While a good corporate game must be enjoyable and highly engaging, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the gameplay is primarily a vehicle for driving critical business insights during the debrief – says Games4Biz Managing Director PAWEŁ CHABROS
In conversation with RAFAŁ GAWROŃSKI – HR automation expert at Symfonia
RAFAŁ GAWROŃSKI: Hello, this is HR 3.0, and I’m Rafał. I’m joined today by Paweł Chabros, Managing Director of Games4Biz. Hello, Paweł.
PAWEŁ CHABROS: Hello, Rafał.
Thank you for accepting the invitation to our HR 3.0 series “What’s happening in HR?”
– Thank you for having me.
My pleasure! I’m excited to discuss a somewhat unconventional topic with you today. In several of our recent surveys, we noticed a growing interest in competency-building games. From our perspective, these aren’t just tools to fill time or keep people busy at team-building retreats. They actually drive the deeper, incredible outcomes that happen during these gatherings. To start, could you tell us a bit about your experience so far? We touched on it briefly before we started recording, and it’s a fascinating story. After that, we’ll dive straight into how these games actually build competencies.
– Sure. I actually envisioned these business games as a fresh alternative—or a way to enrich—traditional tools like training workshops. Games provide a completely different and much deeper experience. People don’t just absorb information; they learn through firsthand experience, tasting both success and failure. We all know we learn best from our own mistakes, and games allow you to experience all the real emotions that go with them. That is why so many clients tell us that these games are such an innovative, refreshing, and interesting alternative to standard development methods.
Spot on. But let’s face it—when people hear the word ‘games,’ they usually think of fun, entertainment, and downtime. When you started building these innovative solutions years ago, did you know you’d have to push back against that bias? Were you prepared for clients who initially see it as just a fun team-building activity, completely missing the serious business impact that comes afterward?
– I definitely expected it, but I honestly see it as a totally natural reaction. Let’s face it, as adults, we love to play and we love to learn through play. We all have that inner child that comes out when the timing is right, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem starts when clients look at business games and see only entertainment. To me, that’s a huge oversimplification. Don’t get me wrong: a great training game should be fun and immersive. But the play is ultimately a pretext for the most important part: drawing profound business conclusions afterward so that real learning actually happens. This is exactly what David Kolb mapped out years ago with his experiential learning model, which is now a staple in top organizations. Games let people live through the wins, the losses, and all the raw emotions. They get to see the ripple effects of their decisions firsthand, but with one massive advantage—even if they completely derail the mission, there are zero financial consequences because everything happens safely inside the training room.
Those are fantastic examples. I completely agree that this is a great foundation for building modern, effective training strategies in any company. But let’s double down on that friction you mentioned—the fact that people see the word ‘game’ and think ‘playtime.’When you sit down with corporate decision-makers, how do you break through objections like: ‘We’re too busy for this,’ ‘We don’t have the budget,’ or ‘We are here to work, not to play around’? I’m sure you hear these all the time. What do you actually say to turn those skeptics into believers?
– Unfortunately, a lot of clients still lump business games into the ‘cost’ bucket. They see them the same way they see a company dinner or a fun team trip. Sure, those things matter, they make people happy in the moment, but they only offer short-term satisfaction. They don’t drive real changes in behavior, and they definitely don’t build new skills.A great corporate game is completely different—it’s a direct investment in your people. Ironically, this investment actually reduces costs down the road because it teaches employees to work smarter, spot savings, and hunt for revenue opportunities. Once you stop looking at it as an expense and start seeing it as an investment, the whole conversation changes. In today’s hyper-competitive market, the real question becomes: can you actually afford not to invest in your team’s development? If you walk away from it, you’re just leaving money on the table.
Paweł, I know that for years you’ve been running traditional competency workshops using all the classic tools. So, if you had to give a straight answer to a business owner or an HR director: which method gets better results, faster? From an employer’s perspective, which approach is genuinely more effective?
– Well, if you put corporate games and traditional workshops side by side, I’d put my money on games every single time—especially since companies have less and less time to spare these days. And here’s why: in a very short amount of time, with zero fluff, no boring theoretical intros, and no endless PowerPoint definitions, participants are thrown straight into the deep end.They get right into the experience. Sure, they make mistakes, but that’s the point—who doesn’t? They learn incredibly fast by figuring out what went wrong, but they also get a massive wave of satisfaction from their wins. As a result, they accomplish way more in a short game than they ever would sitting through a workshop where the first half is just listening to theory. Let me give you an analogy here. Do you play tennis?
I used to play quite a lot, actually.
– Perfect, then you’ll get this instantly. Imagine a guy who desperately wants to learn tennis, but decides to master the theory first. He reads book after book. He watches endless YouTube videos on techniques, drills, and strategies. He even has sit-down consultations with a tennis pro. After months of prepping, he’s bursting with enthusiasm, steps onto the court, and… it’s a disaster. He can’t time the ball at all. When he actually makes contact, it either smashes into the net or flies off into deep space.But look at the alternative: what if he had skipped that whole theoretical mountain, grabbed a racket on day one, and just hit the court with a coach? Yes, he’d make a ton of mistakes at the beginning—who wouldn’t? But he’d be correcting his swing after every single miss, and every good shot would give him a massive boost of motivation. Wouldn’t he become a better player way faster?
Absolutely!
– And that is exactly how corporate games work. By stripping away all the unnecessary theoretical fluff, we throw participants straight into the experience. As a result, the whole learning process becomes way faster and much more effective.
You’ve completely sold me on this, I have to admit. What I love about your tennis analogy is that it makes it so easy to visualize how to set goals, track progress, and map out a realistic timeline for each stage.And since you know how obsessed I am with HR automation, my brain is already connecting the dots. We can actually combine your experiential games with modern HR software. Instead of keeping this competency development offline, we can plug it into a system. We can monitor progress, track the skills that surface during the training, and immediately feed that data into succession planning. It becomes a data-driven blueprint for future leadership.Looking at your client portfolio, who stands to gain the most from this? Small and medium businesses, or giant corporations? You’ve worked with both ends of the spectrum—do you find that this methodology shines brighter in large enterprises, or does it deliver a bigger punch in smaller teams?
– In my experience, business games work wonders in absolutely any organization, no matter the industry, size, or corporate culture. They are completely universal. We’ve deployed them in everything from tiny family businesses with just a dozen employees to massive multinational corporations with offices all over the globe.But here’s the golden rule: a good business game is only as good as its wrap-up—or what I like to call a valuable debrief. This moderated discussion at the end of the game is where the magic happens. We take all the crazy symbols from the game and translate them directly into the participants’ actual workplace reality. That’s when the lightbulb goes off, they see why they put so much effort into the game, and they walk away with profound conclusions. That is where the actual learning clicks, because a great game always has those real-world business analogies baked right into it.
Exactly. I’ve really enjoyed this, Paweł. Honestly, I found this topic absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really hope this isn’t our last meeting, but rather the first of many, and I’m looking forward to collaborating with you again in the future. And to everyone watching or listening, make sure to tune in to the next episodes of our HR 3.0 series, ‘What’s happening in HR?’ Thanks for being here, and see you soon!
