Summary: "Knowledge work is fundamentally different: workers are expected not so much to perform standard roles but to generate creative, innovative results that surprise and delight customers and colleagues." Gamestorming, page xv If you've read Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind or Seth Godin's Linchpin, you're likely already aware that there's a new skill set required for professional success in the 21st century. The days of following a step by step job description are dead, and the future belongs to those who can innovate; those who can "surprise and delight their customers and colleagues". Which, of course, is easier said than done. Imagine my delight then when I came across a slim book called Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers. Fully living up to its (sub)title, Gamestorming is an easy-to-comprehend-and-apply guidebook to a new method of brainstorming; a world in which we use the basic foundations of games (yes, games) to think through challenging or sophisticated problems. The book provides not only 80 some-odd pre-built games (games that you can use immediately to take your brainstorming/meetings sessions to a whole new level), but also provides a comprehensive explanation of how games are designed and best utilized, allowing the reader to start to visualize their own potential games to use with colleagues and/or clients. For those of us who were hardwired through our education to identify a process for solving a problem, Gamestorming offers a refreshing look at the real world we live in, and how we can navigate the challenges of our daily professional lives in a fun and productive manner. Golden Egg Get Fuzzy "A fuzzy goal is one that 'motivates the general direction of the work, without blinding the team to opportunities along the journey.'" Gamestorming, page 7 Like Chris Columbus, Magellan and other explorers of old, we need to be ok with having only a vague sense of where we're going. (India, anyone?) Gamestorming co-authors, Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo suggest that, as leaders, it's ok to be unsure of the exact specifics of how we're going to get to where we want to go... or even if where we think we want to go is, in fact, our best bet. The name of the game is keeping an open mind, and maintaining a willingness to explore a multitude of potential avenues before committing to one course of action. You don't need to "know it all" to be a strong leader in the 21st century. Instead, your role should really be to identify the objective, and then be able to motivate your team to work towards a solution. As an example... In a conversation with Roger Martin (Dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto), Roger outlined to me an exercise he had his MBA students work through as a part of their course. The situation was Toronto traffic, and the challenge was to identify better systems for managing the flow of people in an average day. Now, you don't need to know Toronto to understand the magnitude of this challenge. Imagine any city of 6 million people and you'll start to get the picture. Roger's objective was not to define the ideal solution and have his team build it. Instead, his role was (a) to define the problem, fuzzy though it was (improve Toronto traffic), and (b) to engage his "team" in creating a solution. In Gamestorming, we explore the engagement aspect of the leadership role. How, exactly, do you get people actively involved in creating a solution to a problem this large, and this fuzzy? In the following two GEMs, we look at two tools that Gray, Brown and Macanufo suggest for getting people engaged. GEM # 1 Embrace Artifacts "An artifact can be anything from a piece of paper to a sticky note or index card. Artifacts make it easier to keep track of information by making it a part of the environment." Gamestorming, page 17 By their very nature, complex problems are, well, complex.
