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Post-Up

Post-up, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane. Object of Play The goal of this game is to generate ideas with silent sticky note writing. Number of Players: 1–50 Duration of Play: 10 minutes to 1 hour How to Play There are many ways to work with ideas using sticky notes. Generating ideas is the most basic play, […]

Bring Your Own Dashboard

For more information Listen to Michael Schrage, research fellow with MIT Sloan School’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, describe the need for strategic KPIs, common pitfalls organizations encounter when grappling with new technologies and why co-creating dashboards in a workshop setting are fundamental to AI capability development. The game Read through your favorite Management publication […]

Cost Benefit

This game, developed by Johan Tré, is most probably the most simple collaborative cost benefit analysis ever. It is applicable onto subjects where a group has expert knowledge about costs and/or benefits. A group of developers is such an example. Especially a customer or customer proxy will have interest when it comes to prioritizing work […]

Do, Redo & Undo

Object of Play When creating something, it’s easier to think in the affirmative. We think in a vector of taking actions and building things, and can forget that over time undoing those same decisions can be just as important. Do, Redo & Undo asks a group to focus on this, and to think through the […]

Understanding Chain

Object of Play Communicating clearly and effectively is a challenge when there is a lot to say to a lot of people.  It can be tempting to try to explain “everything all at once” to an audience and fail in the process.  In the Understanding Chain game, a group shifts from a content focus to […]

Build The Checklist

Object of Play In all work of reasonable complexity, there is a moment-to-moment risk that equally important tasks will overwhelm the human mind. In knowledge work this may be doubly true, due to the intangible “fuzziness” of any particular task. For groups that are charting out how they will work one of the most practical and useful things […]

Origins of Games

Gamestorming makes vivid for me the culture in which I wish to live.  It’s a culture which meets us where we are, which encourages us to stretch and grow, just a bit at a time, with every game we play.  Each game has an object of play, and so we can feel safe that we […]

Making The Game Come Alive

The most exciting thing about gamestorming is the creativity it allows me. I’m essentially freed to create an experience perfectly suited for my audience. Because while the games the folks at Xplane have created are effective, they are still just “old standards.” They are like Monopoly® or Scrabble®. Everyone can play and everyone can enjoy. […]

Pre-Mortem

Object of Play Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a “postmortem” to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, […]

Stakeholder Analysis

Object of Play The concept of a “stakeholder” has deep roots in business and managerial science, appearing as early as the 18th century in reference to any holder of a bet or wager in an endeavor. The term now has come to mean anyone who can significantly impact a decision, or who may be impacted by it. At […]

History Map

Object of Play Organizations naturally look ahead to anticipate progress. But the past can be as informative as the future. When an organization undergoes systemic or cultural change, documenting its history becomes an important process. By collecting and visualizing the components of history, we necessarily discover, recognize, and appreciate what got us where we are today. We can see […]

Impact & Effort Matrix

  Impact & Effort Matrix, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane. Object of Play In this decision-making exercise, possible actions are mapped based on two factors: effort required to implement and potential impact. Some ideas are costly, but may have a bigger long-term payoff than short-term actions. Categorizing ideas along these lines is a useful technique in […]

Card Sort

Object of Play Card sorting is a practice used frequently by information architects and designers to gather and structure inputs for a variety of purposes. In a common use of card sorting, information for a website is put onto the cards, and the sorting helps create categories for navigation and the overall architecture. The method works just […]

Elevator Pitch

Note: This approach is meant to be pretty flexible- other idea generating and prioritizing techniques may be substituted within the flow to suit the circumstances. Would like to hear how others approach this challenge. -James Object of Play: What has been a time-proven exercise in product development applies equally well in developing any  concept: writing […]