Author: Dave Gray

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In defense of games in the workplace

Gamestorming author Dave Gray was just interviewed by Mac Slocum of O’Reilly Radar:

We’re hardwired to play games. We play them for fun. We play them in our social interactions. We play them at work.

That last one is tricky. “Games” and “work” don’t seem like a natural pairing. Their coupling in the workplace either implies goofing off (the fun variant) or office politics (the not-so-fun type).

Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo, co-authors of the upcoming bookGamestorming, have a different perspective. They contend that an embrace and understanding of game mechanics can yield benefits in many work environments, particularly those where old hierarchical models are no longer applicable.

In the following Q&A, Gray discusses the collaborative power of games and how they can cut through increasing workplace complexity.

Read the whole interview here.

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Communicate This & Stick it here

Stickit

Communicate This & Stick it here

Complex simulation illustrating communication by people listening and sharing information in a manner that other people can understand the message being received as well as sent.

Creates environment to transfer, strengthen and re-work systems of communication with intra as well as inter departmental systems.

Can also be used to highlight different idioms and references that are used internally, this can be confusing to other departments and cultures (for global organizations and teams).

Materials:

  • Laminated Puzzle (supplied below)
  • Blank Puzzle Board (supplied below)
  • 18 envelopes – 1 for each puzzle piece
  • Countdown Timer
  • Stop Watch

Group Size:

  • For this variation 18 people is ideal
  • For smaller groups you can supply people with more than one puzzle piece or create a puzzle and puzzle grid with less pieces
  • For larger groups you can ask people to break into 18 teams i.e. partner, triad. Or create a puzzle and puzzle grid with more pieces

Objective:

The objective is for the group to assemble themselves according to the directives and place the Communicate This puzzle pieces into their proper order.

Secondary objective is for the group to explore a complex process that requires mapping, planning, strategy, and situational leadership of each team member.

Concluding in the group exploring and developing improved use of communication systems, process mapping and listening plus speaking for understanding.

Preparation:

Prior to beginning this activity with 18 people (see group size above for different group sizes) laminate and cut out each of the square Communicate This puzzle pieces. Place each piece into its own separate envelope, you will need and use 18 envelopes.

The Communicate This grid should be on a table somewhere on the opposite side of the room of where you will have the group gather.

Split about ÂŒ of the room and place on a table the Communicate This blank grid. In the other Ÿ of the room will be the working area for the team. It helps to lay a rope or use masking tape to mark the “Grid Area” and “Planning Area”

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Have the guidelines written on flip chart paper

Instructions and Facilitator Script:

Hand out the puzzle pieces in a random order to the people; ask them NOT to open the envelopes until the activity begins.

Below is how I generally explain the initiative

“Each of you contain within your envelope specific pieces of information that is needed for your personal advancement and the teams overall success. Please keep the envelopes sealed until the countdown timer begins.

The objective of this simulation is to place each of the puzzle pieces in the correct order in less than 60 minutes, and then place the puzzle pieces into the Communicate This grid in under 30 seconds. Here are the guidelines;

  • One person per puzzle piece.
  • Only you can see, touch, and move your puzzle piece once the envelope in opened.
  • NO ONE besides the person assigned the puzzle piece can see, touch and move that puzzle piece at any time in the “Planning Area” and the “Grid Area”.
  • Pieces may NOT be exchanged –You must keep your piece at all times.
  • Pieces will be assembled properly (letters, symbols, numbers are the right way up)
  • Symbols match so that any two adjacent piece edges match the same symbol
  • The color symbols mark the edges of the puzzle (sometimes I leave this guideline out)
  • All planning and systemizing will be completed in the Planning Area
  • The group will have 60 minutes to plan, prepare, and develop a process for placing the Communicate This puzzle into the grid
  • Once 1 person steps into the “Grid Area” the 30 seconds for placing all the pieces properly in the grid starts.
  • For any violation of the guidelines the ethics board requires a penalty of 2 minutes removed from the planning time. You can choose to be a strict or forgiving of the rules as you choose. Observe how the teams and people choose to interpret the rules and use these observations for the processing and reflection.

Any questions? Your time starts NOW.”

Connections and Concepts:

Communicate this is a challenging activity. Expect yelling, confusion, and some chaos in the beginning.

For the team to complete the task a shared use of language for the symbols will be either formally or informally created. Some of the names of the symbols are not commonly known, for example ampersand. Additionally global team members may not know and have the same symbol and description; this creates a great discussion for the processing. This may / will create confusion and frustration for people who are working to solve the puzzle.

Pay attention to the group dynamics; are they all working together? Are they splitting into smaller teams? Are the smaller teams sharing information with the larger group? Who is keeping track of the time?

Once the team is all in place and they are ready to transfer the pieces to the grid, did they remember that once the 1st person crosses the line the 30 seconds for completion starts. Teams need to also plan for how they are going to move everybody in a sequence from the Planning Zone to the Grid Zone and place each piece correctly in the Puzzle Grid.

As you can see this is a multi process, situational leadership simulation.

Processing & Reflection:

Here are some ideas;

Show or list Great Team Dynamics Include;

Ask the people to break into groups of 4 to discuss and find areas in the initiative that match the Great Team Dynamics.

Following about 10-15 minutes of small group discussion ask the groups to share what they discussed.

Ask the group to split into 2 groups of 6 and to come up with an example from their work lives that is similar to Communicate This.

Allow each group to share the example, and then ask each group to create a solution based idea that can change and improve the example either team explained.

Possible questions for the group;

  • What was your initial reaction to the challenge?
  • On a scale of 0-5 0 being horrible and 5 being excellent where would you place the teams planning?
  • For the planning to be 1 to 2 numbers higher what would be different? How would you know? What would you notice in other people? What would they notice in you?
  • Did any leaders emerge?
  • How where disagreement dealt with?
  • In what ways is this like work, home, community, etc..?
  • How?
  • What can we learn from this?
  • How can these ideas be brought to the office, home, community, classroom?

Reference:

First saw a version when working at a Corporate Conference Center in Buffalo, NY. While co-facilitating a Global Corporate Team with Dave Davenport of DxM

Communicate This Puzzle;

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Communicate This Puzzle Grid;

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Michael Cardus is the founder of Create-Learning an experiential based consulting, facilitation, training and coaching organization. Leading to successful results in retention of staff talent, increased satisfaction with work, increased collaboration and information sharing within and between departments, increased accountability of success and failures, increased knowledge transfer, increased trust as well as speed of project completion and decision making of Leaders, Teams and Organizations.

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7Ps Framework

 
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” —Dwight D. Eisenhower
 
Object of Play
Every meeting deserves a plan. Note that a great plan can’t guarantee a great outcome, but it will help lay down the fundamentals from which you can adapt. Sketch out these fundamentals by using the 7Ps framework.
 
Number of Players: Individual
 
Duration of Play: 20 minutes to 2 hours
 
How to Play
Use these items as a checklist. When preparing for a meeting, thinking through the 7Ps can improve focus and results, even if you have only a few moments to reflect on them.
 
Purpose: Why are you having this meeting? As the leader, you need to be able to state this clearly and succinctly. Consider the urgency of the meeting: what’s going
on, and what’s on fire? If this is difficult to articulate, ask yourself if a meeting is really necessary.
 
Product: What specific artifact will we produce out of the meeting? What will it do, and how will it support the purpose? If your meetings seem to be “all talk and no follow-through,” consider how a product might change things.
 
People: Who needs to be there, and what role will they play? One way to focus your list of attendees is to think in terms of questions and answers. What questions are
we answering with this meeting? Who are the right people to answer the questions?
 
Process: What agenda will these people use to create the product? Of all the 7Ps, the agenda is where you have the most opportunity to collaborate in advance with the
attendees. Co-design an agenda with them to ensure that they will show up and stay engaged.
 
Pitfalls: What are the risks in this meeting, and how will we address them? These could be as simple as ground rules, such as “no laptops,” or specific topics that are
designated as out of scope.
 
Prep: What would be useful to do in advance? This could be material to read in advance, research to conduct, or “homework” to assign to the attendees.
 
Practical Concerns: These are the logistics of the meeting—the where and when, and importantly, who’s bringing lunch.
 
Strategy
  • Each of the 7Ps can influence or change one of the others, and developing a good plan will take this into account. For instance, if you have certain participants for only part of a meeting, this will change your process.
  • Get others involved in the design of the meeting. Their participation in its design is the quickest route to its effectiveness.
  • Recurring meetings can take on a life of their own and stray from their original purpose. It’s a healthy activity to revisit “Why are we having this meeting?” regularly for such events.
  • Make the 7Ps visible during the meeting. These reference points can help focus and refocus a group as needed.
  • Have a plan and expect it to change. The 7Ps can give you a framework for designing a meeting, but they can’t run the meeting for you. The unexpected will happen, and as a leader you will need to adapt.
The 7Ps Framework was designed by James Macanufo.
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Value Map

Index cards
Image: Sambla.se via Flickr

Object of play

The end goal of value mapping is to build a visual matrix that quickly and clearly defines areas of interest for something – it can be a service, a product, a plan, a website. It consists of asking people to choose a limited number of features from a bigger collection and then plotting their choices against a matrix. The result can be presented back in a template that resembles a light box, with items that were chosen more times being lit up by brighter colors and items chosen fewer times by weaker colors.

Number of players: 5 – 30

Duration of play: 15  minutes – 2 hours

How to play

This game has three main parts:

1.  Define features and their groups: draw sketches or write down on cards the features or items you want participants to attribute value to. Group them in a way that makes sense to you and plot them on a table that represents these groups

2.  Play: show the collection of feature cards to participants, and ask them to choose a smaller number than the total, so that they need to make choices and leave some features out. A good ratio is 1:3, that is, if you have 30 cards ask people to choose only 10. Another way of doing this is to provide them with imaginary money – say ÂŁ100 – and tell them they can use this budget to ‘shop’ for features. Keep a record of each participant’s choices.

3. Plotting results: color the cards on the original table according to the number of times they got chosen. Cards that were chosen more times can be colored with stronger or brighter colors, and cards that were chosen less times should be colored with light colors. Cards that were never chosen should remain ‘uncolored’. The matrix should now give you a good – and visual – idea of what areas were received with more interest, and which were not.

Strategy

Value mapping allows you to quickly visualize things that are valued by others – consumers, members of a team, your department, your stakeholders. Understanding general areas of interest can help focus the work (where should we concentrate our efforts?) and to settle internal disputes (“consumers really didn’t like any of the social networking features for this application, so we don’t need to invest in them now”). Try presenting the matrix in a series of slides that show different color groups – it really makes an impression!

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Image-ination

Object of Play: To generate new ideas about a topic you feel stuck on.

# of Players: 5-7 per group

Duration of Play: 15 minutes ‑ 1 hour

How to Play:

  1. Before the meeting, assemble a collection of photographs and images that do not contain words. You can cut them out of magazines, catalogs, or junk mail. Don’t look for pretty pictures; instead look for the widest variety of pictures. Try to collect 3-5 pictures per person.
  2. Put a large sheet of paper on the table; a piece of flip-chart paper is ideal. In the center, write out a one- to three-word description of the topic you want to generate new thinking around (e.g., Finding New Customers).
  3. Place the pictures face down around the edges of the paper.
  4. Give each person a pile of sticky notes or index cards.
  5. Tell the participants that the goal of the game is to encourage thinking as widely as possible. The idea is to go beyond what they already know. Demonstrate this by showing an image and quickly state several ways it relates to the topic.
  6. Have each participant randomly select an image, turn it over, and write on the sticky notes or index cards as many ideas as they can come up with about how the image relates or could relate to the topic. Ask each participant to put one idea on each note or card and put it on the flip-chart paper around the topic.
  7. Allow five minutes for participants to work silently. Have people select other images and repeat the process until you either run out of images or time.
  8. Ask the group to collect the notes and cards with all of the ideas and re-arrange the ideas in clusters that relate to each other. For each cluster, ask the group to find a photograph to illustrate the idea and create a short title for it. Write the title under the image.
  9. If you have more than one small group, ask each one to share the photos and titles of each of their clusters with the other groups.
  10. Have a conversation about how the titled photos can inform the groups’ thinking about the topic. Make a list of possible actions they could take in response to the ideas.

Strategy:

Images have the ability to spark insights and to create new associations and possible connections. Encourage people to allow themselves to free-associate and see potential new ideas. In this type of play, you are asking people to move back and forth between using their visual and verbal skills. When done in rapid succession, as in this game, this switching offers the possibility for more ideas and approaches to emerge.

When leading the game, some participants may need to be reassured that the goal is not to come up with a design or specific answer. Keeping Image-ination time frames short reduces this ability and requires people to allow associations to emerge from a less-considered space. After all, if what everyone was already thinking could readily solve the problem, the group would not feel stuck. The idea is to move beyond the stories people always tell and to surface something new and different.

You may hear that people can’t find the picture they want to describe their ideas. That’s actually a good sign! That “problem” actually means the participants have the creative opportunity to find another kind of association.

Imagine-ation is adapted from the Visual Icebreaker Kit, one of several image-based games and tools from VisualsSpeak. It is © 2010 VisualsSpeak LLC.

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Homepage Bingo

VTS Madrid

Object of play

Ranking selections can be quite boring sometimes. In this game, participants have to create the homepage of a product, service or organization’s website as if it was a bingo card – everyone needs to make quick decisions about what comes top, what comes last.

Number of players: Small groups

Duration of play: 30  minutes – 60 minutes

How to play

Prior to the game, prepare a sheet, like the one below.

1.  Before starting the game with the group, prepare a set of cards (post it notes are brilliant for this) with the attributes or features you want to rank. Give each participant a homepage frame and an identical set of cards – and keep one for yourself.

2. It is better if participants are seating around a table or another surface, but not too close to each other – they shouldn’t be seeing what is going on with their neighbor’s homepage.

3.  Like in a bingo, start calling out the cards in random order. You can give a brief explanation of what the card is, so there is a shared understanding, but be careful for not over-explaining some cards and accidentally attributing your own value to it!

4.  As you call out the cards, participants must decide where to place them on the homepage frame. The decision about what goes on top and what goes on the bottom is made on the fly.

Strategy

It will look messy in the beginning, as participants start pushing down – or out – cards they had given a lot of value in principle. Ask them to keep pushed out cards in a separate pile, so you can talk about it when the game is finished. The whole point is to make quick judgements about features. Illustrated cards are also fantastic for this game, as they take away the prejudice words can bring to concepts and leave more room for participants’ interpretation. After the bingo is over, you should have an ‘exhibition of homepages’ attaching the sheets to the wall and opening for discussion.

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The Pitch

Geneva workshop

Object of play

It is easy to come up with concepts in a world of imagination, where money, time and technical capacity are unlimited, or to generate ideas that look good in theory, but are impractical in reality. The Pitch is a role playing game designed to bring attention back to real world and focus on feasible and viable aspects of concepts (What are the key selling points? How can this make money? Why will people buy it?). The players need to imagine that they are entrepreneurs and that need to sell their idea to a group of rich venture capitalists (VCs).

Number of players: 4 – 12

Duration of play: 30  minutes to 1.5 hour

How to play

1.  Divide people into small groups, ideally pairs or triads. One group should take the role the VCs, while the others are ‘entrepreneurs’.

2.  A product or service is defined and agreed by the group.

3. Individually, each group spends 10 minutes formulating their pitch to be presented to the VCs. They can write, draw and rehearse: the creation is really up to each group. Ideally they should be in separate rooms or breakout spaces while creating the pitches

4.  All groups should be aware that one or two representatives will present the pitch verbally to the VCs but the whole group will answer their questions. It is also important to cap preparation time (around 10 minutes is good), since over-elaborating an idea can take away the true nature of their thoughts.

5.  Towards the end of the preparation time, the VCs give groups a time-warning: ‘You have 2 minutes prep remaining’.

6.  Each group then presents their pitch – a time limit (3 minutes) is given for each presentation and the VCs can ask up to two questions each.

7.  It’s not essential, but to add a sense of competition, the VCs can decide which pitch is the winner at the end.

Strategy

The idea behind this game is to capture the different perspectives that different groups have about a product, prototype, service or concept. Preparing a pitch to a venture capitalist obliges participants to focus on the really important ideas and the time limit helps them to concentrate on the core of the proposition. Because different groups will emphasize different aspects, it also provides a range of perspectives on the main idea being discussed. The questions the VCs ask usually expose weak points or help clarify ideas, which can then be shared and discussed by the group.

This game is also good for capturing the type of language people use to define a concept, product, service or situation, so you should encourage participants not to over-think the words they use in their pitch. If participants don’t know each other, it’s interesting to make a competition out of it, and even offer a prize to the winner: the shared goal of ‘winning the game’ usually brings teams together quickly.