How to get what's available – game theory and governing dynamics

Table of Contents

Refresh Conference 2023 - This article is part of a series.

Part 1: Refresh Conference 2023 – showing meaning, not effort

Part 2: How the UX maturity model drives strategic decision-making

Part 3: Redesign your leadership using McKinsey's 7-S framework

Part 4: This Article

Part 5: How I used the VRIO framework to focus my design team

I took over a team of four. In the organization, design was understood as visual treatment. Where we actually fit in the product development value chain – and what we were genuinely worth – was unclear to most, and sometimes to us.

I was looking for ways to think about this strategically – how to change what design meant in the organization. We were still talked about as a visual beauty treatment service, not as business value drivers. Our position in the product development process was confusing to stakeholders, to product teams, and sometimes to my own team.

A thread on Reddit about stakeholder strategy mentioned game theory. Someone described how the structure of the questions – players, rules, resources, outcomes – had helped them rethink the politics in their organization. I recognized the situation immediately.

I knew I had a weaker position. I decided to make two bets: rising production first – clarify the design process using the double diamond framework, prioritize ruthlessly, generate small wins. Integration second – get designers into product development processes where the real decisions were being made. Game theory gave me the map for navigating what stood between me and both of those goals.

A Beautiful Mind - Bar Scene John Nash’s Equilibrium Game Theory¹

Principles

Game theory is a branch of mathematics that studies decision-making when two or more “players” have conflicting interests. It analyzes strategic interactions between rational decision-makers in various fields, like economics, political science, and biology. Game theory provides a framework for understanding how people will make choices when trying to achieve their goals. It helps to predict the outcome of actions based on assumptions about other people’s behavior.

Charlie Munger emphasized the importance of combining numbers and psychology in business. Numbers provide precision; psychology deals with the unpredictable nature of human behavior.² Game theory holds both at once.

A dominant strategy is one that produces the best outcome regardless of what the other players do. Identifying yours changes how you prioritize.

Questions

Who are the players in the game?

My map had three main players beyond the UX team itself. CPOs and Product Owners were the primary long-term stakeholders – they controlled what got built and in what sequence, and they wanted products that delivered measurable value. Delivery Team Leads made product teams work on agreed tasks; for UX designers embedded in product teams, they were critical partners who needed to understand exactly how UX fit into daily delivery. Senior management measured by numbers: active customers, profit, reputation, and customer satisfaction. For them, the UX team needed to be legible in those terms – or invisible.

What are the rules of the game?

With whom can I interact directly? Where do I need to use “messengers”?
How are decisions being made, and who has the final say?
What are the processes and schedules for gaining valuables?
What is the de jure and de facto power structure?

One specific rule revealed a critical gap: product owners could not request UX team involvement through JIRA – they had to make agreements through informal channels. The de jure process said UX was part of product development. The de facto reality: access required a direct relationship.

What does each player value, and what is their motivation?

Senior management moved on numbers – active customers, contracts signed, customer satisfaction scores. Every UX outcome needed to connect to one of those dimensions to register. CPOs and POs wanted products that succeeded and looked credible. Understanding this meant translating UX work into each player’s language.

Design leadership insights in your inbox

Bi-weekly from my practice. Quarterly exclusives from my practice.

What resources are available?

Financial, intellectual, power, and relationships are the primary business-driving resources. I had my team with their skills, capabilities, and available time. Also, I controlled their priorities and allocations. Most of my team’s competencies were unknown and not valued by others.

My manager owned the budget and had the final say. My stakeholders had projects with additional budgets, so they had collective power over my team.

The VRIO analysis I had done earlier clarified the picture precisely. The UX team’s genuine strengths – valuable, rare, and hard to imitate – were the user research process, the design system, the Service Design Foundation training, and accumulated customer knowledge. Our weaknesses were equally clear: we were not tracking metrics, project prioritization was informal, and there was no systematic way for product teams to involve us. One asset didn’t appear on any formal list: the UX team had a reputation. Product teams that had worked with us wanted to continue. That was a resource worth protecting and building on.

What are possible outcomes?

By knowing players’ motivations and available moves, we could define the range of outcomes – what is available.

The structure helped me plan in years, not quarters. 2022 was for stabilizing the team and making it sustainable. 2023 for structuring UX work within the team and organization. 2024 for refining what worked. 2025 for full integration into product development processes.

The dominant strategy – the one that produced the best outcome regardless of individual stakeholder decisions – was embedding UX through education. Product teams that went through Service Design Foundation training consistently became advocates. That dynamic didn’t depend on any single manager’s support. Production went up. Small wins started to come in. Position followed.

Equilibrium

How are reasonable parties acting to attain the goals in direct competition? How do we exit the zero-sum scenario and get to the equilibrium?

By combining each player’s motivations, we work together for the common good without threatening other’s goals. This is what John Nash demonstrates in the bar scene from “A Beautiful Mind” – the governing dynamics that give the film its name. The only way to act rationally is to disclose interests, motivations, and rules – if possible. In my scenario, I had to make explicitly clear to my stakeholders what the UX team possessed and had to offer for the benefit of the organization.

In practice, making the UX team’s value explicit required more than explaining it. The Service Design Foundation training became the primary vehicle. It gave product teams a firsthand experience of what UX work actually involved. Once colleagues understood through doing, the conversation about value became much simpler.

The goal was never to win against anyone. It was to reach a position where the UX team’s contribution was visible, valued, and no longer confused with visual decoration. What followed from that position – the UX maturity evaluation, the McKinsey 7-S analysis, the VRIO work – is documented in the rest of this series.

The game board keeps changing. The questions stay the same.

Originally published February 2024. Substantially rewritten June 2026 – the SEB strategy context, the player map, the JIRA gap example, and the governing dynamics concept were not in the first version.