Role playing

From a few recent discussions and events I find that role playing is a wonderful tool to improve team dynamics and performance. In this post I’ll quickly summarize my thoughts on the topic.

In its simplest form role playing at work can be to consciously decide to take on a different role than what you are naturally having. By role I don’t necessarily mean a formal role in the company, more frequently it will be a short term situational role switch. A good example of this is when you really like an idea that you are discussing but everybody else is also raving about it, a classic role playing move is to play the devil's advocate. As the devil’s advocate you would role play as the person that tries to challenge the idea or find a weakness in the thing that everybody else likes, for an idea that everybody hates the position try to find benefits or arguments for the idea. Regardless of how transparent you are with your role playing the overall outcome would be a more complete analysis of the idea and a better understanding of its implications, it might not change the outcome but lead to a small change in order to remove a potential risk.

A similar way to use role playing is to ask for feedback by opening with a scene, “What would you think if you were one of our top customers and I showed this slide deck to you?” This might enable you to step out of your comfort zone and also make it easier for people to give feedback that they might otherwise not. For training you could use role playing like this to let a team member experience likely situations and practice dealing with them while being in a safe space to make mistakes.

The six thinking hats framework draws heavily on a few archetypes of roles that can be played to prime the mind for thinking about a problem in a better way. But role playing doesn’t need to be as formal as this framework or even have the goal to solve a specific problem. It can simply be a recognition of how a situation that you or the team is in is different from what you normally do and a playful attempt to alter your behavior accordingly. If you are a group of highly skilled professionals exploring a new type of problem you could role play as laymen to lower the bar for when to try weird things or when to celebrate a trivial success.

Use role playing to create the opportunity to think differently, to try out being in a role that you normally would not be in. This could be viewed as training or practice for future roles but under less stressful circumstances. Last but not least, a bit of role playing at work can also make things more fun.