🔧 Tool alert! I’m wrapping up climate change workshops and wanted to share a tool that really stuck with clients: the Polak Game. It helps align diverse perspectives on the future and foster a shared vision. Read on to ensure your stakeholders are on the same page and excited to work together BEFORE you dive in!
💭 We’re in the same room, but we’re starting from different places.
The Polak game explores two questions that surface differing approaches to the future. It illuminates bias, demonstrates the need to meet others in the middle, highlights which functions might feel empowered (or disempowered), and points out blind spots.
❓ Playing the Polak Game
Ask participants to orient themselves along these two axes.
1️⃣ Do you think that while things go wrong from time to time, overall the trend is that things are getting better? Or do you think that while things go wrong from time to time, the overall trend is that it’s more of a struggle and things are not getting better? (are things going to get worse or better in x timeframe?)
2️⃣ What has driven your experience of the world/company/etc? Is it that while there are big forces that have shaped the space, the biggest cause is people (like yourself), or is it that while people are influential, larger forces (like political, cultural, or spiritual) forces have shaped your experience? (i.e. do I have power to shape the future, or are there larger forces that determine it?)
Have the quadrants in the resulting 2x2 explore their relative placements and what it might mean for their shared vision.
Some useful questions:
❓ Who is in what quadrant? Why?
If all of R&D is in a quadrant that feels helpless, while Marketing believes they can shape things, perhaps that’s a great place to start. 😉 How about staff vs. leadership? How about customers?
❓ How would each quadrant describe the others? One person’s optimistic might be another person’s unrealistic. 🤐
❓ If everyone believes they can make a difference, what is hindering them from having made changes before you came along?
Of course, follow-up questions are best tailored to your objective- like asking where customers might sit, and what quadrant might dominate for customers in x years.
Have you ever used the Polak game? What questions do you ask to drive visioning in your work?
👏 Credits: Peter Hayward, based on Frederik Polak's sociological work. Read more about it here (highly recommended): https://lnkd.in/gt4Z2uib
