I’m sure everyone has failed at one point of another in their life right?. Think about this instance, what happened and how it happened. What did you learn from this experience? What to avoid in the future? How to mitigate this issue or overcome the obstacle? Ideally, this failure provided an invaluable learning experience where you learned all the above.
The idea of using failure to teach is not a new concept. However, utilizing online training and game-based learning the opportunity to use failure to teach in corporate training has become increasingly present.
By giving your learners the opportunity to work through a problem or scenario on their own, and learn from their mistakes, they can discover and retain what works and what doesn’t in a given situation. Additionally, there is motivation to overcome that challenge and reach the goal and succeed.
Failure can motivate in many ways; from pushing people to work harder to challenging individuals to learn new skills or improve skills to overcome a challenge. For the sake of this article, let’s look at failure in terms of game-based corporate training.
Video games have been leveraging failure as a motivator for as long as they have been around. Besides, what fun would a game be if you won every time and never struggled? It would be like playing your youngest sibling in Risk when you are 16 and they are 6. For instance, you’re playing Super Mario Brothers and just when you are about to reach the flag, you run into a Goomba; “Game Over.” Do you throw down the controller and pout? No, you try again and show that Goomba who is boss!
Games have a way of grabbing people’s attention and holding it with an iron grip, regardless of difficulty. In fact, it seems the more challenging the game, the more people are hooked. Think about Candy Crush and the countless people who are hopelessly addicted to a simple game on their phone. People keep playing to overcome a challenge and move on the the next level, despite having failed 3 times prior.
Using this ideology in a learning environment can work the same way. Challenge your learners and give them the tools to overcome obstacles and reach success through game-based corporate training.
For more information on how we can build fail safe learning for your organization contact us today!
