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Hello and welcome back to Wonder Tour.

We are continuing our series on game theory.

And this week's episodes, we are focusing on the TV situation comedy, Brooklyn Nine-Nine,
focused on a group of law enforcement, quote unquote, officers, anchored by Andy Samberg

and Andre Brauer.

It's pretty fabulous.

This was my first encounter with Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

And we're going to start off this episode.

We're looking at season one, episode six.

the first of the Halloween heist episodes, So we're gonna jump right in with a tough
question about leadership in the course of this Halloween heist inside the office.

Drew, why does Holt put up with this nonsense?

Like, why does he even indulge this crazy shenanigans inside their office on a day when
they maybe probably should be doing more work?

So set us up, what's going on here?

First off, Brian, I got to say nine nine as a fan of Brooklyn Nine Nine.

Yeah, that's a classic Jake Peralta, thing that he says in the show.

But either way, as a big fan, I thought about these sort of things a lot.

And yeah, so number one, Holt is this combination of a caring and compassionate leader,
but he's also incredibly structured.

process driven.

he's absolutely a guardian type of a persona.

He is interested in reducing risk and seeing the world through a lens of structures and
systems So it's a great question.

Why in the world would somebody like this allow for this

crazy elaborate game that is going to result in ceiling tiles falling out and him having
to replace those.

There's a fire in the trash can in the middle of the office.

And by the way, this is only episode one of the heist episodes.

And there's going to be many, many more.

And they get more and more elaborate to the point where at some points Holt does have to
say, hey, we can't we can't do that.

Okay, so let's see this up.

The way this happens, for those of you who haven't watched this episode as recently as I
have, is that they're sitting around the police precinct and they're complaining about how

stupid the criminals are.

the Jake character is like, well, I would be a brilliant criminal.

Like I would be able to do much better than that.

And the police chief says, no, I would catch you in like 30 seconds.

You're an idiot.

And so I said, all right, I challenge you.

What's your most valuable possession?

I will steal it from you before the shift is over.

And it turns out to be the chief's medal of valor, which is hanging on the wall in his
office.

And so this is the setup.

with this context, with this cast of characters, with this very by the book, direct
unsmiling, but you know, a fairly effective leader character in, in Jeep Hull.

Why is he putting up with this?

Like what, what, do you think's going on in his head here?

Well, we're in a series on game theory and we're gonna have, of course, since it's
WonderTour a little bit of a weird game theory application here.

And the application that I see is he puts up with it because he's actually just playing
into the game in the first place.

And sometimes there's a benefit to playing into the game that's right in front of you.

We often look at these games and think, well, how do I win?

And how am I going to get one over on my opponent?

How do I leverage math and forecast out exactly the outcome that I want to see in this
situation?

But this is what I love about Holt's leadership style here.

He sees and he kind of zooms out a bit and he thinks, huh, there's a bigger opportunity
here.

And he doesn't say this, you know, we're reading into his character based on what we know
from other episodes, but it's an opportunity for him to both do something he enjoys, which

is potentially beating Peralta at something.

but also it's an opportunity for the team to grow, for the team to become more
collaborative, for Peralta to get in here and come up with innovative ideas on how to

solve a problem.

And so he's really setting up, Brian, what we talk about here on Wonder Tour, one of our
leadership tools that we have access to is a dojo, Where you kind of build this

environment for the team where it's more or less safe to fail.

If they fail, then they, you know, they fall on the floor.

They might bounce right back up.

Well, in Peralta's situation, I guess he doesn't have to go to the hospital after he falls
out of the ceiling tiles and onto the floor.

So that's his version of bouncing back up off the floor.

But Brian, isn't it because Holt is able to take a step back and realize that actually by
playing into this game that Peralta is trying to bait him into.

he is the one who stands to gain the most out of the overall situation because you can
build a stronger team and he can really accomplish his overall mission while Peralta, his

only objective here is just to prove that he's smart.

so Peralta's version of winning is I am going to get the captain to say out loud in front
of the team that I'm a great detective and a genius, and also I'm going to get him to do

my paperwork for me, right?

That's his version of winning.

And his version of losing is that he has to do all the captain's paperwork

those stakes are enough to motivate him to do apparently some really crazy stuff.

There's, you know, there's pigeons in the air vents and there's, people rappelling from
the ceiling and he's climbing up the wall of the building with a blowtorch.

it's ridiculous.

But he's intrinsically just motivated by playing the game and by proving that he's smart,
which is a recurring theme that we'll come back to.

Like he kind of wants to be a hero.

But you're right for the watching this, like the the boss's version of playing the game is

This is a relatively low stakes.

Like if he loses, he might have to do some paperwork and he might have to say nice about
somebody, say something nice about his team member that defeated him in this trickery,

right?

If he wins, then he gets to, you know, appear smart and say that he won.

But even if he loses, he kind of wins because it means that his team got to do a thing
together that was kind of fun for them and they got to be super creative in solving a

problem with non-obvious solutions.

right?

And you get some camaraderie and then he gets to be magnanimous as a leader and say, Oh,
you're right.

You were really smart.

You're, you're a great detective and a genius.

in return the pay office, he has to do some extra paperwork, which we find out in later
episodes is actually something he likes to do anyway.

So

from his perspective because he just zooms out, which is the expectation of the leader,
right?

Holt is a leader in this situation and the team members are playing more of the hero.

And at other times in the show, Holt will be more of a hero himself.

But it's cool to see that the game, as we think about game theory and these different game
scenarios that we're going to look at, the game doesn't always have to be about winning in

this instance.

Definitely can be fun because a lot of times competition we think of as competition is
very difficult and challenging and as a result, you know, we'll just have to grind it out

to get the edge.

But in this situation, no, we can use game theory to create joy as well.

Right.

The word game to me doesn't say suffering, right?

The word game says like, cool.

I'm going to try to figure out the complicated rules and I'm going to try to understand
how to win this thing.

Right.

But so, so you brought in the dojo, We, we coined that term as one of our leadership
tools, right?

At the dojo based on the matrix movies, especially the first one where the Morpheus
character, the

mentor leadership character is creating this curated safe environment for team members to
learn how to do things that are outside of their current skillset where they, you know,

they, they fail soft, right?

If you fall off the building, you bounce off the incredibly soft asphalt in the, in the
road.

but the dojo is a place to learn how to do a thing.

But it's also not just, like you said, it's not just grinding.

Like it's super fun.

Like they're getting to be ninjas and they're kicking each other and they're jumping off
of buildings and they're, you know, they're, they're, they're flexing their wings.

And what we see even in the matrix is like when they're in the dojo, everybody else flocks
to the screen and wants to watch what's happening.

Like, Morpheus is like Neo is going to be awesome.

Like there's this sense that everybody's super engaged in the game.

Everybody's super engaged in the meta.

Everybody's super engaged in the like, where is this going and who's going to be good or
whatever.

Like we love games.

We love competitions.

love trickery.

love cleverness.

like you said, there's some great leadership examples here where indulging this ridiculous
thing, right?

In the context of the heist, right?

Is not just about winning for the leader.

For the leader, it's about my team is going to do a bunch of things that they wouldn't
have done otherwise.

They're going to develop relationships.

They're going to flex non-obvious skills.

they're gonna have some fun in the context of work.

you know, if they just like, let's start a Pokemon tournament, like, that's not valuable.

Like that's not, you wouldn't indulge that as a leader.

But if it's skills that might turn out to be relevant, if it's teams, you know, team
building relationships that might turn out to be relevant in the context of the job, it's

totally worthwhile.

Mm-hmm.

All right, Brian, so let's hit the intro.

Hi, I'm Brian Nutwell And we are on a journey to lead wisely, to become better leaders by
touring fantastic worlds and inspiring lore by going on this WonderTour

we connect leadership concepts to story contexts because it sticks to our brains better.

You can find out more at wondertourpodcast.com or on YouTube by searching Lead Wisely.

Also on wondertourpodcast.com, have fabulous merch, which Drew is modeling here in the
hoodie version.

And I'm in the more fitted t-shirt model, but you too could be walking around the streets
representing your love and skill in magnanimous leadership.

So game theory, bringing it back to our series where we've been talking about ways to
approach challenges, where you're gathering information, where you're strategically

deciding what to display.

know, in our Mission Impossible episodes, we talked about learning who to trust.

Does that element come into play here?

this episode, I mean, it's a little bit over the top in terms of learning about trust,
right?

Because one of things that we didn't talk about in our first episode in the Game Theory
series was bluffing.

And of course, bluffing is involved in almost all of Game Theory.

In fact, the most common application of Game Theory, would say, in 2025 is probably poker.

That's where a lot of people learn about the different Game Theory models because most of
them can be applied to poker.

But the idea of

Trust and lack of trust.

It comes into play here to an extent, but the cool thing about this episode is because
everybody's kind of comrades in the first place, the level of trust or distrust only goes

to a certain threshold, In the end, outside of the game, they all have a level of trust
for each other.

Inside of the game, they're kind of manufacturing some distrust, which is great.

And that distrust is what creates the plot conflict.

It's what allows us to build up towards the MacGuffin, the Medal of Valor, and Jake having
some non-traditional way to get to the Medal of Valor, and of course pulling one over on

hold at the last minute.

I wanna talk about Holt setting up the dojo, setting up the challenge, and then I want you
to get us into the mountaintop of like what shows us the way this game is approached here,

So, in this case, the challenge is to steal the MacGuffin, the metal dower which is
hanging on the chief's office, which, you know, as a base level challenge, isn't

necessarily that hard.

We get a little bit of an escalation partway through the episode.

He's like, all right, you're really going to play this silly game.

this is me.

I'm taking the medal of valor off the wall and I'm putting it in the safe, which I'm
locking with an electronic code.

And then I'm going to close the door in my cabinet and I'm going to lock the cabinet and
then I'm taking the key and I'm going to put it on my belt.

Right.

And it's always with me personally.

So.

This is clearly curating the dojo.

Like here's your challenge.

You've got this three level challenge.

You've got the key, you've got the lock, you've got the, you know, and then you've got the
electronic safe, key, key pad that you've got to get into in order to get to this thing.

And those are all inside of my office, which you need to have some plausible reason to be
in as well.

Plausible or implausible, I guess, in this context.

So, so that's the challenge, there isn't a fixed solution.

This isn't like, you just have to understand the way that I've designed for you to solve
this problem.

That's not actually how the dojo works.

The dojo is just a set of rules and it's your job to improvise in that context.

so what are you going to do?

So in that mountaintop moment where, like you said, Holt comes in and he immediately just
kind of lays out his hand and he's like, this is what I'm going to do.

Like you can try to stop me.

Let's analyze that a little bit.

Why does Holt take this approach in the situation?

So it can be tempting when you're in a game, especially when there's hidden information or
the opportunity to bluff and stuff like that.

for us to think like in every interaction, I have to get the upper hand on somebody else.

And that temptation is actually going to lose you the game.

You don't in every interaction in game theory need to get the upper hand, right?

There's ulterior motives, there's alternative win conditions and in, go ahead.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you're playing chess, you don't need to take a piece on every move.

Like that's not the best way to win a game of chess, right?

If you're playing poker, you don't play like, I've got a pair right at the beginning.

I'm going to throw those.

Like you don't immediately go for like, let's close out this hand.

You're like, I've got a really great hand.

Let me see how much other betting I can get people to do.

Yeah, so you got to play the game, right?

And sometimes you play the game even when you're not holding the best cards, you just sit
and play.

this is one in business that happens too often is wanting to win in every meeting, wanting
to show value in every meeting.

Like, no, no, no, I got to get my slides on the screen so that people can see that I'm
creating value here and that my ideas are actually useful for the situation where

sometimes it's like, listen,

I don't care if the party that you're competing with or the party that you're trying to
convince of something, maybe it's like a collaborative competition, is bluffing right now.

You don't always have to make a play.

Sometimes the right move is just to call.

And in poker terms, right?

You just call.

I'm not gonna raise the ante.

We're just gonna continue to play the game.

And I might actually lose this hand.

That's okay.

But that's what Andre Blahler does in this situation.

It's brilliant.

He's just like, okay, well, I'm just going to call.

So here's what I'm doing and I'm playing into your game Peralta and let's see how you
handle this.

And as a mentor or as a leader, that's oftentimes what serving the team actually looks
like.

Yeah, and so importantly, like this first conversation is happening while Holt is sitting
in his office and Jake is like hiding in the ceiling tiles above his office.

He's like, Jake, are you in my ceiling?

Like, you know, and this is one of several points during the process where the captain
could easily have said like, we're done.

this is ridiculous.

Go do your job, right?

He could easily just call time on the whole thing.

He could have not cooperated with the whole plan, And he doesn't, he leans into it.

He's like, okay.

It's ridiculous, but you're putting some energy into it.

You might learn something.

So all right, fine.

I'm going to raise the stakes and I'm going see what you do.

Right.

And so he plays along with it and he makes it a little bit more interesting and he makes
it a little bit more challenging.

And then he wants to see what happens next.

And he does this several times during the episode.

And, it's a great episode in the sense that it looks like Jake is being incompetent and
caught every time.

And then he has the big twist reveal at the end, like, this was all part of my grand nine
dimensional wizard chess master plan to actually get.

You know,

mean, there's nothing better than when that happens, Brian, in real life.

I had a good situation like that with a guy that I'm mentoring the other day where he was
explaining to me how he was approaching a situation.

And, you know, I just kind of was letting him go on, letting him go on, letting him go on.

And then suddenly he like took it a step further, which he was applying something that we
had talked about and he was learning in the past.

and then he had taken it a full step further and applied it and was like, I was wondering
like, if this would even work.

And was like, whoa, that is the point of the dojo is that you take what we learned in one
small scenario and you then say, well, what if I could apply this to this other scenario

over here?

And that's what's exciting.

And you only get that if you're willing to sit in and play the game sometimes rather than.

scold somebody or beat them over the head with this is the right way to do it.

This is the skillful way to do it.

Right.

Absolutely.

No.

this is, this is what I love about this Dojo ideas is because it takes something that
would be, you know, would be just, would be just learning or just training or just

following the rules or whatever.

And if you can gamify it, if you can make it fun, if you can make it collaborative, you
get much better results than you would have if you try to predetermine the outcomes.

Right.

So we, you know, if, know, there's, if you think about like inside of a company, if you
have a suggestion box, like

write down your idea about how the company should be better and put it in this box and
then we'll read through them and sometime in the next six months we'll pick one that we

like and we'll call you back.

Like that's not a lot of fun, right?

Like you might get some good ideas that way, but nobody's really gonna go the extra mile.

Nobody's really gonna learn anything new by writing down their complaints about the
company and putting it a box, But if you do a challenge,

If you do a, here's our six weeks sprint to figure out a way to make some piece of our
company work better.

And here's a specific challenge.

Like here's the area that we're really worried about.

Here's the problem.

We don't know the answer.

Everybody has six weeks to figure it out, form your own teams.

Here's the document format.

You got to propose it in at the end, or here's the way you have to demonstrate it.

Here's what you're going to get.

If you win, exactly what Holt does.

We're going to stand up in front of the whole team.

going to say, this person is a genius.

This person is really smart and did a cool thing and everybody gets to admire them.

Like.

That's enough I've done this.

And you put these projects, you you put these opportunities out there where the challenge
and you could just give people permission to spend a little bit of time on it.

And you get self-organizing teams of people that didn't necessarily work together, but
have similar interests.

You get ideas that you never would have come up with that people spend all sorts of extra
time on because they get excited about.

You get them competitive, motivated against each other and like, my presentation has to be
better than the other one.

And I've got to prove more benefit.

and the only thing you have to do at the end is stand up and say, Hey, these people were
smart and maybe go do some paperwork to try to help that idea to make your company better.

Actually a real thing.

Like this is amazing.

It's a hundred percent works.

the dojo is an incredibly powerful model to get people to put kind of personal creativity
in and into an organizational context by just not telling them exactly what to do.

Like giving them the challenge and see what happens.

Yeah.

And I think there's a good example and a bad example of how to do this.

And I've definitely done both.

I've seen people who are really good at creating dojos.

So I'll give first, maybe the bad example of how to build a dojo.

So when I was younger, I would have co-ops that would come into the company and I would,
go out and hire the co-ops myself.

And so I would pick people exclusively.

who had high potential, I would often end up hiring co-ops who were freshmen or sophomores
because it was easier to find high potential people who were willing to come work with us,

who had a little bit less experience, but they had a really good mindset.

And so the reason that this all sounds okay, right?

Maybe.

But what didn't work out was that I was not very good at curating the dojo for these
people.

And the common thread in their success was if I got the dojo right or not.

They were all perfectly capable.

These were all high performers.

But if they had a great co-op and if they wanted to come back, it pretty much hinged on
did the problem that I asked them to solve allow them enough lateral movement that they

could learn and grow and collaborate and come up with their own ideas, but not so much.

lateral movement that they just got lost in all of it because they were only a freshman in
college and they were struggling to be able to figure out what to do with the information

that I was giving them.

And so I had some examples of co-ops where they did an awesome, awesome work and they came
back with these beautiful dashboards that explained the business situation and how to

avoid the bad condition and incentivize the good condition and how to track it over time
using measures and stuff like that.

Awesome.

And there were other times

where they just came back with a pile of code and they were like, and this is how I've
tried to solve this problem, but here's all the reasons I can't actually solve this

problem.

Yeah, no, I love that.

there is an art to constraining the problem that you give somebody to solve, right?

And that's actually not limited to the dojo, right?

That's basically any challenge, people are most effective when they have a problem that is
slightly too large for their current skill set, but attainable and they have enough

freedom to maneuver around the edges that they can sort of figure out how to get there.

And if it's too rigid or too large or too small.

there'll be some combination of bored or frustrated and not actually getting anything
done.

Yeah.

And our friend, Shubho Bhattacharya, Calling Shubho out because we love Shubho.

Shubho is the master of the dojo.

And I think a lot of what I've learned of the dojo, what Derrick learned, and perhaps even
what you learned of the dojo has come from Shubho because he knows and he has taught me

like what you have to do is really consider what this person's learning journey is.

Consider first what they want it to be.

Then, how that can align with company's goals, how that can, you you can

relay your wisdom as the mentor, as the manager, whatever in the situation.

And then you have to, like you said, Brian, you just set up progressively larger and
larger problems for them to solve.

And as the creator of the dojo, you are a curator of problems, right?

You want to curate the problem to be of the right scope and type to meet them at the place
that they're at right now.

Right.

And that's amazing.

And I think that's one of the key leadership things we want to look for, right?

Is the, are a curator of problems.

If you're a curator of solutions, then you're the hero.

You're telling everybody how to do things and they just have to do it your way.

And there are some work situations where that's appropriate, right?

If you're working on the production line and your job is to do the same exact thing every
45 seconds all day long and never mess it up, like then the solution is known.

Like that's not a problem solving challenge.

That is an execution challenge.

Right.

But there are categories of things that require leadership where really the primary job of
the leader is to just define what is the size and shape of the problem that I need you to

be working on solving right now.

Right.

And maybe, maybe it's a competition.

You give several people to it.

Maybe there's a team, maybe, but appropriately scoping the problems is, is a really hard
challenge, but is also one of the key unlocks for success.

don't over constrain the solution, just constrain the problem.

Man, once again, a great conversation about a leadership tool in the dojo and how we can
use that to kind of cultivate joy of playing games, how we as leaders need to be able to

step into the game when the person that you're leading wants you to, right?

When it's your job to, even if that means you're gonna lose the game sometimes, to be able
to see the bigger picture that it's about development for this person, not about me

getting to say that I won at the end.

Right.

And like you said, the game framework gives you the opportunity to have it be fun.

Gives you permission to make something worthwhile, also something enjoyable.

And that's a really cool framing too.

So, love it.

All right.

Well, I think that's all for this week.

We are going to come back next week with another episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

This time we are going to be season five, episode 14, the box and interrogation scene,
which is a classic law enforcement framework that is handled very differently in the

Brooklyn Nine-Nine environment.

So looking forward to that.

In the meantime, just remember as always, character is destiny.