Using creativity to make both meaning and money

There are two kinds of people in the game industry. Those who think that the industry is in fantastic shape and has entered a Golden Age where the sky is the limit. And those who think it is broken, a creative morass where very little new gets created each year.

Megan Gaiser, the founder of Contagious Creativity and former CEO of Her Interactive (the maker of the Nancy Drew games for girls), believes that the game industry has a lot of potential but has a long way to go before it taps the full talents of the diverse people who work within it.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1798667,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,games,","session":"D"}']

Daniel Bernstein is the former head of Sandlot Games and a current vice president at software sell-side merger and acquisition advisory firm Corum Group. He also believes that the game industry has to change to position itself for future growth, broader audiences, and more diverse talent.

They’ve come to the same conclusion that improving creative leadership at game companies will lead to naturally better products and more diverse teams. And that will make the game industry both more inclusive and more profitable at the same time, but only if we get over the traps that have held the industry back in the past.

I interviewed Gaiser and Bernstein at the IGDA Leadership Summit in Seattle about using creative leadership to make meaning and money. They’re also going to be speakers at our upcoming GamesBeat 2015 conference on the subject of creativity and diversity. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: Tell us about yourselves.

Megan Gaiser: I was CEO at Her Interactive for about 15 years. Now I’ve started a new company, Contagious Creativity, which has a lot to do with our subject.

Daniel Bernstein: I was the founder and CEO of Sandlot Games. I started it in 2002 and sold it in 2011. Since then I went out and did another startup. I’m advising startups as well. I joined an investment bank. It’s an interesting journey, but it made a lot of sense. The bank I joined is the Corum Group. We sell companies.

I don’t know if you guys know about Sandlot, but we did something very similar to what Megan did – games for an audience that’s not the traditional gamer, especially girls and women. This was an important aspect for me, thinking about leadership and creativity in a way that addresses audience that aren’t served as well today.

GamesBeat: We’re going to start with Megan. What is creativity?

[aditude-amp id="medium1" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1798667,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,games,","session":"D"}']

Gaiser: I would say creativity is a way of being that sidesteps what’s not working to create or do something better. What’s your definition?

Bernstein: For me creativity is the generator by which new ideas happen. The newer ideas are created as a result of a fully untethered creative process. By “untethered” I mean throwing away your conceptions of what needs to be done and tapping into that inner sense that is almost something you can’t express. It’s at the bottom of who you are as a person and possibly who you are as an individual within an organization.

Tapping into that almost primal sense of who we are gives us the ability to look at the world in a whole new way. That’s what’s most exciting for me now, ideas that look at the world in a new way. Delving into the true nature of how we think about it is interesting to me.

Gaiser: I agree so much with John Cleese that I would add that creativity is our human operating system. It uses all of our senses, and both our creative intelligence and our intellectual intelligence. We tend to think of creativity as, first of all, a skill. We relegate it to making art or making products. In fact, creativity can, and in my opinion should, be used to inspire every aspect of business.

[aditude-amp id="medium2" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1798667,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,games,","session":"D"}']

It’s about tapping into your own innate wisdom. Everyone is creative. The idea that only a certain type of person is creative is so untrue. It may be that they just haven’t tapped into it because we’re so accustomed to leading with the intellectual side — the linear, logical, literal thinking – to the exclusion of our hearts, what we care about, how to inspire. The two of those together is a full human operating system.

GamesBeat: We’re going to have plenty of arguments about what creativity is and who is creative. One way to get into this would be to ask the audience here — who either went to E3 or followed it closely? What did you think? Mike Gallagher, the head of the Entertainment Software Association, told me that he felt like there was an explosion of creativity at E3.

Gaiser: I just saw eyes rolling [in the audience].

GamesBeat: Other people go to E3 and say, “This is the same old stuff. Call of Duty again.” They have a very different reaction. Who would say they agree with Mike Gallagher? And who disagrees? Many more people in our audience disagreed. We could say there might be a problem with creativity in the game industry, if the bulk of the room feels that way.

[aditude-amp id="medium3" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1798667,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,games,","session":"D"}']

Gaiser: Sure, there is creativity at E3. But there’s a difference between creativity and inspired creativity. It’s the same old same old. We’re not seeing the breadth of diverse stories and characters that we could be. Seeing the same old same old all the time has a dulling effect on players. It gives us a simplistic and homogenous view of what it is to be human.

We have such an opportunity now, given the past few years, which were a wake-up call. The good news is, it’s clear that the way we’re leading is not working. Disruption is creativity’s playground. This is our opportunity to flip leadership on its head.

Bernstein: You have to ask yourself, “How did we get here?” How come the games we see year in and year out are the same ones?

When you’re running a company, a public company, you need replicable revenue from hit to hit to hit. If you’re Electronic Arts and you’re looking to have an increasing level of sales year after year, and you have a captured audience base that you’re targeting—As a result of some of the things that have been happening in the markets for game companies that have gone public and shown recent earnings reports, what you’re seeing is an aversion to risk.

[aditude-amp id="medium4" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1798667,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,games,","session":"D"}']

On the mobile side you’re seeing the cost of acquisition exceeding the lifetime value of a user. Lifetime value is how much people are going to pay for a given game. That’s the metric for a lot of the free-to-play games nowadays.

But we’re not really talking about finance here. We’re talking about creativity. All that stuff reflects a lack of desire on the part of leaders in the games industry to take risks. The risk to reward ratio is very high. You have to take a lot of risks, even if the reward is potentially tremendous. We’re seeing a kind of two-tier result. You have these large companies making a lot of money on the same types of games year in and year out. Then you have the relegation to indie. Nobody is in between. The middle class of game developers is gone. There’s no opportunity to innovate and make enough money to sustain the next creative thing you want to do.

Even if, say, ustwo, who made the Monument Valley game, comes out—It’s tremendous. It’s an incredibly creative endeavor. It’s one that cuts across gender lines, racial lines. It’s a beautiful piece of art. But because of the way it looks, the way it’s presented, the way it’s monetized, it’s relegated to the indie category.

How do we bridge that gap? How do we get to the understanding that you need to risk your capital, the understanding that you can reach incredible returns if you’re willing to invest in creativity?

[aditude-amp id="medium5" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1798667,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,games,","session":"D"}']

GamesBeat: Let’s say that the game industry has a problem. Creativity is not where it should be, and that should be flipped. Monument Valley and games like that should be the ones that everybody aspires to and tries to make happen in a more sustainable way. What is the creative leadership that’s necessary if we’re going to make that assumption?

Gaiser: It doesn’t make financial sense that we’re not taking more risks. Any studio that is not creating diverse content for diverse audiences is leaving money on the table. The indies are leading the way. They’ve proven that diverse audiences play games that are designed for them.

Getting to the creative leadership issue, the courage to take risks is a value of creativity. Leading creatively—This is a more formal definition. This type of leadership leads with creative intelligence and is supported by intellectual intelligence – literal, logical, linear thinking. It’s flipping traditional corporate leadership on its head.

Why are we only serving the shareholders and the board members? Our job is to serve the employees and the customers as well. When we’re doing that, we are setting the behavior to inspire in everything we do. Leadership is behavior, not authority. Under creativity, I see as the pillar, you have inclusivity. You have diverse opinions and people. You have the courage to take risks and right action in the moment. Support, encouragement, kindness. Curiosity is the biggest. Curiosity not just to do something the way it’s always been done, but to always be questioning how to do something better.

When the economy crashed, I crashed too. We had to do some layoffs. We’d been riding high for a decade. I was scared to death. But then I thought that we could do the opposite of what’s done, which is how we did it for the decade that we succeeded. Instead of taking the employees’ keys and shutting down their computers and treating them inhumanly, the management team devised a plan to, moment by moment, support them throughout the entire process.

That gave continuing employees their role: to support these people for the next three days. Instead of the corporate way, where you have your head down and don’t know what to say, everybody was still connected. Everybody had a part to play. We can do that with HR. Their job should be to inspire, not to go through issues all the time. Everything, in my opinion, needs to be redesigned so that we’re finally serving the collective.

Bernstein: To your point about serving shareholders, Electronic Arts makes a tremendous amount of money, as does Activision, making products that are marginally creative. They have taken what they’ve done before and marginally improved it. There is a ceiling to that. A crash is inevitable. You’re now seeing a lack of financing and M&A activity for games. I was fortunate to have worked back in the days when you could get a game company funded.

Why is that? Maybe it’s the market? Bullshit. It’s not the market. The market’s good. I can tell you that the market in all these other areas, all these other sectors, is doing well. There’s about a trillion and a half in cash earmarked for acquisitions. So what is it? It’s creativity. It’s the fact that there’s not enough core innovation coming from that inner place associated with design and creation. The whole process of creation is broken. We’re not tapping into it. It’s not supported by anyone in the organization, whether it’s design or HR.

One thing that was great about Popcap is they had these design jams. It was a great company, a very creative company, and it still is, but now they’re part of EA, so no comment. The point is, it’s there. You can do it. But you need to structure your organization in such a way that you’re fostering creativity from within people in your organization.

You’re starting to see Fortune 500 companies that are run by women, run by people of color. But it’s still very homogenized. The structure is still the same. From the top, continue to work on these product lines and iterate on revenue moving forward. Don’t revolutionize. Don’t think outside what you’re doing. That’s the problem. When tap into the creative potential of your employees, who are now more diverse than ever—The first time I went to GDC it was all just a bunch of white guys. It’s completely revolutionized at this point. But we’re not tapping into the potential of what these folks can bring to the table. We challenge leadership, collectively, to do that, for the sake of having a viable games industry.

Gaiser: Creative leadership, in a short of way of saying it, welcomes diverse people and perspectives for diverse and inspiring products. The keynote this morning was great. We’re all saying the same thing in different words. Even creative leadership–Whether you call it conscious leadership, facilitative, servant leadership, it’s all the same thing.

She said that in order for people to give all of themselves, they need to feel welcomed. They need to feel valued. Another thing creative leadership does, it encourages authenticity. People can truly let down their guards to collaborate. They bring their whole selves to the job, to the creation. And as an added bonus, we’re all creative. In our games, every single person brings their own unique creativity. Every game reflects that. It’s such a sense of pride that everyone had. Then, when our fans gave us testimonials – thousands over the decade – they said they were so inspired that they went on to become scientists, technologists, a NASA engineer, all these things. It gave them extrinsic satisfaction and it gave us intrinsic satisfaction. There’s nothing better than that.

We had a vision. We didn’t want pink games for girls. We just pushed. The system didn’t include us, so we redesigned it from the very beginning, and to great results. We had inspired employees, inspired customers, consecutive award-winning products, and increasing revenues for a decade. You can’t argue with that. I didn’t realize how different that was from the way other companies operated. We were in a little bubble.

GamesBeat: There’s a lot of room for disagreement here. How much creativity can a company afford? How do you foster it? An example I like starts with a young guy, an architecture student. He’s an artist. He goes to work at an advertising agency. He helps with a lot of their creative work and feels like very much a creative person at heart. He’s eventually appointed the CEO of Activision Publishing. His name’s Eric Hirshberg. He runs the company that produces games like Destiny and Call of Duty and Skylanders.

Somewhere along the way, he went from creative to corporate. He’s now part of a company that everybody tends to bring up when they say there’s a problem with creativity in this industry. I bring that up to raise the question: Is there a problem in the industry, or is this an example of the industry working creatively?

Bernstein: He’s doing a one-plus on the creativity side. It’s important to give him credit for that. There’s a greater market opportunity, though. There’s a greater variety of products that could be tapped into. The problem is, when you start operating at the level of a public company, you’re beholden to shareholders and making sure you hit your numbers. That creates a fear of going too far off the cliff. A lot of executives are driven by that, or at least have that in their back pocket.

The courage to drop all your cards on the table is very difficult, especially if you’re running a large public company. It’s impossible. The shareholders will scald you. So it does have to come from—I don’t think that level ingenuity is going to happen.

Another example might be what’s happening in VR right now. Are you seeing innovations in VR happening within the large studios? No. They’re playing a wait-and-see game. I’ve seen some great demos and games coming out of smaller studios. They point to an interest in innovating and tapping into creativity that’s untethered from the things that keep us from being creative. Things like, “Okay, I have to deliver quarterly results better than the last ones.”

In answer to your question, he’s done a great job of stepping a bit outside the box. But there’s a world of other boxes. Right now we’re talking about that world and the opportunities there.

GamesBeat: Megan, how do you think the industry needs to change the way it leads?

Gaiser: The past few years have told us that unconscious bias is holding us back. It’s the reason why, in my 15 years, I’ve seen a lack of diversity in leadership and in content. I left the gaming industry angry. I couldn’t believe how we’re still seeing the white guys running these companies—They’re not taking risks.

We’re all leaders. Leadership is behavior. By the way, unconscious bias is something we all suffer from, men and women. That’s a thing I believe has to be addressed, and I don’t think it can be addressed just by taking an unconscious bias course. That’s not bad, but it’s a band-aid. Or now they’re using quotas in some places. That’s another band-aid. It’s making the end more important than the means.

GamesBeat: We’ve made a leap in our panel topic, from creativity to diversity and inclusivity. Is that what you’re saying, that creativity is closely connected to diversity and inclusivity?

Gaiser: Integrating creativity into leadership is the answer to genuinely welcoming diverse people and perspectives. It’s using all of our senses, not just the literal, linear, and logical way of thinking. Creativity takes courage. Taking a risk takes courage. Also, creativity is the most important skill set in the 21^st century, so it’s obviously the most important competitive advantage that leadership can employ. This is such an opportunity for transformation of companies, to help guide all leaders to tap into that creativity.

It’s good for everyone. It’s good for the industry. This industry has such an opportunity to become a beacon of inspiration. The last couple of years have been the opposite of that. Now is our chance to design things differently.

GamesBeat: This is a quote from William Wulf, who gave this speech on diversity to an engineering society. A lot of you may wonder: “We’re engineers. We’re programmers. We’re making games. Why do we need diversity? Why do we need to be particularly creative?” This quote is pretty on the mark about addressing that. He’s saying that the more diverse experience you bring to an engineering problem, the more likely your team is to come up with the elegant engineering solution.

Bernstein: That’s exactly it. A lot of these companies have all the firepower you need to bring diverse forces to the fold and make decisions that are better than they’ve made before. But their inability to listen to these voices, fully listen to them, give them a chance to speak—The suppression of these voices in a homogenous corporate culture keeps them from being expressed. That’s the downfall. The firepower is there. It’s just not being used.

GamesBeat: I didn’t come up with this myself. I interviewed the chief diversity officer at Intel, Roz Hudnell. She says that she goes into every meeting with her engineers taking this quote, in order to try to convince them, as Intel has seriously been doing in the past year, that they need to bring more diverse engineering talent into the company in order to ensure that the company stays creative and leads in the future. The world’s biggest chipmaker is on board with this particular notion.

Could you show us your exercise on unconscious bias?

Gaiser: This is a quick exercise. It takes a couple of minutes. If everybody could stand up and find your neighbor as a partner? We’ll do this too.

One of you is A and one of you is B. A’s job is to tell B the best idea you have, or something you care about, a cause, your husband, something you really care about. B, your job is to ignore or dismiss this person with every part of your being, body language and all. We’ll do this for about a minute. Does everybody have something they care about? Okay, go!

First of all, way to go, ignorers and dismissers. That was awesome!

Bernstein: Now we’ll flip. B, express your deepest, greatest idea, and A, completely dismiss it in any way possible. Criticize, criticize, criticize.

Gaiser: Next up, let’s switch roles again. A, you’re going to retell that same exciting idea. B, your job is to be fully present, to listen with every part of your being, and to respond to whatever it is they’re saying. We’ll do this for a minute. Go!

GamesBeat: I’m going to go out on a limb and say that listening is a good thing?

Gaiser: When I first did that exercise, I could remember how many times I’d been dismissed, ignored, or criticized completely. What I didn’t remember until I did the exercise was how many times I’d done that. It was a revelation. I was distracted. I was thinking about something else. Whatever. It just jarred me. Experientially, what I think all of us need to do is not just take an unconscious bias course or read a book. We need to take steps to transform ourselves one moment at a time.

In my time, girls were raised to defer to men and please men, only to end up in a leadership system that didn’t value us because they didn’t understand the complementary value we could bring. Boys, conversely, are taught to shut down their emotions at 13. No wonder we’re like ships in the night. It’s a human transformation that I believe needs to take place to genuinely welcome diverse people, perspectives, and products. Not just having quotas. It’s disingenuous. When people really feel valued, you feel that. That’s when they open up and the genius ideas, the crazy ideas come out.

Bernstein: By a show of hands, when this exercise happened, how many of you folks had that nagging feeling in the back of your head? “Wow, this has happened to me a lot.” And how many times, when you were being listened to and engaging and having that connection, that last part, how many of you felt you’ve also had that experience with somebody? How many of you have had that experience professionally? There you go.

The problem is, that experience, we relegate that to our personal lives. We want to be great listeners with husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends. But in a professional scenario we feel like we need to raise up a boundary between us and the rest of the world, and this culture has been created that’s not the most productive thing in the world.

GamesBeat: How does this unconscious bias link back into creativity?

Gaiser: Leading with creative intelligence and being supported by intellectual intelligence – the opposite of what we’re doing right now – fosters that open mind and open heart. That becomes the norm. The values of creativity are curiosity, kindness, open mind, open heart, resourcefulness, the courage to take risks.

Behavior is mimicked, too. I remember working at Microsoft for a very short time, a long time ago. They didn’t value those things at that time. I felt so unwelcome, because my skills weren’t being valued. It’s a step, a very big step, at eradicating unconscious bias. When someone leads like that – a lot of you raised your hands – there’s such a positive energy that it becomes contagious.

At Her Interactive, we co-created that culture. The positivity was so palpable that when people came, they would note it. When we had employees, a few of them, who weren’t the right fit—It’s as if everyone was so protective of this positive culture that it was obvious that person couldn’t operate within it. Behavior is contagious.

It also takes work on all of our parts to become more self-aware. The next time I dismiss someone, I’m going to think more about it, because I didn’t think I did it until I took part in this exercise. All of us need to change. It’s not just the leaders in higher positions. As leaders – and we all are – we can help guide them to behave more positively through the way we behave ourselves.

Bernstein: To Dean’s point, companies like Intel and Microsoft are certainly aware that this is an important issue they need to address. At least superficially, at this point – though there’s no big sea change yet – there’s been interest.

One thing about why diversity matters to creativity. What is creativity if not a collection of stories? What is my story? I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia back when it was the Soviet Union. I have a whole set of stories that is mine. That’s the story I can tell. Wouldn’t it be great if I could tap into my employees and their diverse backgrounds and their stories as well? From all those stories comes emotion. From that emotion comes creativity. From that creativity comes innovation. From that innovation comes revolutionary products, and thereby revolutionary revenue.

The point is, how can you tap into that diversity? Tell those stories. Give people the freedom that they require to be able to tell those stories in a non-threatening manner, in a way that lets them feel they have ownership of those stories and whatever product they’re building that’s going to be revolutionary.

Gaiser: That’s only going to happen if we have diverse leadership. You can’t tell my story. You can’t have my perspective. At Her Interactive, when we began with our first Nancy Drew game, the publishers told us, “We won’t let you into retail because girls are computer-phobic.” That’s when we realized that these leaders aren’t leading at all. They don’t have the courage to buck the status quo. It was clear that they had limited perspectives. They believed it. They were biased, unconsciously and not. It took a different perspective to create something for a huge population that was totally necessary.

That’s why diverse creators and designers need to be in key positions. The decision-making needs to be theirs, to broaden what we’re seeing. Right now it’s too homogenous. It’s not moving us forward.

Bernstein: I don’t quite agree with you. This is back to my original point. When you start seeing leaders who are not the white guys running these large companies, public companies, they’re still not changing the culture internally. Anyone can change the culture, whether you’re a woman, a man, a minority or not. You can tap into those stories because you realize the value that can be driven from it.

It requires an act of bravery no matter who you are. Tapping into those stories requires a bravery that’s irrelevant to where you come from. But it has to be there. Maybe this is more of a “yes, and” than “no,” but my disagreement is that you don’t have to have diverse leadership to actually make changes in your company to be diverse.

The jury is still out on a lot of folks that are the new diverse leaders out there. They may be walking the same road that’s been set up for them, or they may transform it with their leadership. But it comes down to them, to their ability to make changes within their organizations.

Gaiser: It’s harder for corporations to make this shift. The system is in place. It’s very structured. Microsoft is on that trail, and Intel as well. They’re doing it piece by piece and bringing in the people to do it. But the indies are leading the way. It’s exciting, because corporations can learn a lot from the type of behavior in leading for the collective. The original games, the ground-breaking games—Not all of them, of course, but many of them are coming from the indies. And indies don’t need big corporations to get financing now.

Bernstein: My old boss was Trip Hawkins, the founder of EA. He bought Digital Chocolate, which bought Sandlot in 2011. He worked for Steve Jobs back in the late ‘70s. Trip is a creative guy, but he’s more of a button-down type. He was a marketing guy at Apple, a business guy, back when they were just a handful of employees. Steve walked into his office and asked Trip, “So, you’ve never done LSD, have you?” Trip said, “No.” Steve just turns around and walks away.

Trip’s wondering what just happened. Is this another way Steve is trying to get into his head? But the point he was trying to make, if you’re tapping into some other reality—Steve Jobs, if you know the biography, he was all about that. Sometimes a bit too egomaniacal about that. But the point is, breaking open your mind and exposing yourself to a larger reality, whether or not you need drugs for that, that’s what he was trying to draw out of the folks who were working for him.

Then there’s the other side, being so creative that you can’t do anything. We’re not talking about that creativity. This is where leadership is important, because leadership is targeting—If you open this up, it’s like an oil well, a gusher. As leaders, we’re the ones responsible for fostering the best ideas and making them into real products. But unless we dig, we’re not going to find the well.

Question: We’ve heard a lot about creativity and what’s wrong with this industry. I sense a bit of a fix-it mentality. Here are the problems and here’s a solution. My question is, are there any companies doing this out there? Can we point to anyone and say, “We need more of that in the world?” And where do we go from here? We’ve talked about creativity and diversity in leadership, but what’s the next step?

Bernstein: I used to look at Popcap back in the day as a company that was very successful on its own merits. I modeled Sandlot after what they did. They did their game jams and came up with ideas that seemed ridiculous, but they made money and grew into what they’ve become.

Down the same path, the reason we built Tradewinds was to buck the status quo. We had this great idea. I used to play Tai-Pan when I was a kid. This was back when Bejeweled and match-threes were the most popular thing around. We just wanted to do it, badly.

Back in the day, the problem was that the ecosystem wasn’t very forgiving for new ideas. Part of the conversation is still about fixing those ecosystem problems. If you don’t fix it, there’s going to be a crash and it’ll fix itself. But that’s a separate topic. Certainly you see a lot of creativity on Steam, but it’s still very much relegated to the indies. In order for that level of innovation to express itself again, we need that same level of success from a fully creative company, like a Popcap.

GamesBeat: What about looking outside the industry, at a company like Pixar? Pixar has never had a dud, among any of its movies.

Gaiser: Google is all over. They do yoga. They do mindfulness and meditation. Part of getting back to being conscious — we’re all kind of half-conscious, which is why I talk about unconscious bias – is by raising consciousness. Meditation and yoga and the martial arts—There are many different ways to get back in the moment. That’s what being in your full senses actually is.

We were all in the moment as kids until we got taken out of it. That was the beginning of the end. We’ve been institutionalized. It’s about taking the steps to slow down our minds so we can access our innate wisdom – our perceiving, imagining, sensing, feeling. All of those things that are off-limits in corporations, because this intellectual intelligence is the master. That’s a definite step that Google is taking, and it’s working.

GamesBeat: In games, I’d point at Telltale Games as a company that’s done creative work time and time again.

Bernstein: Some of the most successful companies rotate designers. “Why don’t you try it? Why don’t we have a game jam where everybody tries their hand at design?” You get ideas that are weird and random and interesting, compared to teams that are structured in such a way that one person is the designer, they generate all the creative ideas, and all the other people just stay in line and follow that one person. It doesn’t work well. Companies that are structured in a more open manner, from a design perspective, tend to do better.

Question: There’s a lot of opportunity in the game industry right now. You can see that reflected in products and innovations and things that are happening out there. So what’s the big deal about the games business?

GamesBeat: We did go through this whole panel on the assumption that we had a problem or a crisis of some kind. Questioning that assumption is legitimate. We can still argue quite a bit about a lot of things in that vein. We can argue whether Lara Croft is a great woman character or not. That’ll last a few hours.

Bernstein: That’ll last a few years. But this is important. We did go into this with the assumption that things aren’t all that great. There’s Gamergate, for one thing. Just from an operations level, a financial level, you have this big dichotomy between the M&A market and the financing market being really rich, and—Go out there and talk to VCs and angels and private equity funds about investing in game companies. Their biggest issue is, innovation is not replicable. Companies come out with a hit, but they never do anything ever again. They’ve put themselves into a structure where they can’t replicate their model.

It doesn’t have to be like that. In fact, it wasn’t like that at a few times during the history of the industry. When distribution channels were more open to different types of games and different types of content—Right now, in mobile games, you have two shelves. Back when Megan and I were running our businesses, there were 20 or 30 shelves with 20 or 30 different products. You could innovate. You could do all kinds of different things you can’t do now. On Steam it’s becoming much more competitive. Steam caters to more and more specific genres, specific types of gamers, specific demographics. Then there’s the relegation to indie, where everything else falls.

That’s all my answer to that, then. That’s the crisis I’m seeing.

Question: What role do tools play in accessing greater creativity?

Gaiser: Part of the solution is to start creating systems or practices or tools to become more mindful, less unconscious. Yoga, mindfulness courses, all of these thing in addition to unconscious bias training. But it has to be a range. I believe creativity is our human operating system. We have re-learn how to tap into all of our senses again. Some people have tapped in to more creativity than others, but that doesn’t mean all of us don’t have the same access.

I was raised creatively. That’s why I led creatively. The other, I probably need some work on. We’re all in different places. But it’s really about human transformation. That’s something that will be implemented. It’s an interesting thought.

Bernstein: We’re seeing some interesting tools out there for facilitating enterprise-level collaboration. Technology doesn’t do anything without changing values, though. Maybe I’ll think of a way of using these tools that’s more traditional — the traditional waterfall model, go there and do this, that kind of thing. You need change from within to be able to maximize the power these tools and technologies can have in an organization.

But the tools are there. It’s all there. This consumerization of the enterprise, as we’ve talked about—These tools can make it easy to tap into the creative potential of the organization. But they need to be willing to do that.

Gaiser: It takes courage. But once that transformation has begun, it feels so good to be in that space. You want more. You don’t care if you have to practice a little and get better at being fully present with people. The reward is so great. Then, once you’re in, with all of your intelligence, you look at that tool and think, “That’s so boring. Let’s make it more exciting, more interesting.” Because then you’re thinking differently. You’re bucking the status quo. That’s what creative leadership is – to do something better, to make something better, to make something meaningful that helps people really connect.