Management of Extreme Situations

7Management of a Crisis Situation in a Large Video Game Studio

7.1. Introduction

This contribution aims to analyze how Ubisoft Montréal’s studio was able to respond to a major crisis: the cancellation of the production of a blockbuster (a game with a sales potential of more than 5 million units) due to a lack of originality and strategic differentiation. Such a situation can be interpreted as a case of extreme management, insofar as a failure in this type of strategically important project could have threatened the company’s financial health and viability.

Through the analysis of the Always Playable case (Cohendet and Simon 2016), this chapter aims to show how the producer in charge of the blockbuster and his team, with the support of the studio director, have contributed to reinvigorating creativity (to “unfreeze” the organization; Lewin 1951) by radically reshaping processes and recombining existing routines in-depth. Confronted with an unprecedented creativity crisis, this team has helped to radically redefine the way innovation processes are managed in a company. This transformation has a remarkable aspect: creative regeneration came “from within” by drawing on the existing routines, and by “breaking” and brutally reconfiguring routines that had until then been stabilized as “good practice” in projects for nearly 10 years. The regeneration of organizational creativity has not been achieved through smooth and continuous learning mechanisms: it has resulted in a profound ...