If this were 2019, I would say that most commercial companies don’t really find themselves working to save the world from deadly viruses, but that is sadly no longer the reality we live in. Global reality aside, if you are a manager, part of your role is to anticipate disasters and steer clear of them. That also means you need to develop the tools to recognize a dangerous situation before it turns into a disaster.
If you ever find yourself working in a regulated space, likely the pair of words that will end up tattooed on the inside of your skull is Risk Management. Whether you are operating a cardboard factory making board games, developing a software product, or riding a bicycle, the inescapable truth of any production chain or ongoing service is that anything can go wrong.
Risk management is the process of trying to imagine what could go wrong with your system when it is put under stress. First you would apply different methodologies to determine how an operator could misuse the system, or what would be the impact of a component malfunctioning. A risk would normally have two ratings:
Severity - how big of a problem it could cause
Probability - how likely it is to happen
Detectability - in the case evaluating probability is not an option, how capable are you of becoming aware of the problem when it happens and react to it.
The ratings determine whether a risk is acceptable or not. When it is not, you must apply risk mitigations to reduce one of the ratings - change the design to prevent misuse, introduce redundancy, have the device stop when a certain error state occurs, etc.
The key term in this process is Acceptable. It’s a term that may manifest in different ways, but eventually boils down to whether or not the benefit of the device outweighs the potential harm of using it.
Pandemic is all about risk mitigation. Perhaps more accurately, it’s about assessing which risks are acceptable. Risk in Pandemic comes in the form of infection tokens. At the end of each player's turn, they draw a number of infection cards that tell the group where to add more infection tokens. At certain points in the game, the intensity of the infection escalates. When that happens, you shuffle all the infection cards that were already drawn and place them on top of the infection deck. This gives you two pieces of information:
The infection is going to hit places it has already hit sometime soon.
The likelihood of the infection hitting a specific place again is the ratio between the amount of cards already drawn after the escalation and those that were drawn before.
In other words - you have the ability to calculate the probability of cities being hit, and the consequences of that happening. Adding one or even two tokens to a city keeps you in the safe, or more accurately, manageable, space. A third leaves you on the brink of the infection spreading to the neighboring cities, with potential catastrophic implications. Keeping the infection in check while you are searching for a cure means determining which states of different cities around the world are acceptable.
Those that are not merit the expenditure of resources - time, research cards, etc. to buy you the time you need to reach a cure.
Pandemic pressures you to keep your eyes on the target, while constantly reacting to threats that don’t help you get closer to it. As opposed to ROI (Return of Investment) which we’ve touched on previously, here the consideration is the Cost of not Doing. You have to rely on your team to spot the true dangers and decide which risks are worth taking. Much like any project, the stakes grow higher the further you invest, and so does the pressure.
Modeling causality and probability are key skills in managing any long term effort, be it a project or a report’s personal development. Pandemic might not be the most elaborate example in the world of board games, but it is one of the most accessible. The ever present threat, and the fact that resources are not sufficient for you to respond to every threat, force you to think in terms of acceptability. Most importantly, it makes risk assessment and management a team effort, as it always should be.
Scoring Time
We’ve raced against the clock and the spread of deadly viruses long enough. At times we felt the rush of smooth cooperation, playing into each other’s strengths as players and characters in the game in a beautiful display of teamwork. Other times we cried with anguish as success was denied us, realizing we discounted a risk we could have anticipated. Either way, we played as a team.
For leaders, I believe there is a special value to games that place you on equal grounds as your team. Cooperative games are all about consensus. Following a in the footsteps of a star player is a form of consensus, one that Pandemic makes all too easy. The beauty of it, though, is that it allows you to choose between management and leadership.
Telling others what to do when you have the big picture is honestly quite easy. Probably too easy for those of us empowered with status, whether that status is a workplace title, or having the most generic competence.
Making others see what you see, or getting them to talk through the things you can’t see but know are there, is a much more difficult feat. Doing so without overwhelming them - now that’s just art. As long as I lead teams, I will keep coming up with new, better ways of improving as a practitioner of this art.
And I will always have cooperative games to use as an experimentation ground.
This series will not end with recommendations like previous ones. Perfect Information Cooperative Games come in all shapes and themes, with many different mechanics driving them. It’s up to you to find the variety that sits best with you and your group. I assure you most of them won’t hit as close to home as Pandemic does.
Until next time, remember that playful growth is healthy growth, no matter how old you are!