Gamestorming (Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo)

A fantastic book for anyone interested in facilitating sessions on innovation (or in fact facilitating many other types of teambuilding sessions too).  The book starts with the theory of how to construct effective sessions, don't be put off by the title it isn't about games - that's just the term the authors use for facilitated sessions.
Then there is a collection of many types of session to run based on the outcomes you want from your session.

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A fuzzy goal is one that "motivates the general direction of the work, without blinding the team to opportunities along the journey."

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Innovative teams need to navigate ambiguous, uncertain, and often complex information spaces. What is unknown usually far outweighs what is known. In many ways it's a journey in the fog, where the case studies haven't been written yet, and there are no examples of where it's been done successfully before. Voyages of discovery involve greater risks and more failures along the way than other endeavors. But the rewards are worth it.

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The opening is not the time for critical thinking or skepticism; it's the time for blue-sky thinking, brainstorming, energy, and optimism. The keyword for opening is "divergent":

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You are searching for something that you may not find. You will almost certainly find things you don't expect. You have only a vague idea of what you will encounter along the way, and yet, like a turtle, you must carry everything you need on your back.

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The most common and powerful fire-starter is the question. A good question is like an arrow you can aim at any challenge.

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Another common fire-starter is called fill-in-the-blank, in which you craft a short phrase or sentence and ask people to fill in the blank like they would on a test.

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Affinity mapping is a common method that uses meaningful space to sort a large set of nodes into a few common themes. It is a way to rapidly get a group of people aligned about what they are working on together. First, generate a set of nodes using the Post-Up game or some other node-generation method (see Chapter 4). Next, create a meaningful space by dividing a whiteboard or other visual area into three columns. Ask people to sort the sticky notes into three columns that "feel like they belong together" without trying to name the columns. It's important that they not try to name the columns. Naming the columns too early will force them back into familiar, comfortable patterns.

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I cannot forbear to mention...a new device for study...which may seem trivial and almost ludicrous...[but] is extremely useful in arousing the mind...Look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones... you may discover a resemblance to landscapes...battles with figures in action...strange faces and costumes...and an endless variety of objects....     -- Leonardo da Vinci

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Improvisation is a way of thinking with your body. In role play, you take on the role of a character, imagine a situation, and act as you think your character would act in that situation. Putting yourself in another person's shoes helps you to empathize with that person's goals and challenges, and can lead to insights and better solutions.

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You don't need to know the final destination; only the next step in the journey. Just keep your eye on the fuzzy goal—the mountaintop, the imagined thing over the horizon—and the next step, the next game, that moves you one step in approximately the right direction.

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There are two big questions that are worth asking whenever you come across something new. First, what is it? And second, what can I do with it? The first question has to do with examination, while the second deals with experimentation.

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Opening questions are intended to open a portal into the game world.

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The trick of opening is to get people to feel comfortable with the process of working together while generating as many ideas as possible.

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The focus of opening questions is to find things you can work with later.

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Navigating questions help you assess and adjust your course while the game is underway. For example, summarize key points and confirm that people agree to ensure that you understand and that the group is aligned.

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Is the team fatigued? Are they frustrated or sapped of energy?

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Examining questions narrow your inquiry to focus on details, specifics, and observable characteristics. They make abstract ideas more concrete by quantifying and qualifying them.

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Experimental questions invoke the imagination. They are about possibility. What can we do with it? What opportunities does it create? Experimental questions are concerned with taking you to a higher level of abstraction to find similarities with other things, to make unlikely and unexpected connections.

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Closing questions serve the opposite function from opening questions. When you are opening you want to create as much divergence and variation as possible. When you are closing you want to focus on convergence and selection. Your goal at this stage is to move toward commitment, decisions, and action.

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The Graphic Gameplan uses a precisely designed set of meaningful spaces to organize people's thinking and move from ideas to action. Challenges are represented as a rough landscape, actions as an arrow, success factors as wheels, goals as a target, and so on.

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Most people draw a stick figure by starting with the head and adding the body afterward. This way of drawing a stick figure will almost always result in a big-headed, stiff stick figure. When drawing a person, you will get a much better effect if you start with the center of gravity and work outward. Draw a rectangle to represent the trunk of the body, trying to keep it at approximately the same angle.

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The next most prominent feature is the legs; they connect the person to the ground and have the most impact on the body's position. Draw a line to represent the ground and add lines for the legs and feet to connect the body to the ground.

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The next most important element to conveying attitude is the hands. We use our hands for nearly everything we do. Have you ever heard the advice given to public speakers to use their hands and to gesture to help them reinforce their meaning? The same principle applies to stick figures. Now try drawing the arms in position. A small circle is usually sufficient to represent the hands.

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Now take a look at the angle of the neck and head relative to the rest of the body. Notice that they are at different angles. Unless you are a soldier standing at attention, this is nearly always the case. We are constantly turning our heads to see better, to listen carefully, and so on. See if you can draw the head and attach it to the body with a single line at the right angle.

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Now that we have finished the figure we can think about the face. Think about the various smiley faces and other emoticons you can make on a computer keyboard. Those same combinations will suffice for nearly any facial expression you want. Adding a short line for the nose will help you show which direction the head is pointing.

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This can be especially important when you want to show two people interacting with each other. You can use the same principles you learned earlier to make the mailbox, by combining basic shapes from the visual alphabet. I live in the United States, where our mailboxes look like R2-D2 of Star Wars fame. Depending on where you live, yours may differ. I hope this short demonstration has convinced you that basic sketching skills are not out of your reach. Once you become comfortable with the preceding exercises, you can use them to help others become more comfortable with sketching

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In numerous workshops, I have found that you can get through these exercises with a group in about 10 to 15 minutes. In the time it takes for a brief coffee break you can familiarize a group with these concepts and get them comfortable enough to begin sketching out their ideas.

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The idea of bringing improv into a business context may seem intimidating, but the challenges are mostly in your mind. You're already improvising at work. In GameChangers: Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, improv expert Mike Bonifer reminds us that all of life is improvisation: from a conversation at the dinner table to the way we respond to unexpected situations, improv is natural; we do it all the time.

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If you have ideas, comments, or questions you can join the ongoing conversation at http://www.gogamestorm.com.

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Card sorting is a practice used frequently by information architects and designers to gather and structure inputs for a variety of purposes.

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Empathy Map OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to quickly develop a customer or user profile.

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Ask the group to describe—from this person's point of view—what this person's experience is, moving through the categories from seeing through feeling. The goal of the exercise is to create a degree of empathy for the person with the group. The exercise shouldn't take more than 15 minutes. Ask the group to synthesize: What does this person want? What forces are motivating this person? What can we do for this person?

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Creating a forced ranking may be difficult for participants, as it requires they make clear-cut assessments about a set of items. In many cases, this is not the normal mode of operation for groups, where it is easier to add items to lists to string together agreement and support. Getting people to make these assessments, guided by clear criteria, is the entire point of forced ranking.

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WhoDo OBJECT OF PLAY The objective of this game is to brainstorm, plan, and prioritize actions.

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3-12-3 Brainstorm OBJECT OF PLAY This format for brainstorming compresses the essentials of an ideation session into one short format. The numbers 3-12-3 refer to the amount of time in minutes given to each of three activities: 3 minutes for generating a pool of observations, 12 for combining those observations into rough concepts, and 3 again for presenting the concepts back to a group. Essential to this format is strict time keeping. The "ticking clock" forces spontaneous, quick-fire decisions and doesn't allow for overthinking.

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In a typical group setting, extroverts tend to dominate the verbal contributions. And while their contributions are certainly important, it can be difficult to hear from quieter players who also have something valuable to offer. Let the players know that this play is intentionally silent. It affords the quiet people the opportunity to generate ideas without having to verbalize to the whole group, and it gives you certainty that you'll hear from every player in the room. Brainwriting also allows ideas to emerge before being critiqued and creates a space for them to be co-created, with multiple owners, and therefore a greater chance of follow-through.

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This warm-up does not result in a problem definition that will satisfy an engineer; rather, it engages participants in defining the challenge in a simplified form. It is a first step in bringing a group together under a common purpose, elevating the problem above the noise to become something they care to solve.

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People are well versed in having conversations; what most of us aren't used to is listening, observing, and being accountable for our observations. The Fishbowl game, therefore, is about engaging skills that in many of us have become rusty. So, despite the fact that it may look as though the action happens in the players' conversation, the action in this game happens in the outer circle, with the observers.

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Graphic Jam is an all-purpose visualization game that you can conduct before many other games as a warm-up, but it's also a useful game in itself. Visualizing abstract concepts supports logo development, presentation design, website design, metaphor development for e-learning, and so on. It exercises the visual part of our cortex—which accounts for 75% of our sensory neurons—and turns on parts of our minds that don't get much action in a typical business setting.

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History Map 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.

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Mapping a history should be an enjoyable experience for the meeting leader and the participants. It's a time for storytelling, reflection, and appreciation of the life and experience of the organization. While you're helping the group document the history, set a supportive tone and encourage camaraderie, storytelling, and honesty—even about the hard times.

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Low-Tech Social Network OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to introduce event participants to each other by co-creating a mural-sized, visual network of their connections.

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Pecha Kucha/Ignite OBJECT OF PLAY These fast, structured talks enable people to share ideas quickly and with a minimum of distraction. In addition, it puts the pressure on the person conveying the information to do so in a concise and compelling fashion.

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The rule of Pecha Kucha is 20 × 20: Presenters are allowed 20 slides, and they can spend 20 seconds per slide. Images are forwarded automatically—they are not under the control of the speaker.

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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."

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The participants' task is to create a poster that explains their topic. There are two constraints: It must be self-explanatory. If you gave it to a person without walking her through it, would she understand? It must be visual. Words and labels are good, but text alone will not be enough to get people's attention, or help them

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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 in Chapter 4) or "vote with their feet" 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. Pre-Mortem OBJECT OF PLAY Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a "postmortem" to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming. A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful. NUMBER OF PLAYERS Any, but typically small teams will have the most open dialogue DURATION OF PLAY Depends on the scope of an effort; allow up to five minutes for each participant HOW TO PLAY

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A pre-mortem is best conducted at the project's kickoff, with all key team members present and after the goals and plan have been laid out and understood. The exercise starts with a simple question: "What will go wrong?" though it may be elevated in phrasing to "How will this end in disaster?" This is an opportunity for the team to reflect on their collective experience and directly name risks or elephants lurking in the room. It's a chance to voice concerns that might otherwise go unaddressed until it's too late.

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Conducting a pre-mortem is deceptively simple. At the beginning of a project, the forward momentum and enthusiasm are often at their highest; these conditions do not naturally lend themselves to sharing notions of failure. By conducting a pre-mortem, a group deliberately creates a space to share their past learning, at a time when they can best act on it.

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Show and Tell taps into the power of metaphors to let players share their assumptions and associations around a topic. If you see multiple show pieces that don't exactly represent delight around a topic, that's a signal that the players may have some concerns that need to be addressed. Don't overanalyze the objects; pay more attention to the way the players describe the parallels to the topic. As the team leader, encourage and applaud honesty during the stories, and write down every point that players make that seem important to them. Keep the rest of the players quiet while someone is showing and telling.

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Show Me Your Values OBJECT OF PLAY Employees' perceptions of a company's values, whether they're conscious or not, contributes to their morale and their willingness to go the extra mile to support the mission. To get a sense of how employees perceive the values that drive an organization, an initiative, a system-wide change, or any other topic, play Show Me Your Values.

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Your job is to create a space in which people can say something that may be taboo but that everyone is thinking.

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Along with a RACI matrix and other "people + project" activities, stakeholder analysis is a basic framing tool for any project. For leaders and managers, it clearly scopes out who has what level of input and interest in a project, and can help to align decisions appropriately.

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Many of us make the mistaken assumption that others see what we see and know what we know. No one in the world shares your internal system map of reality. The best way to compare notes, so to speak, is to actually draw an external representation of what you think is happening.

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The mapping of an organization's existing business model, including its strengths and weaknesses, is an essential starting point to improve the current business model and/or develop new future business models. At the very least the game leads to a refined and shared understanding of an organization's business model. At its best it helps players develop strategic directions for the future by outlining new and/or improved business models for the organization.

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Employees spend hours sitting in training sessions, sifting through orientation manuals, and playing corporate e-learning games to learn the know-how for their new positions. But the reality is that the bulk of employee knowledge is gained through storytelling. Employees train each other by sharing their personal and professional experiences. Campfire leverages our natural storytelling tendencies by giving players a format and a space in which to share work stories—of trial and error, failure and success, competition, diplomacy, and teamwork. Campfire is useful not only because it acts as an informal training game, but also because it reveals commonalities in employee perception and experience.

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The goal of this game is to improve a product or strategy by thinking through various scenarios and alternatives. By turning the exercise into a competition as well as a storytelling game, players are more likely to get engaged and immerse themselves in the scenarios. Keeping it lighthearted and fun will increase the energy. It shouldn't feel like work.

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Customer, Employee, Shareholder OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to imagine possible futures from multiple perspectives.

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What has been a time-proven exercise in product development applies equally well in developing any new idea: writing the elevator pitch. When developing and communicating a vision for something,

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To set up the generating phase, write these headers in sequence on flip charts: Who is the target customer? What is the customer need? What is the product name? What is its market category? What is its key benefit? Who or what is the competition? What is the product's unique differentiator?

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Five-Fingered Consensus OBJECT OF PLAY Like Red/Green Cards (discussed later in this chapter), this is a technique for managing the feedback loop between a facilitator and a large group. When working in breakouts or as a large group, it may be necessary to periodically gauge the level of perceived consensus, without spending an unnecessary amount of time talking about it.

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Give-and-Take Matrix OBJECT OF PLAY The goal of this game is to map out the motivations and interactions among actors in a system. The actors in this case may be as small-scale as individuals who need to work together to accomplish a task, or as large-scale as organizations brought together for a long-term purpose. A give-and-take matrix is a useful diagnostic tool, and helps players explore how value flows through the group.

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Help Me Understand is based on the underlying (and accurate) assumption is that employees come to meetings with widely different questions around a topic or a change. It assumes leadership can anticipate some questions and concerns but can't possibly anticipate them all. No one knows the questions employees have better than the employees themselves, so this game gives them a chance to externalize what's on their minds and have leadership be responsive in a setting outside the once-a-year leadership retreat. It also allows the players to discover overlaps with other players' questions and to notice the frequency with which those questions occur—something

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The Make a World game appeals to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners because of its layers of interaction. It's useful (and downright fun) because it lets players imagine the future and take action to create a first version of it.

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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.

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Many decisions often boil down to one's basic choices between benefit and harm. By capturing these specifics for a key person, your group may uncover the most relevant points to bring up in presenting or influencing the key person's decision.

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Capture the answers on one side of the person: What does a bad day look like for him? What is he afraid of? What keeps him awake at night? What is he responsible for? What obstacles stand in his way? A persona's gains can be the inversion of the pain situation—or can go beyond. Capture these on the opposite side by asking: What does this person want and aspire to? How does he measure success? Given the subject at hand, how could this person benefit? What can we offer this person?

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Product Pinocchio is a game designed to establish, refine, and evolve the features of a product or service so that it becomes more valuable to the end user. By personifying it, we can better relate to it and better craft it into a "friend" that a consumer might want to take home.

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The object of this game is to quickly diagnose a group's level of understanding of the steps in a process.

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Through this exercise, the group will define an existing process at a high level and uncover areas of confusion or misunderstanding.

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Sometimes responsibilities aren't clear. Nothing erodes morale and performance faster than a difficult problem that belongs to someone else—or to everyone. When these situations raise their head, it may be necessary to call a group together to sort out who does what. By creating a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix,

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Feedback is difficult to manage in large group settings. For the presenter and the audience to track with each other, they need a means to communicate their approval, disagreement, or confusion as the event progresses. Red:Green Cards provide a simple means for channeling this feedback.

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Speedboat is a short and sweet way to identify what your employees or clients don't like about your product/service or what's standing in the way of a desired goal. As individuals trying to build forward momentum on products or projects, we sometimes have blind spots regarding what's stopping us. This game lets you get insight from stakeholders about what they think may be an obstacle to progress.

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Talking Chips OBJECT OF PLAY A recurring challenge in group work is managing discussions so that every individual has a chance to contribute, and no individuals dominate the meeting. By using simple "talking chips" as a currency for contribution, a group can self-manage the flow of participation.

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Understanding Chain 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 an audience focus, and draws out a meaningful, linear structure for communication.

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Value Mapping OBJECT OF PLAY The end goal of value mapping is to build a visual matrix that quickly and clearly defines areas of interest for something—it can be a service, a product, a plan, a website. It consists of asking people to choose a limited number of features from a bigger collection and then plotting their choices against a matrix. The result can be presented back in a template that resembles a light box,

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The Virtuous Cycle OBJECT OF PLAY The goal of this game is to discover opportunities to transform an existing, linear process into a more valuable and growing process by taking a different viewpoint. This is useful in examining processes that are deemed "worth repeating," such as the customer experience.

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20/20 Vision is about asking players to thoughtfully evaluate priorities as a group. The first phase of the game—describing and capturing the benefits—is significant because it lays the groundwork for the hard part: determining priorities. It can be challenging to get a group to rank its projects, all of which seem important in some way.

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Employees are human beings, and every human being likes to be acknowledged. To appreciate employee contributions, celebrate their accomplishments, and build camaraderie among team members, a Memory Wall works wonders.

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Plus/Delta

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Make two columns: one for "plus" and one for "delta" (the Greek symbol for change).

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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

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Prune the Future OBJECT OF PLAY People who work in large organizations know that most change doesn't happen immediately or in broad sweeps. It happens incrementally by taking small, strategic steps. Prune the Future uses a tree as a metaphor to show how the future of anything can be shaped, one leaf at a time.

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On a flip chart or whiteboard, create a matrix that outlines WHO / WHAT / WHEN.

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this approach starts with the "WHO" (the people who will be taking the actions). Put every participant's name into the matrix in this column. Ask each participant what concrete next steps they can commit to. Place this in the WHAT column.