As you try to convince a herd of rebellious nurses and their union representatives to change how they organize their work, the entire campaign depends on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.
As you try to battle the evil out-of-scope health region warlords and convince them that six nurses can't actually do the work of thirty, your department's sanity depends on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.
In the role-playing and action game of Savage Worlds by Pinnacle Entertainment Group, the role of the dice feels particularly realistic, and is a useful analogy for anyone looking to improve their intuition about change, risk, randomness and prediction as it applies to management and business.
Whenever you launch a new product, or start a new improvement initiative, or even just have a conversation with someone, there is never certainty of the outcome - it may go the way you hope, it may succeed beyond your wildest imagining, or it may fail miserably. You bring a certain skill level to the process, either as an individual or as an organization, and then luck kicks in; the random variation of complex dynamic real-world systems.
In a Savage Worlds game, an action generally succeeds if you roll four or higher on your dice. So with a regular six-sided D6 dice you have a 50% chance of basic success. But, if you happen to roll a Six, you get to re-roll and add the new roll to the first. If you get another Six, you keep adding. So, even with a six-sided dice, there is always a small chance that you could roll a really big number (ie. roll Six, then Six, then Five and the total is 17). So, let's say you need a Four to wound the Zygorthian leader, but each additional four adds an extra wound. There's always a chance that you will really succeed and roll 17, inflicting four wounds to take him out of the game.
Another neat twist is that on some actions, if you roll a One, it's not just a miss but it's a "things go bad" failure of some sort. So, if you're swinging your "collective agreement" at the evil warlord, and roll a One, you might accidentally chop off the only leg you had left to stand on. Sometimes, even the best of us do something bone-headed and make a big mess of something that we had expected to go smoothly.As you gain experience and knowledge, you can improve your skills in certain areas. Maybe you take some Leader Effectiveness Training so now you're rolling an eight-sided dice (D8) when kicking off your next team improvement project. Now, your chances or rolling a Four or more have increased to 62.5% from 50%, making it more likely that you'll succeed. However, even if your skill level increases to Legendary, and you're rolling a D12+1 on every attempt, with a 83.3% chance of success, there's always a chance you'll fail.
This feels real, for most situations we face in business.
When cold calling, there's a small chance you'll get a huge order, there's a pretty good chance that you'll start to develop a relationship that might lead to orders in the future, and there's a small chance that you'll cause so much damage to the relationship that you destroy any further chances of doing business with that firm.
When trying to improve the capacity of your service department, there's a small chance that you'll figure out a way to triple capacity without adding any staff, there's a pretty good chance that you'll have some conflict but work through it and gain 35% in capacity, and there's a small chance that it'll go very sour, with serious customer complaints, huge staff turnover, and a new job for you as a homeless person.
There's no certainty in Savage Worlds, and there's no certainty in business. Work on your skills and do everything you can to improve your effectiveness. On a really good day, everything will fall into place in ways you only dreamed of. But every once in a while you'll roll a One, and see how savage the world of management can be.
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