Building Trust and Teamwork: How Werewolf Can Transform Your Leadership Approach

Is knowledge power?

Dimitry Davidoff thinks so. He created the game Mafia in 1987 when trying to teach high school students psychology while studying at Moscow State University.

Davidoff explains the game as the uniformed majority versus the informed minority. And the minority usually wins.

It is not surprising given he was born in Kamensk-Uralsky, where the Kyshtym nuclear disaster happened in 1957. The blast killed hundreds of people and is only second in size to Chernobyl which happened in 1986.

Not shockingly, this blast was covered up. The people in the surrounding areas were not initially told about the situation i.e. radioactive fallout. The whole Knowledge/Power thing.

In 1997, Andrew Plotkin tweaked The game slightly, and the name was changed to Werewolf. He thought being a werewolf was a better cultural reference for someone who looked harmless in the day and killed at night.

To play, you need at least seven people. At the start of the game, you are assigned either as a moderator, who oversees everything, a werewolf, or a villager. There are different variations of the game with different character types.

The game has two phases, a day and a night. At night, everyone closes their eyes and the moderator invites the werewolf to kill someone. Then the day happens and the moderator informs everyone who died overnight. They can no longer take part in the game.

The remaining players all discuss who they think the werewolf is while the werewolf tries to evade detection. Then everyone picks someone who they think is the werewolf and the person with the most votes dies.

Night happens again and the werewolf kills again. This happens until the werewolf kills everyone or is killed.

Knowledge Is Power

So how does this nearly 40-year-old Russian game make us a better leader?

Because the uninformed majority routinely loses to the informed minority.

Simply put, give your team all the information they need to do their job.

Holding back information so you feel powerful limits your team’s awareness of what they are trying to do and more importantly why they are trying to do it.

If you give a team member a ridiculous request that makes no sense but comes from your boss, tell them that. They can understand that you are just doing what you are told, plus they know it needs to be done fast and well.

This doesn’t undermine your boss but helps your team to understand why they are doing something they don’t understand the value. Sometimes we do things for no real value but to appease a stakeholder. That is ok. But it’s more OK when your team knows about it.

Knowledge is Autonomy

If you can provide your team with not just the what, but the why of what you are doing, then they can work independently.

They can, because they are well trained, and because they are adults, act independently of you with you safe in the knowledge that if things come up they will come to you for clarification.

Even better they will explain where they think the issue is given they understand why they are doing what they are doing.

Give them all the knowledge and information they need and then maybe a little more than needed just in case, so you can go and solve some more interesting problems further upstream.