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Analytical thinking is still the most in-demand skill, and I wish I could tell you that solves the problem. But it doesn't. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025  paints a familiar picture. Tech change, climate transition, and economic volatility, plus demographic and geopolitical pressures, all hitting at once. ( World Economic Forum , 2025) If you work in L&D, education, talent, or leadership, the headline takeaway is not “learn AI.” It is “the mix is changi

Teamwork is one of those words that gets used like a lucky charm. Along with "leadership", "prioritizing", and "circle back". We say them in a kickoff meeting, and everyone nods, but then the deadline hits, work gets messy, and suddenly teamwork means, “someone competent will quietly fix this.” That is not teamwork. It turns into a rescue mission and most teams don't have access to a Henry Cavill, Tom Cruise, or Alan Ritchson. Teamwork is what happens when a group can coordin

There’s a certain kind of game that makes you feel clever, not because it flatters you, but because it gives you systems that actually deserve your attention. Historicity: Florence  is in that category. It is not flashy in the “look at my particle effects” way. It is flashy in the “I made it through winter without anybody dying” way. The best thing, for anyone who cares about learning design, is that the game’s historical layer is not just wallpaper. The history shows up as l

If you have ever led a project where half the team is quietly making decisions based on information nobody else has, you already understand fog of war. You just call it “silos,” “politics,” or “that one spreadsheet nobody shares.” The frustrating part is not that people are malicious. It is that people act on what they can see, and most workplaces are full of invisible information. Fog of war and information asymmetry are not just game design tricks. They are practice conditi

Black Myth: Wukong didn’t just sell copies, it sold a feeling, and that feeling got people on planes Most media induced tourism stories are simple, and a bit boring. A show makes a location look cool. People visit. Local businesses cheer. Everyone moves on. Black Myth: Wukong, though, feels different. Not because it is the first game to push players into the real world, Ghost of Tsushima already proved that a game can turn a place into a pilgrimage, but because of the mechani

Collaboration is the skill every org claims to value, and then quietly punishes when deadlines hit. A launch slips, a client escalates, someone “just takes it on” to get it done, and the team calls it efficiency. Nope. It is a coordination failure that got temporarily masked by one competent person burning extra fuel. In my experience, most collaboration problems are not personality problems. They are practice problems . We put people in meetings to talk about teamwork, then

I think you can learn more about someone in their first 15 turns of a Civilization  game than you can in the first few hours of a training workshop. That sounds like gamer nonsense. It is not. Strategy games like Civilization VI  are not “brain training.” They’re better than that. They are complex, messy, human systems that force your brain to do the same work modern jobs demand, planning, prioritizing, updating beliefs, and making trade-offs without complete information. Und

Every December, the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles becomes the center of the gaming universe for one night. Developers in tuxedos, celebrities presenting awards, world premiere trailers dropping between acceptance speeches, and millions of viewers watching from around the world. The Game Awards has become gaming's answer to the Oscars, and this year's show just reminded everyone why that comparison keeps getting made. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a debut title from French stu

You're halfway through a Civilization VI match when your advisors are all telling giving you competing advice, there is a hostile civilization to the North, you were late sending an envoy to the newly discovered City State, barbarians killed your escort and stole you settler, your gold reserves are empty, and your citizens are unhappy. That's not just a game problem. That's Tuesday afternoon in most organizations. Games with resource management mechanics are excellent trainin

The Experiment A few months back, I was having coffee with a friend and he was talking about how some of the kids on his son’s baseball team had such a better understanding of baseball because they played MLB’s The Show. He said they had a better understanding of the rules, certain faux-pas-plays, and best practices in certain situations. They couldn’t always execute (I guess that’s the difference between 10-year olds and professional athletes), but they had a better understa

Smart teams make bad calls for simple reasons. Nobody challenges the first decent idea. Assumptions slide through because everyone’s polite and busy. That isn’t a talent gap, it’s a thinking gap. Critical thinking isn’t a lecture topic, it’s a habit you build under pressure, then carry to work when it counts. Organizations know this. Talent leaders report persistent skills gaps, with critical thinking near the top, and the World Economic Forum expects 39% of job skills to shi

You can watch a team's communication skills collapse in real time. One person stares at a bomb covered in wires, buttons, and symbols. Everyone else holds a manual explaining how to defuse it. Nobody can see what the others see. The clock is ticking. Within two minutes, you'll hear the breakdown. "Cut the red wire." "Which red wire?" "The one on the left." "Left of what?" "Just, the red one!" Then the bomb explodes. That's Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, and it is one of th

Most corporate training starts with a 47-slide PowerPoint deck explaining everything learners need to know before they try anything. Video games? They hand you a controller and say "Jump over that thing." Within 60 seconds, you're moving, making decisions, and learning through doing. Yet the best video game tutorials represent some of the most sophisticated instructional design on the planet, and most learning professionals have never studied them. While L&D teams debate the

Link to the original article - https://ijet.itd.cnr.it/index.php/td/article/view/1502/1275 The editorial by Passarelli, Andreoletti, Silva, and Arnab does something I appreciate by acknowledging the challenges. They call out teacher training gaps, practical constraints, and implementation difficulties. But then the six studies they feature? Five of them focus on purpose-built serious games and gamification systems. Serious games matter, and many show strong results in the rig

Have you ever watched a newly promoted manager completely freeze when their team looks to them for direction during a crisis? Or seen a talented individual contributor get the leadership role they've been chasing, only to watch them struggle for months while their team's performance or morale takes a nosedive? It's brutal to witness. And it's happening everywhere, all the time. Here's what makes it worse. Most of these struggling leaders never had a fighting chance. According

If your team can land hot, loot under pressure, and rotate to zone without turning into a imploding when things go wrong, they can probably handle your next sprint deadline without falling apart. On the surface, Apex looks like just another battle royale, teenagers screaming about shield cracks and third parties. But watch an actual coordinated squad for five minutes and you'll see something L&D departments spend thousands trying to teach: distributed leadership, decisive com

Organizations spend thousands on skills development workshops, carefully crafting scenarios that challenge learners without overwhelming them. They hire facilitators who constantly read the room, adjusting complexity on the fly based on participant performance. Then what happens? Half the participants zone out because it's too easy, while the other half check out because they're drowning. But you know what's wild? Video games solved this problem decades ago, and most players

Organizations can improve the effectiveness of their learning by over 180% simply by implementing proper transfer techniques ( Wilson Learning , 2024). Yet less than 15-20% of knowledge and skills acquired in training institutes typically transfer to the workplace ( International Journal of Training and Development , 2011). What they missed is that they're measuring transfer from artificial training environments that don’t resemble actual work pressures. As someone who facili

Have you ever watched a new team member shut down the moment they encounter their first real challenge? I'm sure you've seen it before....

You're the ADC. Your support just went down. The enemy jungler is closing in from the river while their mid-laner rotates bot. Your...