Creativity and invention has long been seen as a “black box.” As business people, we don’t typically try to understand this process. We fully expect that when designers, inventors, and other creative people go into a room with a goal, they will come out with more or less creative discoveries and results. Although when we watch them at work, we can observe some combination of sketching, animated conversations, messy desks, and drinking. But the fundamental nature of what happens in that room remains mostly a mystery.
It’s easy to leave creativity to the creative types, and say to yourself, “I’m just not a creative person.” The fact is that in a complex, dynamic, competitive knowledge economy, it’s no longer acceptable to take this position. If you are a knowledge worker, you must become, to some degree, creative.
That may sound a bit scary, but the fact is that successful creative people tend to employ simple strategies and practices to get where they want to go. It’s not so much that they employ a consistent, repeatable process that leads to consistent creative results. It’s more like a workshop with a set of tools and strategies for examining things deeply, for exploring new ideas, for performing experiments and testing hypotheses, to generate new and surprising insights and results.
So we set out, much like the brothers Grimm, to collect the best of these practices wherever we could find them, with a special focus on Silicon Valley, innovative companies, and the information revolution.
Many of these practices emerged from a kind of “Silicon soup” – the deeply interconnected network of Silicon valley, where ideas and people cross-pollinate like bees in a single massive hive. The practices live in a mostly oral culture, passed along from person to person by word of mouth. For example, a consultant uses an approach with a client, and the client begins to employ that approach internally. Over time, as more people employ a method, it evolves into something quite different, and over time the source of the original idea or approach may be lost. Sometimes methods are written down and sometimes, like folk tales, they exist in many different versions in many places.
We chose to call this practice “Gamestorming” because it seemed to come closer to describing the phenomenon than anything else we could think of.
Our goal with this collection was to find the best of these tools and practices and bring them together into a single place.
It is our hope that you will contribute games based on your personal knowledge and experience, that you will help us clarify the history of the ideas and practices, and that through your comments you can help us all better understand the complex and fascinating history of games at play in creative work.
Why you should read the book
by Chris Brogan (1 minute 30 seconds)
What is Gamestorming?
by XPLANE (3 minutes)
Gamestorming explained
Gamestorming
Dave Gray – Gamestorming from CPSI on Vimeo.
by Dave Gray speaks at the Creative Problem-Solving Institute (CPSI) (26 minutes)
Design Practices for Co-Creation and Engagement
by Dave Gray for Adaptive Path’s UX Week, San Francisco (30 minutes)
A Grammar for Creativity and Innovation
by Dave Gray for iXDA, Savannah (45 minutes)
Informal chat with Michael Dila
A very informal chat with Michael Dila about knowledge games, later dubbed “Gamestorming” (35 minutes)
Bootleg video of the first knowledge games talk
Rough bootleg video shot by Jonathan Litwack with an iPhone (45 minutes)
Gamestorming webcast
by Dave Gray for the American Management Association (Opens on their site) (1 hour, including Q&A)
Tummelvision (audio-only podcast)
Dave Gray on Design, Gamestorming and more
Dave Gray speaks with Heather Gold and Deb Schultz of Tummelvision.
AMA podcast (audio only)
Dave Gray on How Games at Work Inspire Creativity
Dave Gray speaks with Doug Sohn of the American Management Association.
Forbes article
Gamestorming author Dave Gray on how games cut through creative chaos. Article by Mac Slocum.
