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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

Plus/DeltaHere 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!

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Open Space

Meshforum 2006

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.

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Poster Session

Meshforum 2006

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.

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Break

Take a 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.

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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.

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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:

  1. You will never get the complete list and may miss significant opportunities.
  2. You will end up talking about an issue, which is not the most important issue.
  3. 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.

  1. Just the Facts—Create a [[facts map]] and briefly share facts and figures related to the topic. No opinions, just (verifiable) facts, please.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Prune Your Arguments—Delete any argument on your list that someone else also brings up as soon as you hear it.
  5. Be Terse—Relentlessly end any discussions, long-winded stories, or salvo of arguments.
  6. Exhaust Yourself—She or he who passes last, ‘wins’. Still not exhausted? Loop back to 3.
  7. 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.
  8. 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

Exempli gratiā

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