Board games | Warning Signs 3

As we were designing this webinar about boards and the games that people on them can play, our minds immediately went to some dark, combative places. Game of Thrones, Squid Game, The Hunger Games…

Which probably tells you a lot about why it’s necessary.

What really goes on when boards lose the plot? And why? We investigate the human dynamics behind the power plays, the subtle sabotage, the decisions that don’t get made because no one dares make them… and the vital conversations that never happen because everyone’s too distracted with psychodrama.

No fluff. No theatre. And no Iron Throne. Just powerful, practical insight into a world you know too well — and ways to make it work better.

Transcript

Good morning. Thank you for coming to the third of our Warning Signs webinar series. We are running these throughout the year, more about that shortly, but just so you know, if we’ve not met before, my name is Phil Lewis. I am a coach and consultant. I work with boards and leaders and leadership teams to help them solve seven and eight figure business problems.

My work is powered by a simple belief, which is there’s not really any such thing as a business problem. All business problems are actually human problems that are just manifesting themselves in how an organisation is running. So I focus on resolving issues of leadership, of board performance, of strategic alignment, of structure, and ultimately of change. So how do you actually navigate through and manage change in an organisation. And managing in a kind of human- centred and effective way. So, as I said, this webinar is the third of the 2025 Warning Signs series. We have more on the way, so in May our next webinar after this one is called Exit Wounds. It’s all about mergers, acquisitions, other significant investment events, and the kind of things that leadership teams do and don’t plan for. And that is continuing what we’re trying to do with this webinar series, which is ultimately about open, empathic inquiry into different types of human problems in business that left unchecked actually manifest themselves in all sorts of challenging ways. We’ve done one on organisational trauma. Our one last time was on ostrich politics, all about denial.

Today we’re gonna talk about board games. Next time we’re gonna talk about exits and other significant investment events. So the idea here is to try and get a bit off the beaten track in what we talk about, and how we talk about it. With a view hopefully to try to give you some useful, tangible, practical stuff to walk away with. Because what we’re trying to do is get off the beaten track, the spirit of these webinars is not come along and hear me talk, and I’m gonna give you all the answers in half an hour, 45 minutes. Some of the subjects that we dive into here are quite complex, quite ambiguous in lots of ways. And so what really I’m hoping to do through this series is just give you new stuff to think about and just give you new stuff to try on your businesses. That’s the spirit of it. Open empathic inquiry, not any kind of definitive ‘do this and everything will be solved’. I don’t believe the world really works that way, to be quite honest. So. We’re trying to create here a kind of inquiring, respectful space.

We’re gonna talk now about board games. Now, as someone who worked at board level for years and years, I’ve been sitting on boards in a range of forms now for about 10, 15 years. I had this kind of dawning realisation over time. I can’t say it was some sort of big moment of insight, but over time what happened is things began to kind of dawn on me. And what I began to see was this, which was 95% of what is happening in any given board meeting, it started to seem to me, isn’t being spoken about, isn’t even really being acknowledged by the people in the room, might actually even be happening outside of conscious awareness. And yet it’s having a colossal impact on how this given group of people relates to one another, thinks, feels about what it’s talking about, and ultimately the decisions that group of people takes. So I began to think about there’s so much going on between us all in these different board meetings. There’s so much in play that isn’t being understood, isn’t being acknowledged really in any way, shape, or form. That got rather vividly brought to life. A few years ago. I was actually sat in a board session with a client in a group of probably eight or nine quite experienced leaders, and the CEO was late for this particular board meeting. Only five or 10 minutes late. We carried on with the agenda. The session had begun. And in he walked. This was quite an unconventional CEO I must say and quite an unconventional board environment, but pretty much the first words out of his mouth in this board meeting were: “Hands up who thinks I should fire Bob?” (His name wasn’t Bob, but we’ll draw a discreet veil over it.) And it was the most staggering intervention I think I’d seen in a board meeting at that point. And as I say, it’s a bit of an edge case, but it got me thinking, really thinking about this subject. ’cause I started to think, well, look, there’s something being constellated, there’s something being acted out here. What is it? What is this board meeting actually really about? And since then, over the course of the last few years, I’ve begun to see more and more different sorts of games being played at board level. And I want to start unpacking that for you and how this works in the course of the session we’ve got this morning.

I would think about a board game as follows. It’s a kind of collective behavioural phenomenon that has two core characteristics. So the first characteristic is that people in a board environment, it might be a board meeting, but it could be something more informal, are engaging in interactions that have conscious or unconscious ulterior motives. So in other words, there’s something going on which isn’t being acknowledged and perhaps isn’t really even being understood. There’s some sort of ulterior motive at play, and those motives are relational in nature. So in other words, they’re to do with how the people in this particular board meeting environment are relating to one another, how they’re getting on.

In the example I just gave you of the board meeting in which “hands up, who think I should fire Bob” became the first agenda point, what’s actually going on there is… well, there’s a lot of things actually going on there, but one of the games that’s going on, one of the ulterior motives is about status. So ultimately that CEO can walk into a room and feel as though the entirety of that group can simply be co-opted into his agenda at any given moment. It’s a status play, effectively, it’s a power play. So even though what’s being discussed is, notionally, the firing of the individual in question, what’s actually going on behind it is an ulterior motive, which is to do with status.

So in our interactions, in our board level interactions, what we’re seeing is conscious or unconscious ulterior motives. I’ll talk more about unconscious motives later on. And those motives being relational in nature, to do with how we relate to one another, rather than to do with say, business strategy or commercial performance, numbers, that kind of thing.

I should briefly reference if you are remotely interested in this. A very famous body of work exists in the space of something called transactional analysis, which is to do with ego states. Berne’s great contribution to psychotherapy and to related fields like coaching has been to help us understand ego states: parent, adult, child. You may have heard of that before in various interactions. And one of the things that transactional analysis looks at is the nature of games that get played when people are in those different ego states. It’s a fantastic frame of reference.

It’s an amazing and incredibly rich area of study, but I just wanted to note that in transactional analysis, we talk about games being played in different kind of ego states, but I’m gonna broaden the definition out here. ’cause I think there’s a lot more we can talk about when we talk about the games that are being played at board level.

A game ultimately matters because unless we are aware that we are playing it, we can get lost in it. So the game starts to control us and control those around us. So back to my example of “who thinks we should fire Bob”, immediately the conversation becomes totally consumed by two things. It becomes consumed by a discussion about whether or not poor old Bob should be fired. But it also becomes consumed by the management of that kind of dynamic in the room. Everybody immediately is lost in the game. If we know that a game is being played, so if we know that we’ve got some sort of game going on between us here, then we can make choices. An obvious choice would be to opt out of the game. We don’t have to play the game, we don’t have to get drawn into it in that sense. Or at least we can make a conscious choice about the way that we choose to engage with the game. Awareness is at least half the battle here and a lot of the time, again, in leadership team environments I go into and board level environments I go into, the games that we play… and I say we, because I know I have been and can continue to be as guilty of this as anybody. We’re not aware of them and they’re kind of controlling us and they’re controlling our behaviour. So that is the way to think about it. Related concept. I think about this a lot actually, is the meeting and the real meeting. One of my favourite bits of TV, it’s a great scene, in the remake of House of Cards that was on Netflix many, many years ago. The Frank Urquhart character is meeting with I think a Senator. And this whole very pleasant conversation goes on over tea. As the Frank Urquhart character, or Frank Underwood, I think it is, isn’t it, in the US version goes towards the door, he looks up at the camera, breaks the fourth wall, and goes, and now the real meeting can begin and then just turns back and makes a single comment at this Senator that advances his particular agenda.

A great example of the meeting versus the real meeting. So in the context of board games, the meeting might be to do with what’s notionally under discussion, what’s the agenda that we’ve got in front of us, what are the points of order, all that sort of stuff. But the real meeting is actually what the individuals in the room are seeking to achieve. The genuine motivations of people in the room, which as I said earlier on, can be conscious or unconscious. And sometimes, I would offer up… maybe not all the time, but certainly sometimes what those individuals are trying to achieve might not have a great deal to do with the items on the agenda. So you’ve got this phenomenon of we’re supposedly having a meeting about something going on over here, and actually we’re having a meeting about something completely different if you really analyse the kind of texture in the contours of the meeting. So many clients, for example, in different boards that I sit on, are having a meeting around the financial performance of the business over the last quarter, for example. What they’re really having a meeting around is who’s in charge, right? And so there’s all sorts of dominance hierarchy tricks get played. There’s all sorts of ways that information gets presented, ways that discussion goes on, that ultimately mean the meeting and the real meeting are quite distinct from one another. So. Board games then. What we’re really talking about here are ulterior motives are starting to exert an influence on how a group of people relate and interact at board level.

Over the last few months I have been writing a kind of A-Z compendium of board games which I’m gonna publish I think later on this summer. I want to talk about the most common board games that I come across in the boards and the leadership teams that I bear witness to all day, every day. There are just dozens and dozens of them, but the top 26, the A-Z, we’re gonna get out over the summer I think. We haven’t got time for them all today. So what I thought we’d do though is we’re gonna start at A, and maybe work through to like D or E over the course of the next 15 minutes. And under each one we’re gonna look at what’s the game, why is it that people are tempted to play the game, when does it cause harm, and how to quit. So I’m hopeful that over the course of the next, you know, however long you are going to recognise perhaps some dynamics in some of what we talk about here, that you’ll bear witness to, or have born witness to, some of those dynamics actually in play already.

I just want to offer up we’re talking about games and we’re talking about conscious and unconscious motivations. Just want to offer up that I’m not coming at this from any position of judgment whatsoever. As I said earlier on, I have played a lot of these games myself, unconsciously, I think sometimes, frankly, and not to my credit, consciously on other occasions. It is part of the human condition that we all engage in this stuff, and it’s just a reality of the working world that we’re in as well. So I don’t want this to feel like there’s any kind of judgment on anybody. And yes, of course there are more Machiavellian individuals out there if we wanna start talking about dark triad behaviours and all that sort of stuff. But actually in the end, if we come from a place of going: most of us are just getting out of bed in the morning to do the best job that we know how, everybody just wants to try and have a nice day. The way you might wanna think about these different games as I set them out is; just the ways that we are consciously and unconsciously getting in our own and other people’s ways, in the spirit though of we’re trying to do the right thing for ourselves and we’re trying to do the right thing by our families and those around us. So that’s the spirit I would like to offer all this up in.

So A then. A is for avoidance. Very, very common game. One of, I would argue the most common games. And what the game is, in avoidance, is it’s a collective kind of conspiracy, often a conspiracy of silence to avoid difficult or uncomfortable conversations. It plays out in different ways. There was a board that I was sat on for a good few years. Really successful group of people. Really lovely group of people, actually. Had a very, very low preference for talking about what they considered to be the grubby business of selling, right? Did not wanna talk about sales. Did not wanna talk about sales performance, really. Did, however, have a very high preference of talking about people. So really, really enjoyed discussions around people. So actually what you saw was a kind of collective agreement, a sort of tacit agreement in meetings that would play out, which was to avoid the uncomfortable conversation, which is about the gnarly stuff of sales. And actually, if there was a minor HR issue that the board could then merrily spend a good hour of its time really getting into the wiring of, it was very, very happy to do that. So there’s a kind of collective avoidance of something that that group of people found uncomfortable. You see this in different ways. There’s a client a couple of years ago who’d kept a very, very poor performing team member hanging around because there’d been this kind of collective avoidance of having an uncomfortable conversation at board level where some of those relationships were quite complex about what to do about this poor performing team member. This happens quite a lot, basically. Now why this game gets played. It can be explained by the most basic building blocks of human psychology. Avoidance is really simple. Basically all human beings can be understood in two really simple dimensions. The first dimension is: We are hardwired to want to get away from things that we find unpleasant, and we are also hardwired to want to get towards things that we find pleasant. So for all the complexity of psychology and neuroscience and everything else, pretty much all human behaviour can be mapped onto that. For many of us, situations in which conflict is on the table; in which it feels like there’s something difficult or gnarly to discuss, actually is a great example of something that feels uncomfortable. We don’t necessarily want to have to get into it really. It’s almost tautological, it’s discomfort, no, don’t want to have to go there. Therefore we will do what we can to avoid it. And actually, because like attracts like, and actually a lot of the time what will happen is we build people around us and we negotiate ways of working that allow things to remain pleasant for us, our individual preferences can start manifesting themselves in the group, right? The problem with it though is this. Avoidance… never a great thing, but it can be a neutral thing… maybe… sometimes, but usually when there’s warning signs of business performance that aren’t being attended to, bearing in mind, as you will always hear me say, problems generally do not get better with age, where there is, where there is avoidance going on, what you will see over time is situations getting worse and worse and worse. So back to the previous example, the client that didn’t enjoy conversations around sales, wasn’t seeing its sales performance improved, which actually by the way, only made it harder for them to talk about sales. Teams, which are failing to deal with poor performing team members. Those problems don’t get better with age as well. All that will happen is that poor performance will start to manifest and ripple out into the business in lots and lots of different ways. So: avoidance, the first board game we’re talking about today, how to quit it. Well, awareness is at least half the battle here. If we know that we’re in avoidance, at least we can start making choices about whether or not we actually want to tackle it. Conflict is a skill though, ultimately. It’s something that we can all learn. We often talk about this in our practice, actually. It’s about being able to expand the zone of our own discomfort, what discomfort we can find tolerable, basically. We expand that zone over time. So training and coaching can really help here. As can practice. And even the best training and coaching in the world and this is no substitute ultimately for just the practice of stepping into those courageous conversations sometimes. But yes, awareness – first kind of board game.

B then. B is for blame. The blame game, as you will have heard it referred to previously, I’m sure. But this is a very, very common board game as well. Most businesses will experience negative or challenging issues at some point during their life cycle. And what will actually happen in the context of blame as a board game is that the onus of that, the blame for that, will be shifted around a group of people. Often actually within the context of what you may have come across before as a drama triangle. I don’t know if you’re familiar with drama triangles, if you’re not, very much worth looking at. Karpman wrote a classic paper on this in, I think it was the fifties or the sixties. So we’re talking a good chunk of time ago. And again, it’s been fairly extensively documented since, it gets written about a lot in the context of family dynamics. But in a drama triangle, it posits that there are three roles. The roles are: perpetrator, victim, rescuer. And the idea of the drama triangle is that we can get sucked into playing one of those roles. The real drama in the triangle is created by people shifting around those roles. To give you a lived example of this, actually, let’s go back to the previous example. Let’s go back to “who thinks we should fire Bob”. So immediately in the response to that question, what you have is you have somebody who’s coming in playing the role of perpetrator; in that case, the CEO. You then have a notional victim, I would argue in the case of Bob and actually potentially arguably other people in that board environment, we won’t get into the depths of that particular client relationship. What you’ve then got is a bunch of people who immediately start moving into the world of rescuer. So trying to actually ameliorate the situation between the CEO and Bob; the perpetrator and the victim. And then what happens as that goes on, is the CEO starts feeling as though, actually, he is being a bit got at because his notionally humourous but ultimately quite controlling statement didn’t get the response he was after. So he starts shifting into victim mode. And somebody else in that particular environment, in this case, another board member, started actually taking the CEO to task about the behaviour around Bob. And actually in that sense, you’ve then got a different perpetrator—victim dynamic. You start to see how people shift around these kind of drama triangles all the time.

And so the thing about the drama triangle, the perpetrator, victim, rescuer, dynamic. The reason why people play, it’s quite complicated actually. It’s often to do with unconscious reenactments of family dynamics and, and other considerations. But ultimately, at a really simple level, it comes down to playing any sort of blame game, positioning oneself as a victim or taking a really aggressive stance in making somebody else into a notional victim, or indeed being the hapless rescuer in the middle of it, for example, can be easier than owning issues that we actually have helped to create.

All relationships are actually co-created. Everything that we’re experiencing with very, very few exceptions, we’ve usually had some sort of, some sort of role in. So the idea of the drama triangle, it becomes a massive distraction. The drama, the psychodrama of it all becomes a distraction from actually owning things that we need to own and it can be really problematic actually, because ultimately what it can lead to is individuals feeling quite bullied or got at in some situations as well. So there can be really personal, personally challenging consequences to these sorts of games. How to quit it. Understand that relationships are co-created. Accept the fact that actually, if you’ve got negative or challenging situations going on in the business, you may well have been a progenitor of that in some way, shape or form. Navigate from that place. Again, awareness is a large part of the battle.

C — let’s move on to C. C, I would argue, is for collusion. Collusion is a really interesting and challenging dynamic. Fundamentally collusion is to do with the fact that there’s a certain view of the world. There’s a certain way that we want to see things, sometimes. There’s a certain comfort zone that we might be in, and we wish to preserve that. And in order to preserve that what we’re gonna do is consciously or unconsciously collude with others to do so. A great example of this. I had a client a year or two back who was having a very bumpy time in their board level interactions, and what was going on with this particular client was everybody was colluding in not having… again, this close relationship sometimes between conflict avoidance and other things… everybody was colluding in not having the difficult or uncomfortable conversation that needed to be happening about what that team was experiencing. I was getting text messages from different members of that board, different times of the day or night, asking me to effectively join their side in the argument. Asking me to, when we go into the next board meeting, do you think you would be able to back this? Do you think you would be able to back that? So people absolutely in campaign mode about their view of the world, but ultimately working behind the scenes to co-opt others into their particular campaign and to collude with others in that case, quite consciously (collusion can also be unconscious) in the perpetuation of the status quo. Collusion is challenging because actually it stands in the way then of having really productive open, sometimes quite gnarly, conversations about what’s actually going on in the context of any given interaction. If I’m colluding with you, ultimately I’m usually colluding ’cause I want something not to change. I want status quo to be perpetuated in some way, shape, or form. I want my version of the world to be right and I don’t wish to be challenged on it. So ultimately all that acts as a very practical and emotional barrier that can stand in the way of the progress that needs to happen through open, honest, and constructive conversation. So the quitting of collusion, again, awareness being half the battle here, is often to do with us being able to ask ourselves a really simple question, I would argue, which is: to what extent am I wedded to being right and why? So if we start examining questions like that, we can start seeing where actually we’re trying to co-opt others into our view of the world.

D is for denial, and I’m gonna spend absolutely no time on this whatsoever because if you’re interested in denial, go back to Ostrich Politics, our webinar from last month. There was a good 45 minutes of talk all about denialism in business and how it hits. Huge problem. Close cousin of issues like collusion, I would say. A huge, huge problem, but I’m spend no time on it today.

I’m gonna do one more before we get some questions. And it’s E, and it’s for experimentation, a very different sort of board game. The game of experimentation at board level, I would argue, is a collective addiction to new initiatives or ideas undertaken at the expense of developing a clear and coherent strategy. It’s also known as initiative-itis. Years and years ago, a senior member of the very big business AIG, she said this in open forum so I can share this, but she said, AIG internally there’s a joke within the business, which is, it stands for Another Idea Generated. And what she was basically saying there, was we’re so off to the shiny new thing a lot of the time what we’re actually not focused on is executing the thing that’s in front of us. It’s a really seductive game, experimentation. And the reason why it can be seductive, it can be tempting to play the game of experimentation, is because it’s actually easier than having to set out your store by way of a strategy that might actually fail. So in the end. There is a non-negligible risk with all strategies that at some point it’s gonna go horribly wrong. There’s gonna be some degree of failure going on. When it causes harm… I want to be careful here actually, because I don’t want to say that experimentation actually itself is the enemy of progress. In fact, experimentation is incredibly important, and if we don’t test and learn and fail and continue to do that on an ongoing, iterative basis, often our businesses aren’t moving forward in the way that we want. So it’s not that experimentation is the problem, it’s when it starts to become an end in its own right, rather than a means to an end. That’s the key distinction. When a board or a leadership team just becomes so addicted to doing something new at the expense of actually working out what works, rinsing and repeating it, or working out how its experiments are actually in service of a bigger, broader strategic goal, then we have a problem. One of the great things about this particular game, unlike a couple of the others that I’ve talked about, which sometimes can take a bit of coaching to tease out this one is one that leadership teams, or certainly individual leaders, tend to be aware that their organisations are actually engaging in, and can spot pretty quickly a lot of the time. There’s already a kind of latent awareness of it. Sometimes our archetypes and our psychological preferences don’t help us here. Some of us are actually very experimental by nature. We’re committed to adventure. We like the new thing. We want to try and see what else we can achieve in the world, but we need to have a degree of balance, particularly in our senior leadership environments by people who are quite focused on getting, in a structured way, towards a particular end goal. And that balance is really, really important. A lot of the time when people spot this, what they’ve actually always struggled to do is correct their own behaviour or correct the collective behaviour. And that, again, can sometimes be a coaching and consulting and training requirement, but I would actually argue that a lot of the time what just needs to happen is a more forensic, uncomfortable, intellectually honest form of conversation, which is: how does this given experiment or initiative contribute to the strategy that we are wanting to advance? And if we cannot name how this particular initiative, idea, or experiment contributes to that strategy with absolute clarity, and indeed, if we can’t actually name our strategy or describe our strategy with absolute clarity, then there’s a strong likelihood that we’re actually just engaging in some form of game playing here, and we would be quite well advised to quit the experimentation that we have got going on. Experimentation is something which can be a really, really good thing in business, but it very, very quickly becomes an unhelpful ball game if we’re not very canny to it.

F is for financialisation, but I haven’t got the time to get into that now. I think we will leave it there.

So board games. Thing to think about. What is going on underneath the surface, the meeting, the real meeting, how are ulterior motives potentially in play and informing how a group of people interacts with one another and the dynamics of that particular group, the quality of its thinking, the quality of its action, the quality of its decision making. Are there things being discussed here? Things that are going on beneath the surface that it would be healthy for us to acknowledge. I mean, again, a lot of our behaviour is unconscious. Not all of it is harmful at all. But this thing about games is, as we’ve spoken about a bit this morning, they can really get in the way of progress unless we acknowledge them. So what are those conscious or unconscious motivations, how are they influencing how we show up? That’s the thing we wanna be thinking about. Awareness being, as I’ve said, half the battle. And then here are a few that you might want to consider. You might want to consider, are we in avoidance? Are there some complex drama triangle style blame games going on? Are we colluding with one another in conversations that should be happening that aren’t, to keep ourselves and those around us comfortable. Is there some form of denialism going on? Are we addicted to experimentation, for example, at the expense of progress? All of those sorts of things. There are many, many of these games. We play them all the time. We play them unconsciously a lot. As I said, I’ve been as guilty of it as anybody, but if we spot them, we can work out whether or not we wanna play the game. Whether it serves us to play the game. Or actually whether or not we want to try and do something different in those moments. It is interesting, isn’t it, that in business you often hear that phrase ‘we need to play the game’, right? We’re actually aware sometimes, and we’ve almost normalised it in the language that we use. We’re aware that we’ve got these games going on and we’ve made it normal in phrases like ‘we need to play the game’. But I would argue, while it’s normal, it’s not healthy a lot of the time. If we don’t acknowledge the games that we’re playing, we can’t actually build healthy dynamics in our teams. And actually, from a board point of view, and I’ll leave it here on this, I have seen over the years not just serious business problems resulting from that, but serious human damage, human consequences, flowing from really, really badly played or malevolent games, often unconsciously, going on a board level.

And that is frankly nothing short of a tragedy a lot of the time. So I hope in some sense what this half an hour has done this morning for you is equipped you perhaps just to be on the lookout, if it does nothing else, it’s maybe equipped you, planted a seed, to have a think about what ulterior motives might be going on here, what might be going on in this group of people that’s actually hindering our collective ability to make progress.

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