Gamestorming is an approach to discovering the Win/Win solution. Thinking Win/Win is about finding the Third Alternative – not my way or your way but an alternate way that is best for both of us. It’s likely an alternative we couldn’t come up with on our own. Gamestorming helps teams to engage, brainstorm, and generate the Third Alternative.

Gamestorming can be used to explore all sorts of problems, questions, and scenarios. There are games for icebreakers, networking, vision casting, risk identification, product ideation, and marketing, just to name a few. In the following we’ll look at the basics of gamestorming including what it is and how to facilitate a good gamestorming session. In a following post we’ll look at an example of using gamestorming to get to Win/Win.

How do I know if I’ve done gamestorming?

You’ve probably been a part of a gamestorming session, although you might not have tagged it as gamestorming. If there are Post-It notes, Sharpie markers, sticky dots, and walls filled with giant sheets of paper, then you’re probably part of a gamestorming session.

The basics

Gamestorming, as you can guess, is a combination of games and brainstorming. The term is coined by the authors of the book Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, by Gray, Brown, and Macanufo. A gamestorming session contains one or more games. Games have certain characteristics such as:

  • Players opt-in to play the game.
  • There is a defined playing field.
  • Rules of the game replace rules of everyday life.
  • Players work towards a result.

Gamestorming games create a safe space in which to engage and voice ideas. If you’re like me you might not always be comfortable voicing your concerns or new ideas. If we are part of a gamestorming game, then many times we can write down our thoughts (Post-It notes are popular tools), taking away the need for speaking up in front of everyone. It makes brainstorming a lot more comfortable. The ideas that are written on the Post-It notes are then combined, making all answers semi-anonymous. I say semi-anonymous because typically there aren’t infinite number of people in the room so the answer had to come from one of us 🙂 Collecting like ideas (we call this an Affinity Mapping game) provides added psychological safety.

How to facilitate a great gamestorming session

Having a good facilitator is key to a productive gamestorming session. A facilitator has to be:

  • prepared
  • alert to queues from the participants
  • and able (and willing) to change directions while the game is running.

Unlike teaching a class, a facilitator of a game doesn’t know ahead of time what’s going to happen. So, a good facilitator has faith that by playing the game something good will result.

To prepare, the facilitator has to pick the right game or, more likely, sequence of games. Figuring out what the question or concern is that is being addressed is key. What really needs to get answered? This may take meeting with stakeholders ahead of time to understand what’s needed, or if it’s a game for your own team, clarifying what result is desired. Result here could be a list of action items to make the team more productive, ideas for new products, or feedback from a customer, to name a few.

Being alert to queues from the players is also important. Say you designed a game where players brainstormed for 5 minutes. After 3 minutes, though, they start looking around the room and fiddling with their pens. It’s OK to stop the timer and move on. Similarly, if everyone is still filling out sticky notes and a good clip at 5 minutes, feel free to let them go another minute or two.

Sometimes a game at the start of the sequence gives unexpected results making the games you planned for the rest of the session no longer a good fit. A good facilitator is familiar with enough games that they can either modify the ones that they had planned, or pick a new game altogether as a follow-up. Other times games take more time than originally planned, and modifications need to be made to stay in the allotted time frame.

The most important thing for a facilitator to keep in mind is that the results cannot be left open-ended. For example, if the team comes up with a list of items to improve productivity, these have to be acted on, starting right away. If the facilitator is not part of the team, then the team leader needs to agree before gamestorming to act on whatever results from the session. Without this follow-up, trust in the leader, the facilitator and the gamestorming process itself erodes.

What if you don’t get a list of action items, or you end up with too many things to consider by the time the session has ended? Closing the loop in this scenario can be committing to a meeting with everyone or a subset, to revisit the results in order to pare down to a reasonably sized list. Then follow-up and act on that list.

What if there’s really no action to take, or you can’t (for whatever reason) take action on what you came up with? The follow-up here is an explanation of why the items won’t be acted on. Do not leave the participants wondering why they bothered to spend the time brainstorming in the first place. Sometimes there are very legitimate reasons for not being able to actually act on the results. If you’re transparent with the team they will likely understand.

In our next post we’ll look at a real-world example of gamestorming that led to Win/Win results.

tl;dr

Gamestorming can help come to a Win/Win alternative. Gamestorming is a way to use games to engage participants in brainstorming by providing a safe space. As a facilitator of gamestorming games you need to be prepared, alert to the queues of the participants, and able to modify the game flow if needed.

engineer your life

  • To learn more, check out gamestorming.com or Innovation Games
  • Get some Post-It notes and give it a try! Pick a question for yourself or your team, find an appropriate game (see links in above bullet), and give it a go.