One of our colleagues at Dachis Group, X-Plane Founder Dave Gray (@davegray), recently co-authored (along with @sunnibrown and @macgeo)and published an incredibly valuable collection of techniques for the use of games to help individuals collaborate and make decisions in a business setting. The book is called Gamestorming and a group of us here at Dachis Group North America though we would inaugurate our first Summer Reading session by reading it. We all got a lot out of it and thought we’d write up a few of our thoughts for any curious passers by.

Brian Kotlyar

Here at Dachis Group, and most likely for much of the audience of this blog, collaboration is typically discussed in the context of technology. When we think about collaboration we spend our time pondering how best to apply technology to first facilitate and then capture the fruits of group work. In all of our thinking about technology, we sometimes forget that no amount of software can compel people to innovate or create a culture of transparent dialog. The fact is that at its root, collaboration still requires a meeting of minds that is difficult to foster and even harder to replicate.  It is interesting then to think about the relationship between technology-enabled collaboration and Gamestorming – where the most advanced technology to be applied consists of a blue sharpie marker and perhaps an oversized Post-It.

After thinking hard about what Gamestorming means for Social Business Design, it seems that, even beyond the clear practical uses, as a practice it reminds us to consider enterprise collaboration in two equally important tracks: First, we must learn to think in terms of social technologies and structures for establishing a collaborative organization. This is the kind of thing that today’s social software is so very good at. Second, we must focus on the grassroots nature of collaboration – the sessions occurring every day in conference rooms and via e-mail where business gets done. This is the kind of thing that Gamestorming codifies and makes a whole lot easier. By applying both tracks of thinking to a clients’ problems we can create a system whereby social technology enables the amplification and documentation of the grassroots collaboration that Gamestorming promotes.

Gamestorming teaches us a valuable lesson that can sometimes be forgotten in the constant excitement over the latest and greatest enterprise social network or crowdsourcing platform.  The fact is that social technology doesn’t have very much to amplify in an environment without grassroots collaboration and grassroots collaboration doesn’t get an organization very far if it isn’t recorded for posterity and shared widely.

Ellen Reynolds

In the opening chapters, the authors discuss the importance of “fuzzy goals.” As opposed to clear and quantifiable goals, fuzzy goals are vague. These are the situations where the desired end state is not easy to see, and for knowledge workers, these are the most important situations to visualize, i.e., “What will success LOOK like?” These are also the situations where gamestorming can be instrumental to success.

Fuzzy goals give your team “a sense of direction and purpose while leaving team members free to follow their intuition,” and gamestorming is the means to move you closer to your end goal. This concept is extremely applicable to social business design – because the idea is new, we’re not exactly sure what a world of social businesses will look like. Setting fuzzy goals “motivates the general direction of our work without blinding us to opportunities” along the way. As a result, we’re able to adjust quickly based on what does and doesn’t draw us closer to our visualized end state.

Kate Rush Sheehy

Early adopters of ideas or technology are the masters of improvisation. When the rules and guidelines have yet to be written, it is anybody’s prerogative to define the future state. Gamestorming talks about using improvisation to create a new world of possibilities to explore. That’s a lot like what we’re doing with Social Business Design.

Some practitioners have been delivering socio-collaborative and 2.0 initiatives to their companies for several years. When those practitioners began, there wasn’t a community, or Council, to provide support and guidance. They had to improvise and create a plan from scratch. A major component of successful improv exercises and successful social business constructs is laying out basic principles that will help you to create simple, but loose structures to guide people’s thinking. The loose structure fosters spontaneity, which in turn spurs the process of discovery. If you can get  your team into discovery mode, you’re laying the groundwork for the possibility of some emergent outcomes.

The most interesting parallel I found between improvisation and social business solutions is that the learning is in the doing. You can’t realize the benefits of either until you dig your heels in, set up structure, and start discovering.

Lars Plougmann

Starting out my professional career in a big consulting firm, lots of great training was lavished on me. It would have been great to walk away from the training with a manual that set out everything in a logical fashion and offered further ideas on how to facilitate client interaction. Gamestorming is that kind of book.

Games, in this context, are exercises to help discover information or facilitate decision making. Referring to the exercises as games gives you permission to suspend the usual behavioral standards for a limited time, allowing creativity to surface. When the game ends you have a slew of fresh input for change and innovation.

I have already had the opportunity to put some of the games in the book into practice on real projects that we are working on at Dachis Group. While some games are proven classics of the consulting trade others are innovations. Some may seem silly on paper but prove their value in a real life situation.

Oh, and another thing you will learn from the book is that you already know how to draw [ed: here is proof]. That alone is totally worth it.

Have you read Gamestorming? What did you think? Also, what should we read next?