Author: Dave Gray

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Gamestorming for Distributed Teams

Gamestorming is an amazing way to improve the performance of teams. Unfortunately, Gamestorming doesn’t work too well when your team is distributed. In this guest post, written by Luke Hohmann (who also wrote the foreword to Gamestorming and his own nifty book, Innovation Games), Luke will describe some of the tools his company has created to enable distributed teams to gain the benefits of serious, collaborative play.

Framing the Games: Computer Supported Cooperative Work

Researchers in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) typically organize work as a grid in two dimensions. The first is time: either your doing work at the same time or at different times. The second is the physical structure of the participants: you’re either co-located, standing or sitting next to each other; or distributed, in different offices, buildings, or continents.

Here’s a sample picture. Happy gamestormers in the top left playing Prune the Future. The games described in our respective books occupy this quadrant as they are same-time, same place games. A Scrum team’s taskboard is shown in the lower left. In the lower right, we have a standard mailbox. And in the top right? Well now, that’s a problem for the our intrepid Gamestormer: you can’t easily put a sticky note or index card on your monitor and play games with other people.

But My Team Is Distributed!

Yup. The realities of the modern workforce means that you’re likely to be working in a distributed team. And while it is trivial to say that we’re working in an increasingly global set of team, it is not trivial to say that we’re working with a pretty crude set of tools to help us accomplish our goals. Unfortunately, that leaves people who want to Gamestorm in distributed teams with a lot of questions and not enough answers.

Consider, for example, this post that Dave and Luke wrote together. We agreed to write this together through a combination of email and tweets. Luke then wrote the first draft directly in WordPress. Dave edited this. And this cycle continued until we published it. According to the CSCW grid, we used  a different time/different place technology. And it worked well enough.

But what if we had wanted to work together on the same document at the same time? CSCW researchers have been working on this for quite some time. For example, in 1968 Doug Engelbart gave an amazing demonstration of shared, collaborative editing over a wide area network (see a great presentation on this, including cool videos, here). In the early 90’s researchers at the University of Michigan created ShrEdit, a shared (collaborative) document editing platform. A more recent example is EtherPad. These systems, and many others like them, provide excellent platforms for one kind of collaborative work – collaborative text editing.

Unfortunately, shared document editing is not the right kind of solution for distributed Gamestorming teams because each of the games has a unique set of goals, rules, and contexts. However, by understanding the kinds of collaborative goals that motivate Gamestorming, we can design a solution that meets their needs.

Visual Collaboration Games

Let’s focus on one class of Gamestorming games: Visual Collaboration Games. These are any game that:

  • leverage visual metaphors to serve as the “game board”, a guide to participants on the goals / objectives of the game, and a way to provide real-time feedback on the game;
  • use simple rules for structuring the placement “game tokens” (such as post-it notes), including how many tokens can be placed, the meaning of the tokens, and where and/or how the tokens can be placed.

This is an abstract definition, so let’s use two games to illustrate these concepts.

Empathy Map

Empathy Map

In this game, the visual metaphor is a stylized head that helps player develop a deeper, more empathetic, and more personal understanding of stakeholder’s experiences in a business ecosystem. The head is divided into sections based on aspects of that person’s sensory experiences, such as what they are thinking, feeling, saying, doing, and hearing.

Tokens are post-its or other artifacts that are placed on this visual metaphor represent the players best understanding of the person’s real, tangible, sensory experiences. For example, anything placed in the “hearing” section represents what that person might hear and how might hear it. While it is common to use Post-Its for this game, Luke has encouraged in-person players to add physical objects to the “empathy map game board” as a way to capture as much “empathy” as possible.

Prune the Product Tree (also known as Prune the Future)

Empathy Map

In this game, the visual metaphor of a tree is used to represent traditional product and/or service roadmaps. The evolutionary growth of the product or service is captured in the tree, with branches representing broad product capabilities or areas of service, and apples and leaves representing discrete roadmap items. Trees can be identified via various growth areas – “sooner” and “later” or “this year” or “next year”. The physical metaphor of pruning a tree to ensure healthy growth enables players to “prune” unnecessary features from a product or offers from a service portfolio.

No End In Sight To Visual Collaboration

Visual Collaboration Games are one of the most powerful classes of games that exist. And the supply of these games is inexhaustible: every visual image that we use in business can serve as the foundation of a visual collaboration game. Some examples:

Disappointed that your favorite game isn’t listed? Don’t be. While we’re trying to collect all of the games that we can into the Gamestorming wiki, the reality is that if you’re a good gamestormer or Innovation Gamer, you’re going to be inventing visual games as needed for special circumstances. And once you play them in-person, chances are pretty good that you’ll want to play them online.

Sounds Great! I Want To Play ONLINE Right Now!

Empathy MapExcellent! We were hoping you’d say that! Here is another image of the Empathy Map. 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 three icons that you can drag on your online Empathy Map:

  • Smiley Faces: Use smiley faces to indicate what would make your persona happy.
  • Grim Faces: Use grim faces to indicate what would make your persona concerned.
  • Frowns: Use frown faces to indicate what would make your persona unhappy.

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!

Playing Visual Collaboration Games

The benefits of playing in-person, co-located visual collaboration games are considerable. The visual metaphor guides the group in solving a critical problem. You have a shared artifact that captures key aspects of your collective understanding. The results of the game play can be used and shared with others. And many times you don’t have to tell the participants that they’re playing a game, which can be important when introducing serious games to organizations who might be resistant to change. Players can just smile and compliment themselves on having a good time solving a problem.

And now, the power of online games means that we can use the same visual metaphors to enable distributed teams to solve complex problems. We can add semantics to the images so that we know where items are placed. The system acts as a perfect Observer, silently recording every event, so that we can analyze the results of multiple game plays with many distributed teams. And the flexibility of online, visual collaboration means that we’re only limited by what we want to try.

We’re going to be adding more instant play, online collaborative games to the Gamestorming wiki over the next few weeks.

To learn more about how to convert any Doodle or image into an online, collaborative game, read this post.

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Pre-Mortem in action

Over on the inevitable blog, Cara Turner gives a great description of a Pre-Mortem exercise she conducted with an Agile development team.

Excerpt:

Introduction to the team:

This is a slightly different retrospective activity, that looks forward not back, but as if we’re looking backward. We’re going to pretend we’ve come to the end of the next sprint, and it’s been a miserable failure – everything that could have gone wrong did.

At this point the team flinched a bit – I had to emphasise that the idea is to find out what went wrong, so not to focus on the feeling so much as the causes.

 

Read the post here.

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Gamestorming in London

Design Jams are one- or two-day events where people get together to learn, collaborate and hone their design skills while working on real-life problems. On February 26, a group of people got together to design a mobile service. I wasn’t lucky enough to be there, but since I’m following the #gamestorming hashtag on Twitter I came across some great articles describing how they used gamestorming to get some great results out of the day:

My First Design Jam by Will Myddelton

Design Jam 2: A More Structured Design Process by Eewei

Design Jam London 2: Post-Mortem by Aral Balkan

Design Jam London 2: Same 9 Hours, 1 Brand New Challenge by Desigan Chinniah

Design Jam London 2 by Shek Man Tang

Thanks everyone for the blog posts. They help give a tangible sense of what the event felt like.

 

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5 Best Practices for Presentations

I had a surprise client turn into a favorite client recently, namely ViaTech Global Publishing. Kurt Heusner, the CMO, tracked me down like many of my clients – through the semantic web – and together we planned a really successful session for 75 of their top team members. I met with Kurt before Gamestorming was published and, because our planning continued after the book was released, we had the opportunity to design the 2.5-day meeting specifically around the participatory work in the book. We used techniques like The 5 Whys, The Blind Side, and Empathy Mapping and I gave the group a short talk on Best Practices for Presentations (you can click on the image above to see the five practices I chose). At the end of the retreat each team gave a storyboarded presentation as a sales pitch for ViaTech and the visual thinking the group did the two days prior was intensive. Kurt and I both got fantastic feedback from the employees (the visual and participatory work was, for me, almost magical to witness) and everyone got a copy of Gamestorming. I’m telling you, folks, if you really do want problem-solving and innovation to occur, you’ll do no harm to dive into visual thinking meeting techniques. They give you, as I’ve witnessed dozens and dozens of times, productivity on steroids. See David Sibbet’s recent book, Visual Meetings, for more proof positive. Until next time, game on.

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TEDx Austin – Lo Tech Social Network (p. 105 of Gamestorming)

As many of you know, TEDx events have sprung up all over the world. Planning the bigger events takes a lot of time and effort from volunteers who are serious about “ideas worth spreading.” I’m one of those volunteers, having been on the production team for TEDx Austin since its inception. The team was very supportive of our book, Gamestorming, when it was released and we used the next group meeting as an opportunity to demonstrate the value of the visual-thinking activities within. What you see above is an artifact from a recent meeting with some of the best design, marketing and UX firms in Austin. It was a creative brainstorm designed to put the “hive mind” together to see how we can make the 2011 event better and bolder than last year’s (which was very well done, in large part to Nancy Giordano‘s solid mind and infectious enthusiasm). I’d love to be able to show the other visual artifacts from the meeting, alas, that content is intended to be a surprise for the audience.

Some tips for running the Lo Tech Social Network game (on p. 105 of the book): This game is an opener and it really contributes to warming up groups that otherwise may be slow to wake up or timid about contributing, particularly if they’re in a group of their professional peers. (Note: If the people are strangers who have never heard of each other, this game won’t work. At least 1/2 of the participants need to have some knowledge of the others.) Position your white space by a food-and-drink area so the participants can loiter and make connections while they (sometimes awkwardly) stand around before the meeting begins. You can have written instructions on a flip chart next to the space they’re playing in, but it’s also good to have a visual example already in the white space (at least two sticky notes connected by a line that says how the people are connected) and you’ll find that people deduce what to do. And of course you can have a facilitator placed near the area to give people the rules of the game and supply them with markers and sticky notes. Lo Tech Social Network gets fun fast and it alleviates the desire to run the old “My-name-is _______ and-one-thing-people-don’t-know-about-me-is _______” snoozer. This is a faster way to accomplish the same goal and to actually show how small the world can be. And if you want to make the game less formal, start off the visual example by writing a comment like, “we have the same taste in women” or “we went to the same nudist colony.” If you’ve got a tight-knit group already, let them be goofy. It makes it a funnier experience.

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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 know why we’re playing it.  We can play games that are tried and true, we can adapt them and combine them, and we can create entirely new games, as needed.

In my own words, it’s a culture of the poor-in-spirit who want to take many small leaps of faith (as in I’d like to check this out) rather than just one big one (as in Trust me!)  Gamestorming makes real my belief that every way of figuring things out can be shared as a game.  I’d love to know, apply and share a directory of these many ways in math, science, engineering, medicine, finance, law, ethics, philosophy, theater, art, music, architecture, agriculture, homemaking and many other fields. Happily, Gamestorming is an inviting community, and for me, a logical place from which to reach out to other practices and appreciate them.

And so I learned of Dave Snowden and the Cognitive Edge research network focused on sensemaking.  They develop and share a set of methods, some of which, like Ritual Dissent, are very much games in the Gamestorming sense.  I believe that others, like the Cynefin framework, make for advanced games, which take some time to learn. I engaged Dave by way of Twitter. He tweeted: Give me a reference to gamestorming and I will happily take a look.  The best summary that I could find was the Amazon review, which reproduces the back cover.  So I thought a good project would be to create a Wikipedia article on Gamestorming.

Wikipedia’s guidelines for inclusion don’t allow articles to be created for neologisms.  A subject most be notable.  So I included academic references to Gamestorming, such as Jon H.Pittman’s syllabus for Design as Competitive Strategy, Christa Avampato’s use of Gamestorming in her social media marketing class and Franc Ponti’s talk on Trends in innovation for restless people. I submitted my article for review by Wikipedia editors.  Within an hour or so, they put it up: the Gamestorming article.

I include below the references to the origins of the many games.  The Wikipedia editors took them out of the article.  That’s unfortunate because the Gamestorming authors took care to credit the people who created, popularized or inspired the games.  Some of the games have roots way back:

Since the 1970s, notably in Silicon Valley, new games are contributing to a culture of facilitating creativity:

  • 4 Cs is based on a game by Matthew Richter in the March 2004 publication of Thiagi GameLetter.
  • Anti-Problem is based on Reverse It from Donna Spencer’s design games website, http://www.designgames.com.au
  • Brainwriting is credited to Michael Michailko’s Thinkertoys and also Horst Geschke and associates at the Batelle Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, and also related to 6-3-5 Brainwriting developed by Bernd Rohrbach.
  • Bodystorming was coined by Colin Burns at CHI’94 in Boston, Massachusetts. See: Bodystorming.
  • Business Model Canvas was designed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, and featured in their book, Business Model Generation.
  • Campfire was inspired by Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence (Rethinking Theory) by Roger Schank and Gary Saul Morson.
  • Customer, Employee, Shareholder is based on the Stakeholder Framework developed by Max Clarkson in A Stakeholder Framework for Analyzing and Evaluating Corporate Social Performance in the Academy of Management Review (1995).
  • Design the Box is attributed, independently, to Luke Hohmann, Jim Highsmith and Bill Schackelford.
  • Context map, Cover Story, History Map, Visual Agenda and The Graphic Gameplan are credited to The Grove Consultants International.
  • Fishbowl is based on ideas from Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Sam Kaner et al.
  • Force Field Analysis is based on Kurt Lewin’s framework Force Field Analysis.
  • Graphic Jam is inspired by Leslie Salmon-Zhu of International Forum for Visual Practitioners.
  • Help Me Understand is adapted from Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making by Sam Kaner and inspired by Five W’s and H in Techniques of Structured Problem Solving, Second Edition by A.B.VanGundy, Jr.
  • Heuristic Ideation Technology is documented by Edward Tauber in his 1972 paper HIT:Heuristic Ideation Technique, A Systematic Procedure for New Product Search.
  • Image-ination is based on Picture This! adapted from the Visual Icebreaker Kit.
  • Make a World is inspired by Ed Emberley’s book.
  • Open Space was invented by Harrison Owen, author of Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. See: Open Space.
  • Pecha Kucha / Ignite, first held in Tokyo in 2003, was devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture. See: Pecha Kucha.
  • Post-Up is based on exercises in Rapid Problem-Solving with Post-it Notes by David Straker.
  • The Pitch and Value Map are by Sarah Rink.
  • Red:Green Cards are by Jerry Michalski.
  • Speedboat, 20/20 Vision and Prune the Future are based on Luke Hohmann’s innovation games in his book Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play.
  • Talking Chips was inspired by the email program Attent by Byron Reeves.
  • Wizard of Oz was pioneered in the 1970’s in the development of the airport kiosk and IBM’s listening typewriter.
  • The World Cafe as practiced at The World Cafe.
  • Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and especially, James Macanufo contributed many new games to the Gamestorming book.

Please, let’s remember all who have created games. They are our points of departure for Gamestorming as a culture.

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Gamestorming Cheat Sheet

The Gamestorming book lists more than 80 games.  I share a visual cheat sheet that I made in my own exploration of how the games fit together.

You can say, I made a game of it.  First, at my Self Learners wiki, I listed out the games, with links to the Gamestorming wiki, and for each game, I noted the object of play, as highlighted in the book.  Encouraged by Dave Gray on Twitter, I pushed on to see how they might fit together.  I empathized with each game’s purpose and grouped together different games that sought the same goal.  I used the Dia diagram editor to make an Affinity Map that related the groups.  At first, I just laid them down, from opening games to closing games, from left to right, laying together groups that felt related.  I printed out the diagram, took a Break for lunch, and over quesadillas I made sense of my feelings and thought through a theory.  This, for me, is the Eureka! part, which draws on the years of Gamestormers’ experience by which the games are real, tried and true.  I noticed that some games seem more social, touchy-feely, but others seem more technical, fleshing out systems.  (A distinction that reminds me of the Fishbowl).  They seem to represent implicit vs. explicit knowledge.  They also seem to work-in-parallel in a sequence of stages.  Here’s the initial diagram, which I then reorganized:

Initial Draft of Gamestorming Cheat Sheet by Andrius Kulikauskas

I see a process of transforming an existing solution into a new solution: Consent -> Care -> Understand -> Transform -> Innovate -> Validate -> Commit. I think that the climax is when we shift to a new perspective, for example, when we shift from features to benefit, from our answers to our audience’s questions, from our processes to our activities’ significance to others, from what we want to say to what we want others to hear. Once we’ve made this shift, then we’ll find an incremental way to innovate, we’ll vet that and commit to it. But to prepare for that shift, we have to sift through the details and understand what we’re involved in; and to do that wholeheartedly, we have to orient ourselves around our dreams and our concern for each other; and that depends on our voluntary participation. I imagine that this horizontal movement takes place at many scales, fractally, from the smallest tasks to the largest missions, and certain steps may be skipped over, or rushed over, especially for smaller projects. I’ve also arrayed the games vertically, along a spectrum, as to whether they help us make progress explicitly, fleshing out structures of knowledge, or make progress implicitly, building consensus around how we feel. I think if we pursue both, then our group’s commitment is both intellectual and emotional. I conclude that I myself, in working with others, should focus more on the emotional side.  (Click for the large image).

Cheat Sheet for Gamestorming by Andrius Kulikauskas

Oh! because I’m showing this to visual thinkers, I realized (peer-pressure!) that they’ll be disappointed if I keep it abstract.  I got out my oil pastel crayons to draw, as in the Visual Glossary game.  Drawing helped me focus on the main point, explicit vs. implicit.  I suppose that I drew a wave to represent the depths of the unconscious, and forward motion, and to leave a lot of open space for the diagram.  Then I remembered my first large painting, a muse for the fifth day of creation, (she’s Jesus), cutting paths with scissors for the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea.  That pushed me to explain birds fly high to see the big picture and fish swim deep to win consensus.  That clicked with some people, and got me thinking further, in that I keep wondering what’s relevant to God (Stakeholder Analysis), that we can think of one God beyond us, like the bird, but also God within each of us, as with the school of fish.  I’m thinking that each game takes a little leap of faith and each lets us dialogue with God in a particular way.  Here’s a sketch of my theory, more broadly, in terms of ways of figuring things out. (Welcome to My World!)

Muse of 5th Day of Creation by Andrius Kulikauskas at Uzupio Galera, Republic of Uzupis