I learned the Chair Game from the applied improv maestro Robert Poynton seven or eight years ago. To hear Rob tell it, he had learned the game from a friend who had learned from another friend and so on back to who knows when.
I don’t know where the Chair Game came from or who played it first, but I did once track it back – in an afternoon fit of internet “research” – at least as far as a collection of games for camp counselors and youth leadership instructors on a kludgy website from the ‘00s.
Appropriately, the game itself is appealingly, deceptively simple.
In an otherwise open space, players (ideally ~20 - 80 ppl) are seated in randomly distributed chairs. One person is selected to be the “Chair Zombie” and pulled away from the group – leaving a single empty chair. When the game starts, the Zombie has one goal: Sit in the empty chair. Everyone else also has one goal: Prevent the Zombie from getting the open chair by occupying it.
The Zombie – in classical style – has to amble slowly. Everyone else can move as fast as they like, but they can’t block the Zombie in any way except by sitting in the open chair. Players can’t move the chairs. And once someone stands up, they’re up. They have to sit in a different chair before returning to their original seat.
That’s it. Simple.
But once the game starts, chaos reliably ensues, and the first round rarely goes longer than 10 seconds. In the aftermath, the facilitator asks players what went wrong – and then what they should do the next round. And then the players play again. And again.
I’ve played the Chair Game with kids. I’ve played it with university students at Stanford. I’ve played it with leaders from organizations around the world as part of all kinds of workshops. After countless rounds over the years, I still find it consistently fascinating to facilitate, and I don’t know anyone who’s spent much time with the game who hasn’t felt the same way.
I also don’t know that there’s anything quite like the Chair Game for quickly and creatively exploring how we show up as leaders and learners in uncertain, complex environments. Depending on the group of humans involved, various lessons are likely to emerge each time, but here is just a handful of the many valuable lessons I’ve seen surface through playing the game.
When confronted with novel challenges and unfamiliar conditions, we often assume constraints that don’t exist. I once watched an intact org team play their first disastrous round of the Chair Game in complete silence before anyone thought to ask if they were allowed to speak to one another.
Related: Asking questions is a great way to reduce uncertainty!
“Seeing the system” always helps in environments with a high degree of interdependence and interconnection. When half the players jump up to occupy the open chair, everything becomes much more challenging. This is why Observe and Orient come first in Boyd’s OODA model!
That said, experimentation drives learning – especially in complex conditions where causality isn’t clear or reliable. It’s easy for players to bog down in debating strategy between rounds and to forget that they’re in an environment where they can quickly test and validate their ideas through play.
Related: Understanding the cost of experimentation (and where/how we can accelerate and de-risk it) is critical!
Learning only advances if we can listen and also let go. For group performance to improve round by round, some players have to change what they’re doing based on what they see and hear from the rest of the group. If players are stuck pointing fingers and loudly restating past positions, nothing improves.
Your strategy is only as good as your execution – which is only as good as your buy-in. There’s more than one way for players to keep the game going and the Zombie moving by reaching a kind of dynamic equilibrium, but every way ultimately depends on players staying engaged and perhaps adapting to step outside the strategy as necessary while staying clear on core principles.
I could go on – like way, way on. Depending on how the facilitator frames it, the Chair Game can explore emergence vs. control, the balance of agility and alignment, the difference between finite and infinite games, and more.
But to prevent this missive from running any longer, I’ll close with just one more meta-lesson from the game: In a world where performance pressure and the stakes of failure can both feel impossibly, terrifyingly high, we can’t afford to overlook opportunities to explore fraught concepts in the kinds of low-stakes environments that games provide.
Play is powerful. Don’t forget it.
@Jeffrey