What Ninja Tag taught me about technology strategy

How a kids’ obstacle game revealed a common failure in enterprise technology decision-making.

During the recent half term I took the kids to an indoor game I’d never seen before. Ninja Tag Action is a mixture of ninja‑themed obstacles in a multi‑level arena — basically what you’d get if soft play grew up, hit the gym, and bought some LEDs. Like soft play there’s no set route; you just dive in and pick your own challenges.

This one adds gamification. You wear a wristband and have to swipe coloured targets around the course. Each little square LED target is worth points, with higher scores for the hard‑to‑reach ones. The ones at ground level might be worth 10 points, but the one 18 feet up a parabolic ramp is worth 250.

In the first 20‑minute game, the kids were happy just exploring: trying different areas, working out the obstacles, laughing when they slipped. Then they realised they could carefully throw their wristbands to tap the sensors and grab extra points without doing the hard climb.

By the second game, they’d clocked that points really mattered. They started hunting for spots where several sensors were close together, stringing them into little combos. They still weren’t really thinking about which targets were worth what — it was more “ooh, more buttons” than “what’s the best return on effort?”

After two rounds I was shattered, but quietly smug to see my name sitting at the top of the day’s leaderboard.

In the final game, something clicked for the kids. They changed tactics: hoovering up easy targets and mixing in a few high‑value ones they knew they could reach. They’d worked out which walls to climb, where to traverse, and the quickest way down. They knew which areas were basically impossible for them, and simply skipped them. You could see them constantly planning their next move as they crawled, jumped and swung around the course.

My daughter’s score crept onto the leaderboard. Then, quite rightfully, she knocked me clean off the top, my proud “highest score of the day” disappearing from the screen.

Exploratory then exploitative behaviour 

Psychology and behavioural economics talk about the explore–exploit trade‑off. Early on, you “explore”: try stuff, click buttons, see what happens. Once you learn what works, you “exploit”: repeat the efficient patterns and shortcuts that give you the best outcome with the least effort.

There’s a whole line of work on this in decision‑making and reinforcement learning (e.g. Sutton & Barto’s work in RL). It’s not about joy per se, but it matches the arc: initial playful exploration, then converging on efficient behaviour.

What struck me later is how familiar that pattern feels when you watch organisations rush into a new technology.

Every year, big software vendors roll out the red carpet for user conferences. Executives fly in, get wined and dined, and are shown shiny demos of the latest release — complete with this year’s buzzwords, sometimes slapped on top of last year’s features with a new name.

They come back to HQ energised. The message to their teams isn’t “could we use this?” but “we have to implement this.” The strategy has been declared. Previous objectives may still be half‑done, but suddenly everything is re‑prioritised around the new thing.

This is the organisational version of jumping into Ninja Tag and sprinting for every flashing light. It feels exciting. It feels like progress. And it completely skips over the “is this actually the smartest way to score points?” conversation.

What organisations get wrong

There are endless articles on data preparation — scrub the source, polish the pipes, cleanse the core — but they seem to wash over the people who most need to hear them. The enthusiasts upstairs see the leaderboard. The people on the ground see the obstacles, the dodgy wiring, and the bits of the course you probably shouldn’t climb yet.

In explore–exploit terms, the execs often get stuck in permanent exploration: new tools, new slogans, new dashboards. Meanwhile, the people doing the work are trying to quietly move the organisation into exploitation: better processes, cleaner data, fewer manual hacks. One group is throwing wristbands at every sensor they can see. The other is trying to map out which targets are actually worth the climb.

I think Ninja Tag Action has something to teach organisations — but not as a “department away day” with everyone in matching T‑shirts. The teams that matter for AI and data aren’t horizontal. They’re vertical. You need execs, managers and front‑line staff in the same lane, seeing the same obstacles, learning together where the real high‑value targets are.

It’s not about labelling people as leaders, workers or followers. It’s about realising, together, how to exploit the multiple targets out there: when to grab the easy points, when to risk the 250‑pointers, and which walls simply aren’t worth climbing yet.

I could have been like a lot of dads, watching from the sidelines and shouting encouragement. But there was far more connection — and far more learning — when I was in the thick of it with the kids, slipping off ramps and missing targets alongside them.

When was the last time your organisation’s technology strategy — for data, analytics, reporting, AI — was shaped by adding a small, thoughtful step to what’s already working, rather than being rewritten under the flashing lights of a software vendor’s circus tent?

Maybe the real high score isn’t who adopts the latest buzzword first, but who learns, together, how to play the course they’ve already got.