Matrix Games:  A Valuable and Underappreciated Tool for Cognitive Skills Training

A while back, a former student—now a senior vice president of operations for a high-tech manufacturing firm—contacted me about providing training to help his company with business continuity planning (BCP).  As a midshipman years ago, he’d of course been force-fed a steady diet of tactical decision games (TDGs).  Now he wanted his people to get “the TDG treatment”—challenging, realistic decisions under uncertainty and extreme time pressure.  After discussing his requirements, we concluded that TDGs were not what he needed.  He wanted the experience of pressurized decision making, but his challenge was different.  He wasn’t looking for a command decision at a single point in time; he was looking for multiple actors interacting to manage a situation evolving over time.

I proposed we play a matrix game instead, although I had reservations.  I had never developed a matrix game for a business setting before, and I was not sure how well it would work—especially since matrix games are best suited to complex situations with multiple purposeful actors, and this was essentially one actor against the inanimate and undirected forces of friction and chance.  It is the interactions of multiple actors locked in a web of variously aligning and conflicting interests that creates the interesting and challenging dynamics that make matrix games so compelling.  Two-sided games rarely achieve the desired complexity.

Never one to shy away from risk however, my former student was on board.  My colleague Jared Peterson and I came up with a scheme to turn a one-sided problem into a six-sided game.  The company would be organized into Production, Logistics and Support (HR, compliance, facilities, etc.) departments, each acting individually but under the coordination of a designated crisis manager.  We would anthropomorphize the forces of disruption:  the Supply-Chain Gremlins would attempt to upset logistics, Murphy’s Law would attack the production process, and the Law of Unintended Consequences would connive to cause the company’s actions to backfire and cause unanticipated indirect effects.  Unlike with a traditional scripted exercise, we did not need to author a challenging scenario (which we frankly were not qualified to do because of the extremely technical nature of the domain); we just needed to establish the web of interacting interests.  Natural competitiveness took over and the players wrote a more compelling scenario through their actions than we ever could have done.

The game was a huge success—and massively entertaining.  My client was thrilled.  In fact, I received a text from him a couple months later telling me he had arrived at work that morning to find the facility in the midst of a potentially major crisis but that his team had performed magnificently to resolve it without disruption.  He credited that success to our exercise.

It has got me thinking about matrix games, their value, and their generalizability, as well as about their relation to other types of decision-making exercises like tactical decision games (TDGs), decision forcing cases (DFCs), and ShadowBox exercises (SBXs).

First of all, I am reminded that matrix games are a valuable but underappreciated tool for exercising cognitive skills. I’m coming to recognize that they have greater versatility and applicability than I have previously understood.  The experience with my former student has convinced me that if you can represent a domain according to 4-6 distinct sets of interests, you can develop a matrix game for that domain.

Matrix games emerged in the late 1980s, the brainchild of Chris Engle, a clinical social worker at Indiana University.  Engle’s initial vision was wargaming based on words rather than numbers, and therefore essentially qualitative versus quantitative.  For decades matrix games remained one of the best-kept secrets in wargaming.  It’s only within the last few years that they have gained traction in the serious wargaming community.  

Matrix games essentially are wargaming by argument.  At its heart, a matrix game is a conversation disciplined by logic and evidence.  Players propose actions, explain their expected effects, and defend their reasoning. Other players challenge, refine, support, or complicate those arguments.  The argument gets adjudicated by one of several methods ranging from having a subject-matter expert act as judge to having all the participants vote.  Most methods employ dice, although some people recoil at the idea of rolling dice to determine outcomes in a serious wargame.  (I personally like the idea because it introduces a stochastic element to the game and allows for the occurrence of unlikely, surprise events.)  The immediate purpose of this process is to determine what happens in the game.  If an argument succeeds, the result is implemented and becomes part of the new reality that all subsequent arguments must deal with. 

But argument is also the principal learning mechanism of the game.  Having the argument makes everybody smarter about the nature of the problem and potential solutions to it, by exposing assumptions, revealing different perspectives, and generating insights. 

One of the appealing things about matrix games compared to conventional wargames is the lack of rules and mechanics to be learned, making the bar to entry very low.  This lack of constraining rules grants players great freedom of action. Basically, you can do anything you want, as long as: (1) you can imagine it, (2) you can describe the result in concrete terms that can be implemented in the game, and (3) you can make your case.   Matrix games thus encourage creative, critical and causal thinking.

Matrix games share important attributes with other types of decision-making exercises like TDGs, decision-forcing cases (DFCs) and ShadowBox exercises (SBXs).  They are facilitated games designed to encourage learning through structured discussion.  They are analog, low-tech affairs, and as a result they tend to be very accessible and repeatable.  And like TDGs especially, the magic is in the facilitation.

There are some important differences, however, most significant being the time commitment.  While you can knock out a TDG in a half hour, a matrix game requires a commitment of at least a couple hours.  The design is also more complicated.  Rather than creating a single decision dilemma, as in a TDG, matrix game design requires crafting objectives and capabilities for each actor to establish the interlocking interests that are the heart of the game.  

Facilitating a matrix game, or a TDG for that matter, is not as simple as it looks.  In the hands of a skilled facilitator, both can appear as effortless as an engaging conversation.  But there actually is a lot that goes into making them appear so.  There are a few guidebooks available on matrix games.  The best concise guidance can be found here.  But it is a big step from reading best practices on a page to carrying it off in practice.  You could try to figure it out yourself through trial and error, as I and others have done.  (As a result, there are lots of variations on how to run matrix games.)  But the best way to learn how to execute matrix games is to experience one in the hands of a skilled facilitator.

I can’t imagine that anybody who does will not come away enthused and convinced of their utility.

Matrix games align very nicely with our mission here at ShadowBox of helping practitioners develop expertise through accessible, experiential and engaging cognitive skills training.  Reach out to us at info@shadowboxtraining.com if you think a matrix game might be a good fit for your organization and you’d like some help in designing and executing it.

We have made a copy of Bananas, Bayonets and Battleships: A Matrix Game of U.S. Gunboat Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1928-1933, my latest historical matrix game, available as a free download in the ShadowBox Learning Center.  Let us know what you think.