Blog – Page 15 – Gamestorming

Posted on January 27, 2011June 2, 2015 by Dave Gray — 1 Comment

Welcome To My World

Object of Play

Many of us make the mistaken assumption that others see what we see and know what we know. No one in the world shares your internal system map of reality. The best way to compare notes, so to speak, is to actually draw an external representation of what you think is happening. Welcome to My World gives players an opportunity to better understand other players’ roles and responsibilities. It helps chip away at silos and introduces the novel idea that we may be seeing only one reality: ours. It helps immensely to show what we see to others so that we can start to share a reality and work on it together.

Number of Players

8–20

Duration of Play

30 minutes to 1 hour

How to Play

1. Give all players access to flip-chart paper, markers, and sticky notes. Ask them to take 30 seconds to write one of their job responsibilities (e.g., create the company newsletter or devise a marketing strategy for Product X) on a sticky note and stick it to their shirt.

2. Have the players wander around the room and pair up with someone whose job responsibility they’re the least familiar with or that they’re curious about. If you have an odd number of players, join them to even it out.

3. In pairs, ask the players to take turns drawing their best representation of how they envision the other person’s workflow around that job duty. They can use simple circles, boxes, and arrows to make flowcharts or they can get creative, but they cannot interview the other player or ask any clarifying questions while they’re drawing. Give them 5–15 minutes to draw quietly.

4. When the time is up, give each player five minutes to share her drawing with the other person and describe what it means.

5. Then give the pairs 5–10 minutes each to clarify or agree on the realities of each other’s drawing. They should also take time to discuss where the areas of ease, friction, and interactions with others fall in the process. They can elaborate and draw on the other person’s visual at this point, or the original creator of the visual can add content as his partner shares.

6. Ask for volunteers to show their visuals to the larger group and to describe some of their insights and observations.

Strategy

To be maximally effective, this game has one requirement: the players should represent a range of positions or job responsibilities within an organization. The game rapidly loses its value if all the participants have the same, predictable workflow, like processing an undisputed insurance claim. The idea is to educate each other on the realities of their work duties and to help break down silos across organizational areas. Once the insights start coming out, this game can significantly increase the understanding and appreciation of others’ work. And it can be even more effective when you have players who have to work together but historically have had little insight into—or even patience with—their colleagues’ processes.

Most people feel comfortable drawing basic shapes and workflow-related diagrams since these are common in company life. If, however, players balk at having to draw, tell them they’re welcome to rely only on words, but they’ll miss an opportunity to make a simple picture of someone else’s “world” at work.

The source for the Welcome to My World game is unknown.

Posted on January 16, 2011June 2, 2015 by Dave Gray — 3 Comments

Pro/Con list

Pro/Con list, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

It’s rare that we can clearly establish the provenance of a Gamestorming approach, but it’s very nice when we can. The Pro and Con list is a good example: It was invented by Benjamin Franklin and described by him an a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley. Here’s the description in Ben’s own words:

To Joseph Priestley

London, September 19, 1772

Dear Sir,

In the Affair of so much Importance to you, wherein you ask my Advice, I cannot for want of sufficient Premises, advise you what to determine, but if you please I will tell you how.

When these difficult Cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under Consideration all the Reasons pro and con are not present to the Mind at the same time; but sometimes one Set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of Sight. Hence the various Purposes or Inclinations that alternately prevail, and the Uncertainty that perplexes us.

To get over this, my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four Days Consideration I put down under the different Heads short Hints of the different Motives that at different Times occur to me for or against the Measure. When I have thus got them all together in one View, I endeavour to estimate their respective Weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two Reasons con equal to some three Reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies; and if after a Day or two of farther Consideration nothing new that is of Importance occurs on either side, I come to a Determination accordingly.

And tho’ the Weight of Reasons cannot be taken with the Precision of Algebraic Quantities, yet when each is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less likely to take a rash Step; and in fact I have found great Advantage from this kind of Equation, in what may be called Moral or Prudential Algebra.

Wishing sincerely that you may determine for the best, I am ever, my dear Friend,

Yours most affectionately

B. Franklin

Source: Mr. Franklin: A Selection from His Personal Letters. Contributors: Whitfield J. Bell Jr., editor, Franklin, author, Leonard W. Labaree, editor. Publisher: Yale University Press: New Haven, CT 1956.

Note about the image: I couldn’t find an example of a Pro/Con list by Benjamin Franklin, but I found this image as part of a Connecticut Historical Society blog post about the Rev. William Patton, who made this Pro/Con list as he considered the relative merits of living in Boston vs. Hartford.

Image: Pros and cons of moving to Hartford, Rev. William W. Patton diaries and account book, 1835-1889, Ms 68129. CHS, Hartford, CT

Online Pro/Con List

Given Benjamin Franklin’s large and distributed social network, we’re pretty sure that he would have enjoyed playing this game with his friends and colleagues. And while dear Ben couldn’t engage his network very easily, we’re pretty sure that he’d be really happy to learn that you can engage your distributed team in an online Pro/Con game.

Here is another image of the Pro/Con List Game. But this one is special – clicking on this image, will start an “instant play” game at www.innovationgames.com. In this game, there will be two icons that you can drag on your online Pro/Con List:

Blue Pluses: Use these to capture Pros.
Cons: Use these to capture Cons.

We’ve organized this game using multi-layered regions so that you can keep track of the importance of each item. There are High, Medium, and Low importance regions on the game board. As you’re moving items around, use these regions to help you keep track of the most important ideas.

Keep in mind that that this is a collaborative game. This means that you can invite other players to play. And when they drag something around – you’ll see it in real time!

Posted on January 8, 2011June 2, 2015 by Dave Gray — 2 Comments

Poster Session with Credit Counselors

Inspired by the use of Poster Session. I had about 90 minutes of time with a Consumer Credit Counseling Service group I am doing some long term Managerial Leadership Coaching with.

A slightly varied process was introduced combining an activity called Bright : Blurry : Blind and Poster Session provided some amazing insight and commonalities to define metrics and areas for future work.

Additionally working with this group, I knew that they were numbers people, who still cared greatly about service. Using poster session, asking them to keep it visual the people used different brain connections that they often do not associate with work. This allowed the people to feel free and able to share, because the situation was changed.

Here are some some photos from our time;

Thank you GameStorming!

michael cardus

Posted on January 5, 2011June 2, 2015 by Dave Gray — 7 Comments

How-Now-Wow Matrix

When people want to develop new ideas, they most often think out of the box in the brainstorming or divergent phase. However, when it comes to convergence, people often end up picking ideas that are most familiar to them. This is called a ‘creative paradox’ or a ‘creadox’.

The How-Now-Wow matrix is an idea selection tool that breaks the creadox by forcing people to weigh each idea on 2 parameters.

Object of play: This game naturally follows the creative idea generation phase and helps players select ideas to develop further.

Number of players: 1 to 30

Duration of play: 10 to 40 mins

What you’ll need: Flip-chart sized paper, some markers, lots of voting dots in 3 colors (blue, yellow, green)

Preparation:

Draw a 2-by-2 matrix as above. The X axis denotes the originality of the idea and the Y axis shows the ease of implementation.
Label the quadrants as:
1. Now/Blue Ideas – Normal ideas, easy to implement. These are typically low-hanging fruit and solutions to fill existing gaps in processes. These normally result in incremental benefits.
2. How/Yellow Ideas – Original ideas, impossible to implement. These are breakthrough ideas in terms of impact, but absolutely impossible to implement right now given current technology/budget constraints.
3. Wow/Green Ideas – Original ideas, easy to implement. ‘Wow’ ideas are those with potential for orbit-shifting change and possible to implement within current reality.

How to Play:

List down the ideas that emerge from the creative ideation phase on large charts of paper stuck around the room.
Give each player 3 sticky dots of each color – that is, 3 blue, 3 yellow, 3 green. 9 dots per person is typical, but go ahead and reduce/increase that number based on the time at hand and number of ideas generated.
Ask each player to step forward and vote for 3 best ideas in each category. They need to do this by sticking a colored dot in front of each idea they choose.
In the end, count the number of dots under each idea to categorize it. The highest number of dots of a certain color categorizes the idea under that color.
In case of a tie:
1. If blue dots = green dots, the idea is blue
2. If yellow dots = green dots, the idea is green
You now have a bucket of Now/Green ideas to work on further. Make sure you also collect the low-hanging blue ideas for immediate implementation and the yellow ideas to keep an eye on for the future.

Note: Check your yellow dots in advance to ensure that they can be seen from a distance. If not, go ahead and replace them with another color. FYI, in the original matrix, WOW ideas are red.

Online How-Now-Wow Matrix

Here is another image of the How-Now-Matrix. But this one is special – clicking on this image will start an “instant play” game at www.innovationgames.com. In this game there are 20 light bulbs that you can drag on your matrix. We’ve organized this game into a set of regions that match the How-Now-Matrix described above. As you’re placing these items, use these regions to help you keep track of the most important ideas.

Many studies confirm that logic games improve mental health and help to cope with depression, apathy, and reduce the dose of Viagra.

Keep in mind that that this is a collaborative game. This means that you can invite other players to play. And when they drag something around – you’ll see it in real time!

Here is another version that based on Martien van Steenbergen’s comments, in which he recommends flipping the y-axis.

The How-Wow-Now Matrix is adapted from work done by The Center for Development of Creative Thinking (COCD). Information about the COCD Matrix was published in the book, “Creativity Today” authored by Ramon Vullings, Igor Byttebier and Godelieve Spaas.

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Posted on December 12, 2010June 2, 2015 by Dave Gray — 3 Comments

Plus/Delta

Object of Play
The object of this game is to generate constructive feedback.

Number of Players: Any

Duration of Play: 10–45 minutes

How to Play
Make two columns: one for “plus” and one for “delta” (the Greek symbol for change).

1. Ask the group to reflect on what was positive or repeatable about an activity and capture their thoughts under the “plus” column.

2. Ask the group then to brainstorm about what they would change about it, and capture these under the “delta” column.

Strategy
This feedback method can apply to any activity, idea, work product, or action. By focusing on change as opposed to direct negatives, the group will be more likely to share its true assessment while also generating improvement ideas.

The earliest known use of the Plus/Delta game is at The Boeing Co circa 1980.

Online Plus/Delta

Here is another image of the Plus/Delta Game. But this one is special – clicking on this image, will start an “instant play” game at innovationgames.com. In this game, there will be two icons that you can drag on your online Plus/Delta Chart:

Pluses: Use these to capture positives.
Deltas: Use to capture what you’d like to change.

We’ve organized this game into three regions: High Impact, Medium Impact, and Low Impact. As you’re placing these items, use these regions to help you keep track of the most important ideas.

Keep in mind that that this is a collaborative game. This means that you can invite other players to play. And when they drag something around – you’ll see it in real time!

Posted on December 12, 2010June 2, 2015 by Dave Gray — 1 Comment

Open Space

Object of Play
Open Space technology is a method for hosting large events, such as retreats and conferences, without a prepared agenda. Instead, participants are brought together under a guiding purpose and create the agenda for themselves in a bulletin-board fashion. These items become potential breakout sessions, and participants have the freedom to “vote with their feet” by moving between breakouts.

Open Space was founded by Harrison Owen in the 1980s out of a desire to “open the space” for people to self-organize around a purpose. Many meetings and examples have been recorded at Openspaceworld.org. Hosting a small Open Space meeting is fairly straightforward, but requires an amount of “letting go” on the part of the organizer, who must recognize that the participants will develop a richer approach and solution to the challenge at hand.

Number of Players: 5–2,000

Duration of Play: A day or longer

How to Play

Setup: An Open Invitation
Perhaps the most important work of the organizer is developing a compelling invitation. The ideal invitation will frame a challenge that is urgent, important, and complex enough to require a diverse set of perspectives to solve. It might sound as simple as “How can we revitalize our city’s schools?” or “What’s our strategic direction?”

Create the Marketplace
At the start of the process, participants sit in a circle, or in concentric circles, to get oriented and start to create their agenda. Given the challenge of the meeting, participants are invited to come to the center and write out an issue they’re passionate about, and then post it on a “marketplace” wall with a time and place at which they are willing to host the discussion. All are invited to create an item for the marketplace, but no one is required to. Creating the agenda in this fashion should take between 60 and 90 minutes.

The “Law of Two Feet”
The breakouts then begin, typically lasting 90 minutes per session. Participants may organize their breakouts however they see fit; the host records the discussion so that others may join the conversation at any time. Participants are asked to observe the one law of Open Space, the Law of Two Feet, which asks that if you find yourself neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet to go somewhere else. In this sense, participants are given full responsibility over their learning and contributions.

Pulling It All Together
Breakouts may last for a day or more, depending on the scope of the event. Closing the event may take many forms, the least desirable of which is a formal report from the groups. Instead, return to the circle arrangement that started the event, and open the space again for participants who want to reflect on what they’ve discovered and their next steps.

Strategy
Keep in mind the four principles of Open Space that will help set the tone of the event:

1. Whoever comes are the right people. Passion is more important than position on an org chart.

2. Whenever it starts is the right time. Spirit and creativity do not run on the clock.

3. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Dwelling or complaining about past events and missed opportunities is a waste of time; move on.

4. When it’s over, it’s over. When a conversation is finished, move on. Do the work, not the time.

You can read more about Open Space at openspaceworld.org.

Open Space game rules been popularized and incorporated into many self-organizing events which are known under different names, most prominently BarCamps and Unconferences. The concept of Open Space was put forth in Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, by Harrison Owen.

Posted on December 12, 2010June 2, 2015 by Dave Gray — 2 Comments

Poster Session

Object of Play
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what would 50 pictures be worth? What if 50 people could present their most passionate ideas to each other—without any long-winded explanation? A poster session accelerates the presentation format by breaking it down, forcing experts to boil up their ideas and then present back to each other via simple images.

Number of Players: 10–100

Duration of Play: 20 minutes to develop posters, an unlimited time to browse

How to Play
The goal of a poster session is to create a set of compelling images that summarize a challenge or topic for further discussion. Creating this set might be an “opening act” which then sets the stage for choosing an idea to pursue, or it might be a way to get indexed on a large topic. The act of creating a poster forces experts and otherwise passionate people to stop and think about the best way to communicate the core concepts of
their material, avoiding the popular and default “show up and throw up.”

To set up, everyone will need ample supplies for creating their poster. Flip charts and markers are sufficient, but consider bringing other school supplies to bear: stickers, magazines for cutting up, and physical objects.
Start the game play by first framing the challenge. In any given large group, you could say the following:

“There are more good ideas in everyone’s heads than there is time to understand and address them. By creating posters that explain the ideas, we’ll have a better idea of what’s out there and what we might work on.”

The participants’ task is to create a poster that explains their topic. There are two constraints:

1. It must be self-explanatory. If you gave it to a person without walking her through it, would she understand?

2. It must be visual. Words and labels are good, but text alone will not be enough to get people’s attention, or help them understand. When creating their poster, participants may be helped by thinking about three kinds of explanation:

Before and After: Describe “why” someone should care in terms of drawing the today and tomorrow of the idea.

System: Describe the “what” of an idea in terms of its parts and their relationships.

Process: Describe the “how” of an idea in terms of a sequence of events.

Give participants 20 minutes to create their posters. When they have finished, create a “gallery” of the images by posting them on the wall. Instead of elaborate presentations, ask the group to circulate and walk the gallery. Some posters will attract and capture more attention than others. From here, it may be worthwhile to have participants dot vote (see Dot Voting) or “vote with their feet” (See Open Space) to decide what ideas to pursue further.

Strategy
As a variation, the posters may be created in small groups. In this case, it’s important for the group to have decided ahead of time what their topic will be, and to give more time to come to a consensus on what they will draw and how they will draw it.

On a smaller scale, a group may do this around a conference table. A small group of experts may create posters to explain their different points of view to each other at the start of a meeting, to make their models of the world, their vocabulary, and their interests clear and explicit. Twenty minutes spent in this way may save the group from endless discussion later in their process.

The Poster Session game is based on academic poster sessions, in which authors of papers that are not ready for publication share their ideas in an informal, conversational group.

Posted on December 12, 2010June 2, 2015 by Dave Gray — 4 Comments

Break

Although not a formal game, unstructured time, whether it’s a walk in the park, an informal lunch, or just a short break, is not only helpful but critical to the creative process. A break allows people time to process new information. It gives teams time to gel as a unit so that all the players can get to know each other. It also gives people a chance to catch up on details of their work or personal lives, which helps reduce the stress in the session.

Thomas Edison and Leonardo Da Vinci were both known for taking short naps interspersed with intense working sessions. The break gives ideas a chance to settle and creates opportunities for them to merge and collide with previous knowledge or other people’s ideas.

Invites teams to take a walk, take informal time to get to know each other or catch up on outside work. Skipping breaks is a dangerous business. Don’t underestimate the power of a break to renew, refresh and reinvigorate your team.

Research confirms the “break effect.” In a 2010 study entitled ”
Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea,” researchers found that a hybrid approach that combined group work with individual time for reflection resulted in the most quality ideas.

Posted on December 8, 2010June 2, 2015 by Dave Gray

Ice breaker

Ice breaker, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

Here’s a simple but effective way to break the ice and introduce people at your next meeting or event. It’s a good way to get people into a brainstorming/creative mood and sets the tone for a creative meeting.

1. Give everyone an index card and a colored marker (it’s better if everyone has a different color).

2. Have each person fold the card in half to make a table tent.

3. On the front, have them write their name and draw their “supermask” (as in, if they were a superhero, what would be their mask?).

4. On the back, have each person write their “supername” and “superpower.”

5. Go around the room and have each person describe their card to the group.

Variations:

1. If everyone more or less knows each other: After writing their name, have each person pass their card to the person on their left or right. The person receiving the card fills it out and passes it back. Then go around the room as before.

2. Instead of “supername” and “super power” you can try other things, like “wrestler mask, name and secret move.”

3. Corporate version Have each person draw a self-portrait on the front of the card, and on the back write something others are unlikely to know about them.

We did this at a recent edition of visual thinking school and it really livened up the meeting. Here are the results.

Give it a try, and post your cards to the vizthink! pool.

Posted on December 7, 2010June 2, 2015 by Dave Gray — 2 Comments

Argument map

…complex situations and infoglut.

You need a good oversight to think about your future, or to really understand your clients. You are committed to empathically include everybody’s reasoning and arguments. You want to make wise and just decisions.

✣ ✣ ✣

Making the right choices and decisions is crucial. Often too, we need to decide fast. Do we need to vaccine the world population against swine flu? Should we enter this new market? Can we still trust science after Climategate? Are we going to bail out Greece and Ireland? Can computers think? Do we need a new monetary system?

The [[argument map]] is a systematic approach to mapping a debate in a pleasant and high-quality way as a [[big visible chart]]. It’s process invites every stakeholder to carefully listen to each other’s arguments. It moves away from debate and towards mutual understanding, encouraging empathy. When people are forced to examine other peoples’ points of view there’s a chance for a real conversation.

Therefore:

Generate, collect, prune, and cluster all arguments for and against in a tree-shaped structure on a single A3 sheet of paper.

✣ ✣ ✣

Use the [[force field analysis|force field map]] to chart weighted forces that direct change.

The [[argument map]] is originally conceived by the Argumentenfabriek.

Number of Players: 5–30

Duration of Play: 1–3 hours

Object of Play

Public debate often diverts into endless low quality discussions and exhausts both the debaters and audience. At the end, you still can’t make a well-informed choice. Many conversations suffer from lack of a central theorem or stand, scarce arguments in favor, or ignored counterarguments.

The goal is to get out all of the issues and arguments before talking about any one issue. Real-life dialogue makes this a challenging goal, yet it is the goal nonetheless.

If you immediately explore the first one or two issues instead of getting a complete argument list, you risk the following:

You will never get the complete list and may miss significant opportunities.
You will end up talking about an issue, which is not the most important issue.
Even if you eventually discover the most important issue, you may have depleted the scarce resources of time and energy.

People have trouble to remember a lot of connections between statements and arguments, and suffer from infoglut—masses of continuously increasing information, so poorly catalogued or organized (or not organized at all) that it is almost impossible to navigate through them to search or draw any conclusion or meaning.

A [[big visible chart]] like the [[argument map]], [[force field analysis|force field map]], or [[hoshin kanri]] gives oversight. Visualizing reasoning helps in practicing critical thinking: clean reasoning, focusing on errors of reasoning, unspoken assumptions, and psychological digressions. [[big visible charts]] will increasingly take over long-winded texts. There is simply no time to read and understand the ever growing thickets of documents.

How to Play

Either use a whiteboard or flip chart or a computer projection and some handy outline software. Step through the process below, and everything important will surface. You will be complete and not miss any important issues or arguments. And you will be able to make a just decision.

Just the Facts—Create a [[facts map]] and briefly share facts and figures related to the topic. No opinions, just (verifiable) facts, please.
Quiet Brain Dump—Take ten minutes or so to find causes and consequences, pros and cons. Jot down any argument you can find in favor or against the case.
Take Turns and Share—Take turns and share a single argument with the group at each turn. Got nothing more? Just pass. Write down the argument on the whiteboard or type in on the computer.
Prune Your Arguments—Delete any argument on your list that someone else also brings up as soon as you hear it.
Be Terse—Relentlessly end any discussions, long-winded stories, or salvo of arguments.
Exhaust Yourself—She or he who passes last, ‘wins’. Still not exhausted? Loop back to 3.
For or Against—Take two flip charts. Label one as “For” and one “Against”. Collect the arguments on their appropriate flip chart. If you are using an outliner software program, simply drag each argument in its appropriate “For” or “Against” class.
Shape, Organize and Thicken—Shape, organize and thicken the arguments. Cluster and categorize the arguments into ‘themes’, facets or aspects. Pick one to three key words for theme name. Within each theme, further subcluster arguments and label each cluster as a theorem, proposition, opinion, or stand, listing the arguments below. Often you will find similar themes and labels in both “For” and “Against”, but this is not a requirement; they can differ.

Instead of listing arguments and copying them to flip charts, you can also write them down on sticky notes, one argument per sticky note, and put those on the flip chart. Crumple any duplicate stickies.

Repeat this process with other groups of stakeholders.

If you have the time and money, process the harvest into a colorful tree-structured schema like the examples below. Make sure it fits on a single and handy A3-sized sheet of paper, while keeping it legible, of course.

Reasoning errors

petitio principii—begging the question.
argumentum ad hominem—personal attack.
post hoc ergo propter hoc—‘false cause’.

Exempli gratiā

This article is a copy of Pareltaal » Argument Map and formatted like a pattern from a pattern language.