The coming revolution in competence development: Using serious games to improve cross-cultural skills

Abstract

Approaches to competence development have tended to focus on training to reach a required level of performance in simple and reproducible contexts, rather than in the more complex and hard-to-replicate contexts that characterize real-world projects, especially projects that involve people from other cultures. This paper explores how the Serious Games approach can be exploited to create skills in dealing with cross-cultural issues in project management. The degree of difference this can make to real-world performance is so dramatic that managers who have experienced it are seeing it not as a way to add Incremental Improvements to TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) but as more of a Radical Innovation - a revolutionary change. Some of the main skills required in project management are reviewed, and different models of cross-cultural analysis applied to understand how the challenges of managing projects are increased by cultural issues. Our testbed for this is an EU project TARGET that is developing the next generation TEL approach. We describe its approach and look at how the TARGET serious game can be designed to achieve enhanced cross-cultural skills in users. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.