Will You Be Able to Compete with Fortnite?

Anyone with a teenager probably knows about the video game Fortnite—the last-man-standing shooting contest that has 200 million registered players. The game is reshaping how teens spend their time and how they communicate. A recent Wall Street Journal article outlines both sides of the story—is this just the latest fad to consume the attention of teenagers or an addictive, anti-social, violent reprogramming of an entire generation?

If the extreme is true, consider the implication of Fortnite on your future employees, members and customers.

Like many video games and other online platforms, Fortnite uses machine learning to mine and analyze user behavior. It identifies what players love the most and what drives players to quit. Equipped with this insight, the game designers use the constant stream of data and AI to amplify player engagement.

The game matches what stimulates the player’s brain and in many ways reprograms the player much like other addictive agents (opioids, alcohol, and sugar, for example).

So the question is, once these 200 million teens enter the workforce 10 years from now, how will YOU engage them as employees, members, and customers?

Don’t count on the school system to do the work for you. The academic community doesn’t have the answer, and you will be on the hook to recruit, hire, and acquire them in new ways.

Ten years may seem like an eternity but many of your current employees, teammates and members are dialed in to this new environment of stimulation, engagement, and focused individual behavior.

What can you do? For starters, think about how you can create engagement with your team and members the old-fashioned way—by asking questions, listening, making your internal meetings and live events more open and authentic, and using data and analytics to institutionalize your memory and customize your value—one person at a time.

As always, it’s easier said than done. But we have to start somewhere.

An actual fortnight is two weeks’ time. What’s the one thing you can do these next two weeks to create more engagement with the people that matter?