I recently sat down with Martin Hauck on the From A People Perspective podcast to talk about how we can make team development both intentional and genuinely impactful using Dungeons and Dragons.
Here are the two ideas we kept circling back to:
1. The titles come off at the table
In most workplaces, the org chart tends to run the show. A junior person hesitates to push back on an executive or a manager defers to whoever's talking the loudest. Sound familiar?
This is exactly why so many team activities fall flat, because the existing power dynamics just walk into the room with everyone.
When I play games with a team, those titles disappear. Everyone is at the same level. And, everyone's playing a character in a low-pressure world, so the usual hierarchy melts away, and people start talking to each other like equals.
2. You get to see who people actually are
Every team runs on a set of unspoken rules. Things like:
Who really has the final say, no matter what the org chart claims.
Whether it's actually safe to disagree out loud.
Who covers for whom.
Nobody writes these down, but everybody follows them, and they shape how a team works far more than any policy ever will. So what unspoken rules are running our team? You can’t read the label from inside the jar, so we need to create some distance from work to actually get some perspective on how your team runs.
This is the purpose of the game.
Put a team into a game together and we can see how those unspoken rules begin to emerge, because play has a great way of revealing what we normally keep managed.
When the stakes are imaginary, people stop performing the version of themselves they think the office wants and slip into how they actually operate. And once they does, those unspoken rules come right up to the surface.
Who's collaborative when the pressure's on?
Who quietly makes space for everyone else to shine?
Who can't help grabbing the spotlight?
Who panics when the plan falls apart, and who grins and improvises a new one?
Watching how someone shows up for a fictional crisis tells you a lot about how they show up for a Tuesday meeting. And the real value comes after the game, when we mirror those observations back to the team and help them see how these patterns might be helping them, or quietly holding them back.
The future of team development is play
Adults learn by doing. We don't prep a sports team for the big game by sitting them down with a PowerPoint. We get them on the field, running drills together until it's second nature.
Our teams deserve that same practice time, and somehow they almost never get it.
💡 There's a neuroscience version of this too: what fires together, wires together. 💡
When a team practices communicating, trusting each other, and solving problems together in play, those pathways start to hold. That's how the soft skills actually stick instead of evaporating the second everyone gets back to their inboxes.
A game is a safe sandbox where people can try on a leadership style, practice really listening, and work a hard problem together, all while having a genuinely great time.
Huge thanks to Martin Hauck for having me on From A People Perspective to talk about the mission behind Once Upon a Roll.
👉 Want the full conversation? Listen here, or look up From A People Perspective on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
And if you're ready to finally make time for the kind of connection that actually moves the needle for your team, let's talk about bringing a game to your next team day. Drop me a message or come find us at Once Upon a Roll. We've got a spot for you at the table.
