Object of Play Many of the games in this book are about seeing the bigger picture or relating a problem to its context. The 5 Whys game mirrors that motive to move beyond the surface of a problem and discover the root cause, because problems are tackled more sustainably when they’re addressed at the source. Number of Players […]
The way humans gain the lion’s share of what we know is through a slow process of gathering informational knowledge – accumulated layers of additive information based on years of exposure and experience. For example, my knowledge of Spanish is informational knowledge. I learned it through years of listening to Spanish speakers and eventually formalized it by […]
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Summary of the Plane Metaphor and why to use it (neuroscience reasoning) One way of organizing information is to formulate analogies and conceptual links with other things. The information can be represented by anything that helps you break out of habitual thinking patterns. We all create our reality when getting external information to our brains. We use […]
On May 4th we asked for your help: to share wisdom with students preparing to facilitate their first workshop. Your response flooded our inbox; it was reflective, generous, vulnerable and helpful. Thank you scrum masters, designers, authors, consultants, coaches, teachers, students and Gamestormers all over the globe. Common themes: Prepare to improvise Write your word-for-word […]
For more information Listen to Michael Schrage, research fellow with MIT Sloan School’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, describe the need for strategic KPIs, common pitfalls organizations encounter when grappling with new technologies and why co-creating dashboards in a workshop setting are fundamental to AI capability development. The game Read through your favorite Management publication […]
Humans live in language. It defines what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. Language is the bedrock of our cultures and societies. As with fish in water, we go about our daily business without paying much attention to the language around us and how it influences us. Information architect and […]
Any product change, project plan, change management initiative requires assessment of and approach to working with stakeholders, a term we use to describe anyone who can impact a decision. Stakeholders often slow or block change; in other cases, they bust obstacles and accelerate progress. To increase your likelihood of success, check out this activity from […]
Are you struggling to break down organizational silos, increase creativity, engagement and collaboration? Do you feel like the people in your company are resisting change? Is your company’s culture holding you back? Nobody denies the critical importance of culture to a company’s success. And yet, although everyone agrees that culture is of vital importance, culture […]
Measures of success vary across an organization. Executives concern themselves with company-wide Objectives involving Revenue, Cost, Profit, Margin and Customer Satisfaction. Further down the org chart, management and individual contributors rate performance against more detailed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tracking customer behavior: a product manager may measure app downloads, or number of shopping cart items […]
Object of play Personal Kanban is a tool for organizing your work to be more efficient and productive. Number of players Any number of people can play this game. Duration: 10-15 minutes. How to play 1. Divide a whiteboard or sheet of paper into four columns: Backlog, Ready, Doing, and Done. Or you can use […]
Object of playThe Hero’s Journey Agenda is a unique and different way to lay out the agenda for a meeting or workshop that creates a sense of adventure and builds anticipation for the meeting. Number of playersOne, usually the facilitator, created live in front of a group. Duration: 10-15 minutes. How to playI am going […]
We designed the Empathy Map at XPLANE many years ago, as part of a human-centered design toolkit we call Gamestorming. This particular tool helps teams develop deep, shared understanding and empathy for other people. People use it to help them improve customer experience, to navigate organizational politics, to design better work environments, and a host […]
Empathy map, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane. The empathy map, one of Gamestorming’s methods for understanding audiences, including users, customers, and other players in any business ecosystem, has gotten some press lately because it was featured in Alex Osterwalder‘s excellent book, Business Model Generation as a tool for discovering insights about customers. Here’s how it works: […]
Here’s a great article by Pete Sena of Digital Surgeons on the power of Gamestorming, called Breaking Up with Brainstorming: How Gamestorming Helps Build an Innovation Culture. It references research on some problems with brainstorming and why Gamestorming enhances the creative power of groups. Read the article.
Object of play You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking. This also works as a nice warm-up exercise to get people engaged with each other and thinking visually. Plus, it’s fun! Number of players Any number of people can […]
Object of play: The partnership canvas is a tool that enables visualization of current and/or future partnerships. It can also be used for early testing of the value creating potential of a partnership between two partnership candidates. The tool’s purpose is to define your business priority for partnering, and empathize with your partner to explore whether […]
This post written by guest author Clifton B. A while back I was working with a friend’s startup, building a web app that helps small businesses connect with their customers without having to pay for dedicated customer service teams. Still in the proof-of-concept stage, the developers had been wondering whether to introduce a handful of premium […]
Object of Play: This game helps you discover what you and your colleagues like best and least about your jobs. When doing something you love, it is easy to get lost in the activity for its own sake, which stimulates creativity and commitment to the task at hand. This can be applied to your work […]
Think about a game you really enjoy. Why do you play? What makes the game enjoyable? Why is it fun? Now think about your last meeting. Who was there? What was the goal of the meeting? What was the process you used to get the people to move toward the goal? Now think of the […]
Object of Play The first step of achieving your business goal is always the most difficult. Where do you start? Who can you talk to? Is there anybody that will support you in your risky journey? Fortunately, Deb Colden’s Circles of Influence can help you reach your action potential by identifying connections that will lead […]
Object of Play Sitting through status meetings is boring, right? Well, then why do many of us go home and watch status reports for an hour or more every night?We watch news shows, ‘fake’ news shows, Entertainment Tonight, TMZ, ESPN’s SportsCenter, and many more. Something about those status reports must be working better than the […]
Object of Play Plenty of us are visionaries, idea generators, or, at the very least, suggestion makers. But ideas never come to fruition without a plan. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Well done is better than well said.” Following up on a big idea with an executable action plan is one of the monumental differences between […]
Object of Play Communicating clearly and effectively is a challenge when there is a lot to say to a lot of people. It can be tempting to try to explain “everything all at once” to an audience and fail in the process. In the Understanding Chain game, a group shifts from a content focus to […]
Object of Play Quite naturally, most of us don’t think of products or services as being alive and animate. But there are a lot of benefits to imagining a product as a friend rather than an instrument. By pretending that a product has come to life, we can personalize and evolve its features in a […]
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 […]
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 […]
Sunni B. refreshed her union history during the latest Gamestorming session right down the street from the White House. Working with Union Privilege, a program of the AFL-CIO, together she used visual thinking and game techniques to devise their master plan for shifting from good to great. She invented a new game that actually isn’t in Gamestorming […]
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 […]
The most exciting thing about gamestorming is the creativity it allows me. I’m essentially freed to create an experience perfectly suited for my audience. Because while the games the folks at Xplane have created are effective, they are still just “old standards.” They are like Monopoly® or Scrabble®. Everyone can play and everyone can enjoy. […]
Object of Play In this method of prioritization, participants assign relative value to a list of items by spending an imaginary $100 together. By using the concept of cash, the exercise captures more attention and keeps participants more engaged than an arbitrary point or ranking system. Number of Players Small groups of 3–5 participants Duration of Play Medium; […]
Object of Play To truly create something new, we must challenge constraints. In this exercise, participants take an existing design, process, or idea and change one foundational aspect that makes it “impossible” in function or feasibility. For example: • “How do we build a house…in a day?” • “How do we create a mobile device…with no battery?” […]
Object of Play Organizations naturally look ahead to anticipate progress. But the past can be as informative as the future. When an organization undergoes systemic or cultural change, documenting its history becomes an important process. By collecting and visualizing the components of history, we necessarily discover, recognize, and appreciate what got us where we are today. We can see […]
Object of Play Words become more challenging to visualize as they become less literal. For example, the words computer and necktie offer immediate imagery. But the words strategy and justice are more abstract and lend themselves to broader visual interpretations. Graphic Jam is an all-purpose visualization game that you can conduct before many other games as a warm-up, but […]
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 […]
In the Back of the Napkin game, players on teams write/draw their answers to a provocative question on the back of a napkin. This game opens conversations and creates connections. Includes examples from the October, 2010, TEDxTC in St. Paul, MN.
Object of Play Bodystorming is simply brainstorming, but done with the body. It may look different depending on the preparations and location, but in the end all bodystorming is fundamentally about one thing: getting people to figure things out by trying things out. A group may explore one of the techniques described below to get […]
Social-Network-Un-Plugged is effective with groups of people who know each other well as well as those who do not know each other well.
The objective is to find connections, then to continue to explore how people in the team are connected. By graphically illustrating connections people begin to feel and understand that the similarities and accountabilities are more alike than they at first thought.
Katie Koch of Project: Interaction is Gamestorming with high-school students. Here’s an excerpt from her blog post where she explains how she used Graphic Jam (page 96) to get students thinking visually and to get their creative juices flowing: Looking for a fun way to brainstorm, we decided to adapt a game called Graphic Jam, […]
This game is credited to Cyd Harrell and has been used by Bolt Peters in several client brainstorming meetings. Objective of play: Improve the onboarding process of a product or service. Number of players: 5-30 Duration of play: 30-60 minutes How to play: Everyone is handed a piece of paper and a marker. Participants are […]
Object of Play: Co-create products or services using design insights gained from collaborative analysis of key frames of peoples’ activities from video clips recorded during ethnographic field work. Number of Players: 6 – 12 Duration of Play: 7 – 8 hours Required Resources: The Video Card Family Game requires use of a video camera (perhaps a smartphone), […]
“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 […]
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 […]
WHAT IS GAMESTORMING? Think back to the last time you played a game. What was the game? Why did you choose to play? Was it a simple game like tic-tac-toe, or something more complex, like Monopoly, Scrabble or Chess? Or maybe it was a game of basketball? Did you play with friends? With family? […]
Note: This approach is meant to be pretty flexible- other idea generating and prioritizing techniques may be substituted within the flow to suit the circumstances. Would like to hear how others approach this challenge. -James Object of Play: What has been a time-proven exercise in product development applies equally well in developing any concept: writing […]
Meeting games, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane. Games are not a new thing at work. In nearly every office environment games are in evidence. Be assured: you are part of a game whether you know it or not. Games are going on all around you and most of the time the rules are unclear, unspoken or […]
Creating a boundary matrix, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane. Boundary object is a term from sociology used to describe something that helps two disciplines exchange ideas and information, even when their languages and methods may be very different. Today I was in a call with a couple of colleagues, Lou Rosenfeld and Marko Hurst, who were […]
Empathy map, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane. The empathy map, one of XPLANE’s methods for understanding audiences, including users, customers, and other players in any business ecosystem, has gotten some press lately because it was featured in Alex Osterwalder‘s excellent book, Business Model Generation as a tool for discovering insights about customers. Here’s how it works: […]
After coming up with great ideas, the next challenge is figuring out the best way to make them happen. This exercise is one of many types of “scenario” games which can be used to test ideas and try out different approaches to bring them to life. When having discussions about how to do something, we […]
While it’s enjoyable and worthwhile to discuss the ideas behind Gamestorming, it’s more useful to experience them. The image below represents output from a visual-thinking game that you can “play” with your employees. Caution: Adults have a tendency to link Show and Tell to child’s play. This is a learning faux pas. It’s right up […]