a daily basis, and, "Boy, today was better than average, not as good as average..." And I'm drawing my feedback from the scorecard or the dashboard. Then when my coach sits down with me, he or she needs to be consistent with the feedback that I've been working with. So if I think that I've got a hitting streak of 10 days in a row, getting done the things that I need to get done, and somebody comes in and makes a huge deal out of one shortfall, or starts picking the fly specks out of the pepper, as the cliche goes, I'm devastated.

Jon Thompson: 11:12

So the importance of measurement is that it gives a basis for empirical feedback, and not just the whims or mood of the manager and the most significant negative data point. Okay. While we're on those five principles of the motivation of recreation, you talk about choice. Someone might look at dashboards and scorecards as something that really regiments what someone needs to do. "Just hit these numbers, and you've got it." I'm guessing that you see an opposite to that, that it's an opportunity for choice. But I'm curious if I'm right on that, and if so, how you think about choice in that context?

Chuck Coonradt: 11:57

Here's the thing that I think that we've got our hands around. People who work in organizations, privately held, corporate, PE controled. People in the team seem to be acceptable to the leader/coaches/owners, right to set the goals. So as we define choice, it's not about setting the goals, but they will kill over trying to screw around with our methods. Okay, so, you know, Steve Kerr coaching Steph Curry would be an idiot to try to change his shot. Steph will accept from Coach Kerr, that we need to have 30 from your tonight, or we need to have 40. But nobody in the right mind is going to yell at Steph to step back another foot from the three point line because it works better for you. So what we're saying is that when you give people choice of their methods, you solve the biggest problem in corporate improvement, which is buy in. So one of the things we know about feedback is that if you increase the frequency of the feedback, this is really interesting, you decrease the size of the problem. So if I'm looking at overtime on a monthly basis, and I start to look at it on a daily basis, I've reduced the size of the problem. And when I reduce the size of the problem, I create a greater emotional willingness to solve it.

Jon Thompson: 13:49

Yeah. Does that feedback need to be at what level? To the person who is actually logging the overtime, to the manager who's responsible for it, to the executive who cares about how it hits the bottom line, all three?

Chuck Coonradt: 14:03

I think, primarily, it's the ownership. So primarily, it's probably that manager who owns that budget. Now, he or she is going to communicate upward to he or she that they report to. And then really, the person who has the greatest chance to fix the overtime is a person who is working. But if I can go to a team, and I can say, I mean, we've done a lot of work in the in the beverage business on both of the main two sides, so we have to be careful here. But if we go in and look at change over time in a manufacturing situation, and we're summing that up in the traditional,"once a month after the game's over financial thing," and then yelling and screaming about it, too often the case, we don't have a chance. I mean not to dime and duck in a hailstorm is gonna get improvement,

Jon Thompson: 15:08

Doesn't it fix the next month? When you look at the previous and say, "Agh," yell and scream, and then the next month they get it right?

Chuck Coonradt: 15:15

No. Yeah, well, my assessment of management is that if your May excuses can overcome your April performance, you get a job in June. You may, you may not be any better. But, you know, there's just too many people that confuse good excuses and bad performance for good performance. It's crazy. So if you break it down back into the daily or the weekly, as we've done on several occasions, what you get from the player, which is the most important person on the deal here, what you get from a player is, "We can fix that." You know, when we looked at it monthly, too big, too tough, too late.

Jon Thompson: 16:14

It gets lost in the noise and doesn't touch the nerve.

Chuck Coonradt: 16:18

Right.

Jon Thompson: 16:21

Question for you. So thinking about impact generally, that your methodology, The Game of Work, the Gamification of Work, scorekeeping, and feedback has, can you just give us some sense of that, that you've seen in the real world? The impacts it's had in terms of growth, profitability, culture? Does it span those? Where do you see the greatest impact, and any thoughts there.

Chuck Coonradt: 16:44

We were getting the results in a week, or two weeks, or three weeks after implementation. Because the human individual, we're designed to win. We just need to have a really clear path to get there and a really sized amount of improvement, that I know that I'm getting better.

Jon Thompson: 17:11

Sorry to interrupt, but I think it's easy to speak to the business intelligence, which I have never really understood that phrase as been very helpful, but data insights, data intelligence, to think of that as purely technical, just get the numbers in front of people. But really, it's an excuse to have a conversation, as you said, and it's a way to give a person who has an innate fundamental instinct to win, a path to win. So in your view, if we know how to win, we're gonna do it, because that's how we're driven, every person from top to bottom.

Chuck Coonradt: 17:46

Yeah, and if we don't, here's the real danger in this is, I'm gonna call it the nature of man and mankind. But if I can figure out how to win my job, my domino thinking says,

Jon Thompson: 17:57

I was just thinking this sounds like golf"There must be no way to win." If I don't have the thing I can latch on to, then I have to assume the absence of it. So there's no way to win. Now, think about what happens in your head when there's no way to win. I mean, you play golf? to me, there's no way to win.

Chuck Coonradt: 18:28

No, I mean, but every one of us has been in that Foursome, typically at an association or even a client deal. And you got three people you've never played with before. The first guy stands up and hits it out of bounds. The second one hits it in the water. And the third one says, "Should I hit it again, or put it back on the tee." You quickly conclude there is no way to win. This is going to be four and a half hours of non-achievement if I've ever seen in my life, and the only reasonable thing to do is to figure out where the beer card is. Okay, but in work, if there's no way to win, I'm gonna quit. Now I either quit and stay, or I quit and leave. Now if I quit and leave, we get a vacancy. But we also get a chance to start over and make a better choice next time. If they quit and stay, the great resignation that we're hearing about or the great shutdown or whatever, they choose to stay. Wow, because now we got a virus which can affect other healthy tissue around it.

Jon Thompson: 19:44

As you answer this about accountability, when I think of accountability I think of the power of team sports. And certainly you see great performance and solo sports but there's something magic that happens when a team is accountable to each other. Football, right now the season. Quarterback, accountable to the tag man, frontline accountable everyone else, so on. In terms of that sense of accountability, does that play a role in the game of work? I guess it's the coaching piece, but also to the larger organization and cultural health. Do you see accountability playing a role?

Chuck Coonradt: 20:21

I think that great coaches, both in business and in sport, I think that the great coaches are able to galvanize a group of people to a common goal. And then they start holding each other accountable.

Jon Thompson: 20:42

Yeah. Thank you, Chuck. This has been a pleasure. I think I first read your book 10 years ago, and it was largely the genesis of what we built here at Blue Margin. For leaders that want to get in touch with you directly, what's the best way?

Chuck Coonradt: 21:00

You can go to gameofwork.com, we're on the web. My personal email is cac@gameofwork.com. And I'd love to chat about your circumstances.

Jon Thompson: 21:18

Thank you, Chuck. I look forward to talking to you soon, I hope.

Chuck Coonradt: 21:21

You got it. Thanks, Jon. Let's do it again.

Jon Thompson: 21:23

All right.