In recent months our Amsterdam office has been leading a number of Gamestorming and Visual Thinking workshops for clients in Jordan, Finland, Switzerland and the UK.
In our consulting practice at XPLANE|Dachis Group we use visual thinking to guide our clients from complexity to clarity and ultimately to better storytelling. Our consultant-designer teams facilitate visual conversations to explore complex information, and we then work closely with clients to craft compelling visual explanations in print, animated and interactive formats that are designed to resonate with the right audience and drive business results. Our discovery and design work invariably tackles specific problems and delivers concrete solutions that address carefully defined business goals.
It often happens that clients who work closely with us on individual problems become interested in learning more about how to apply our approach to a variety of challenges they face in their work. Many have read Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo, but need help putting into practice the wealth of techniques offered in the book. This is where our workshops come in.
The workshops are designed to give participants an intensive hands-on introduction to some core ideas and skills we use in our practice. The Gamestorming book is an extremely rich resource. It is a collection of visual thinking games and techniques for solving a wide variety of challenges, from innovating product/service concepts to creating compelling pitches to fostering better group collaboration. Given the wide variety of applications for Gamestorming, our workshops come in different flavours and are always customized to fit individual needs.
We combine theory with practice to give participants an understanding of how to confidently apply our methods to real-world problems. Our goal is always to ensure that they can go to work the next day and immediately apply what we have taught them. We emphasise the value of drawing, not as an artistic exercise but as a way of developing and communicating ideas. We also introduce techniques for understanding one’s audience, managing difficult conversations in dynamic ways, and building on each other’s ideas to generate innovative concepts. Above all we emphasise the importance of fun.
As with our discovery sessions, part of the thrill of each workshops is that it reflects the unique talents of the people in the room. Each group has different strengths and faces different challenges. In a recent workshop with a group of Enterprise Architects I saw that the participants were quick to absorb the principles of visual communication and apply them in playful ways to personal stories. However, when it came time to apply these principles to work-related problems they immediately returned to the familiar boxes, arrows and labels they used in their daily work. This approach would work well for other systems thinkers in their community but would not necessarily be as compelling for the time-starved and information-overloaded seniorleaders they wanted to connect with in their organization.
We talked about alternative approaches they could take, building on their schematic representations to include metaphorical as well as literal representations of how things “look in the world.” As an example, in my image below the concept of “family” could be represented literally as a family portrait, metaphorically as an image showing what family represents (home, love…), or schematically as a family tree.
Literal, Metaphorical and Schematic representations of "family".
We decided to push them out of their comfort zone by only allowing them to work with literal and metaphorical representations, purely for the purpose of this exercise. They quickly and enthusiastically transformed their box diagrams into vivid, dynamic and humourous stories that I still remember weeks down the line. Who could fail to listen to a pitch that promises the audience a peaceful summer of fishing thanks to the timesaving initiative proposed by the storyteller?
As in any teaching experience, the exchange enriches the teacher at least as much as the student. We always enjoy the opportunity to run these workshops because they give us a chance to reflect on our practice and try out new approaches. Our participants are always curious and engaged, offering new insights or pushing us to explore new questions. Gamestorming, like our work, is a living practice. It is constantly evolving and we continue to learn together. These workshops help to give participants the confidence to start using the existing toolkit, but that is only the beginning. More importantly they are an invitation to join us in exploring the world of visual thinking and to contribute new tools, methods and ideas for everyone to play with.
