The main focus of this blog is sharing fresh and innovative ideas on new ways of working, from a variety of perspectives. Maarten Bahlman, Joost Vuijk and Vincent Wiekenkamp are the primary drivers. All three are management consultants at YNNO, a consulting firm based in The Netherlands.
The posts are commonly in English, but a post can also be in Dutch, when the nature of its topic is very local. Please feel free to comment; the ambition is to make lasting connections.
At the end of my last post, I mentioned there are fundamental ingredients that constitute a game beyond just adding points. In his excellent exposé on game design (that I mentioned before), Sebastian Deterling identifies seven game design principles that form a good round-up of these ingredients:
Games present clear, bite-sized actions and choices
The relations between the actions/choices and the goals are clear
Your current status is absolutely clear
Games give instant and unambiguous feedback
The challenges games present get increasingly difficult
Games create social comparison
In essence, these principles are another way to phrase what Salen & Zimmerman have called meaningful play. Perhaps the principle of recoverable loss could be added to the list, because it is an essential ingredient of the informed trial-and-error behavior that characterizes a lot of game play.
When applying game design to organizations, these principles form a good checklist. However, many of the principles are hard to apply directly outside a computer game context. But when crafting a rule set that triggers action and lets desired behavior emerge, principles such as the ones mentioned here are a good way to achieve the desired dynamic.
In a previous post, I briefly touched upon a difference in perception between ‘hardcore’ games such as World of Warcraft and social games such as Farmville: the latter can be reconciled with being productive, the former can’t (the idea was coined by Timothy Burke in this blog post). It is interesting to talk a bit more about this work vs. play or real-life vs. game-life dynamic. This is probably the most important challenge I face in my research, working to apply game design to the design of organizations.
My early struggles with the subject focused on the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. But ultimately, that is not where the biggest divide is: there is a lot of extrinsic motivation in games as well as in work.
More fundamental seems to be the playful attitude and the magic circle that games induce. My research has shown that this can also be created in work settings, albeit in a very specific and sometimes fragile manner. Getting back to the difference in perception between Farmville and World of Warcraft, it may come down to just this. There is no doubt that most players take leave of their “real lives” when they enter the magic circle of Azeroth, sometimes perhaps to a worrying extent. I don’t think the same is true for Farmville. It seems to be an instrument for killing time in between your day-to-day activities, while staying very much inside your real-life social circles. There is probably not much of a magic circle to speak of with Farmville, or at least it is one that is extremely permeable.
In a sense, I guess that the Farmville model more closely resembles the way we can apply games to work settings. But there is much to be improved there, such as getting beyond the just-add-points paradigm, creating a little game, big game dynamic (extending the things that happen during the playful moments to the broader context) and crafting an elegant set of rules that allow for emergent behavior.
Today I presented a paper I wrote together with Marinka Copier and Thijs Gaanderse at the International Workshop on Organizational Design and Engineering in Lisbon. My participation in this workshop brought me a lot of new insights. Not just from the reactions to my presentation, but also from listening to the other speakers and participating in the discussions that went on here these past two days.
One early comment that resonated with me was the distinction that was made between “hard” and “soft” elements of an organization: on the one hand hard artifacts that can be designed (information systems, offices, business processes, etc.) and on the other hand the parts of organizational systems that cannot be designed, such as individual behavior and social interaction. This of course lies at the heart of my own research and of my interest in game design.
I was encouraged by the reactions to my conception of a rule-set as the minimal structure that an organization is looking for. Case studies like the one described in our paper were recognized as a valuable research setting that add an important empirical element to related conceptual and theoretical work (such as that by Joao Vieira da Cunha, also present at the workshop). One insightful comment was that the term “minimal structure” does not relate so much to the number of rules, but to their elegance and their affordance for emergent behavior.
The keynote today was given by Antonio da Camara, CEO of a company called YDreams. Besides some of the very interesting projects his company is doing, he talked about how he designed his organization. What I thought was his most interesting remark was: “If I were to start another company now, it would be less emergent but more based on my experiences in the past.” This points to the need for supplying design knowledge to managers and entrepreneurs. It also addresses one of the questions that was raised during this workshop: who will use the results of our work? My answer to that question is – based on the discussions here – that the results of our work on organizational design are not directly applicable by managers or entrepreneurs. As a matter of fact, it was pointed out that there have been big failures when working from the assumption that everyone can use these methods themselves. Applying organizational design knowledge requires specific training, so a manager will need an (internal or external) designer to come in and help him with this task. Much in the same way that managers will not design buildings or information systems themselves.
A presentation that got me thinking was the one by Robert Winter. He has been doing very interesting work on what he calls method engineering. I did not know this label before today, but it is actually part of what I’m doing in my research: I am constructing (or: engineering) a method for organization design. His point was that there is often too great a distance between the method and the actual problem that it is being applied to. He used the example of Davenport‘s BPR method. This is a very general method, being applied to a great variety of problems. Sometimes it can be better to make a method adaptable to specific design goals or context contingencies. This is definitely something to think about in my research as well: perhaps the steps we go through in our method should not be the same for all design problems.
I look back on a very worthwhile couple of days. Interesting discussions with fellow researchers, much food for thought, and a feeling of validation for the direction that my research is taking.
I was invited to give a presentation about my research today at the CoreNet Global Summit in Las Vegas. CoreNet Global is the world’s leading professional association for corporate real estate and workplace executives. They have been active in organizing a dialogue between researchers and practitioners. This session was part of that effort.
I started out with a very brief overview of the history of computer games, leading up to MMOGs and World of Warcraft. I then went over some principles of game design and how it can be used to inform organizational design. I explained the importance of the rule set as the means to induce certain behavior. This led up to an explanation of the methodology that I’ve developed together with Marinka Copier, that has the organizational rule set as an end product.
The link to the workplace is something that I’ve been exploring recently. I put forward the idea that the workplace could be used as a means to express this organizational rule set and communicate it to employees. And with this idea, I put the audience to work. Of course we didn’t have time to go through the entire design process, so we did a highly condensed version. I gave each group a desired behavior as a starting point (such as: collaboration). I then asked them to choose one or more rules that would induce this behavior and to describe how the workplace could communicate these rules.
I was pleasantly surprised by the energy that this exercise generated. Here are some of the ideas that came out of it:
If the desired behavior is collaboration, the rules could be: you answer the phone when it rings, you are available 50% of your time to connect, 50% of those connections have to be face-to-face.
A second group came up with these rules for collaboration: all ideas are welcome and valued; experiences, abilities and ideas are always visible; all members must participate.
To express these rules for collaboration in the workplace, a group developed workplace interventions such as: colocating individuals or units to mirror certain behavior and strategically locating visible, high energy business units.
For customer focus, one group wrote down the rule that “we actively solicit our customers’ opinions about how effectively our products and services have performed”; a way to express that rule in the workplace could be a wall of customer comments
Several groups worked with the rule that employees who live more than 20 miles from the office would be there a maximum of two days a week (to induce sustainable behavior); as an expression of this rule in the workplace they came up with maximum technological support for the virtual workplace and maximum support for “non-task objectives” when in the office: celebrations, feeling good about the company, building trust, managing conflicts.
I want to thank everyone who participated in the session today for their enthusiasm and input and I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation with some of you.
And next week I will be at the CoreNet Global Summit to discuss what implications my research on game design could have for new ways of working and the design of the workplace. Incorporating the workplace is a recent perspective I’ve been taking that looks quite promising. More about my CoreNet presentation and the subsequent discussions next week, when I will report from Las Vegas.
Last summer, I blogged about applying the principles and process of game design to organization design. At that point, it was no more than an interesting theoretical notion. If you want to know more about it, it’s more or less what I talk about in this presentation.
To make it a bit more tangible, Marinka Copier and I developed a methodology based on the game design process. This past fall, we have completed our first project using this methodology. There will be a formal write-up of this project – to be presented at an academic conference later this year – but I wanted to take the opportunity to share some preliminary results with you. Disclaimer: these are just reflections on my part, not conclusions based on our data.
We did the project at one of the largest non-academic hospitals in The Netherlands. This hospital was in the midst of setting up a new unit for elective care. They asked us to use our applied game design methodology to develop a set of starting points for their new elective care unit. These starting points should then be usable to guide the design of their IT systems, real estate, work process, etc.
We labeled the end result of this process as “meta-design”, which should basically be a rule set for their new organization. We planned three workshops that followed the steps in our methodology. The first workshop was a brainstorm about the building blocks of the new organization with the core design team. In the second workshop we invited the players who would play a role in the new care unit (such as doctors, nurses and insurers) and asked them to further develop their “game characters”. In the final workshop we did a playtesting session with a paper prototype of our meta-design. In other words: we played a game (with the same players of workshop 2) according to the rule-set we designed for their new elective care unit.
In general, the process and the results were very encouraging. Our client was very pleased with the results and to me it showed that the theoretical potential is there in practice as well. The workshops were energetic and united the perspectives of the various stakeholders in a playful way.
But of course I also see room for improvement. The biggest need for improvement for me lies with the core of the design process. Once you have collected all the building blocks and have explored the characters, it all needs to come together in a design. In this project, that has proved to be the most difficult step. It is difficult because the rule set we are designing has to reflect the organizational system, but also has to conform to game design principles (at least, that is our ambition).
I see two important avenues for improvement of our methodology. The first lies with the process: a deeper understanding of the system we are designing needs to come first, then more focused workshops and finally several playtesting sessions (one is not enough). A more fundamental improvement lies with the use of game design principles. I would like to see how we can incorporate some of the design knowledge that is being formalized in game design. For instance, I’d like to see if Jussi Holopainen’s Gameplay Design Patterns can somehow be used.
However, it has also become clear to me that some sort of x-factor will remain in this process. What I mean is that not everything about it can be formalized. Much will still depend on the skills of the designer. And that is something that game designers have been warning me about since day one.
So yes, I am still very optimistic about this notion that game design can enrich organization design. On to the next project!
It was an interesting experience to be part of the seminar on The Play Element of Learning Leadership in Amsterdam last Tuesday. It was a seamless combination of speakers and audiences in several locations: there were speakers and an audience in Amsterdam, speakers participating from North America with a video link and we had an audience in Second Life watching a video feed of the whole thing and asking questions. My congratulations to Eduverse for putting it all together.
Tony O’Driscoll came to us by video link to highlight the main points from the Seriosity/IBM reports that were central to this seminar. I followed up with a short keynote on the managerial relevance of games and especially game design. The most important part of the seminar was formed by the presentations of Utrecht University graduate students who had elaborated on the Seriosity/IBM reports. One of the main points of their research papers was that it is difficult to transfer elements of online games to organizations because the two domains are so different. This was further emphasized by David Williamson Shaffer, who pretty much took apart the Seriosity/IBM research by re-interpreting some of the figures in the report (after Tony O’Driscoll had virtually left the room, for which David apologized). His main point matched that of the students: isolated skills do not transfer well at all between different contexts. So no, you cannot learn to be a corporate leader from playing World of Warcraft because the two contexts (what David calls epistemic frames) don’t match.
I tend to agree. My answer to that problem is to take one step back. To look at the game design instead of the game. And to see how you can apply game design to improve the design of organizations.
I will be giving a short presentation on June 24th about Game Design for Managers at a seminar in Amsterdam organized by Utrecht University and IBM called The Play Element of Learning Leadership. The core of the seminar will be presentations of research done by graduate students at Utrecht University, who elaborated on the “Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders” report by Reeves and Malone. It will be streamed live on the internet and inworld in Second Life. Details about the stream (including the SLurl) will be announced here.
