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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...

I was seven years old when I got my first pair. Just kidding, but Ben, hit me up if you ever read this. I was seven years old when my...

Here's something that bothers me about L&D training. Thousands are spent on resource management workshops, right? We bring in consultants...

A study published in JAMA Surgery has validated something I’ve suspected for a long time. The skills developed through video games...

Have you ever watched a perfectly capable team unravel during a high-pressure project because nobody could stay focused long enough to...

Portal 2 develops precise team communication skills through cooperative puzzle-solving that mirrors real workplace challenges—perfect for corporate soft skills workshops.

"Just make it interactive and it'll be more engaging!" Sound familiar? If you're in L&D, you've heard this before. The assumption that...

Here's a sobering reality: the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of information every single day according to UC San Diego's Global...

Have you ever watched a colleague completely lose their cool during a "simple" project meeting? That meltdown probably had nothing to do...

The esports industry has grown from $957 million in 2019 to approximately $1.6 billion in 2024 —a 70% increase in just five years. But...