Organizational Design and Engineering

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.

Bringing game design to the workplace

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.

Designing an organizational rule set

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!

Seminar videos

The videos of all the presentations at the Play Element of Learning Leadership seminar that I blogged about earlier are now available here.

Learning Leadership Online?

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.

The Play Element of Learning Leadership

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.

Game design for managers

The interest in design thinking for business managers is gathering momentum with an interesting article by Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO) in this month's Harvard Business Review. He gives a description of how design thinking can be used in developing products, services or strategies. It is closely related to work being done by Helen Fraser and others at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. I especially liked their description of the role (non-physical) prototypes can play in the development of a strategy or a service.

What Marinka Copier and I would like to bring to the table is a more specific design approach for managers: that of game design. We are now at the point where we have developed a first version of an applied game design process that can be used for designing an organization structure or a business process. That is also where we take a slightly different direction than people like Brown and Fraser, who focus more on strategies, products and services. Whereas they take a client-centered approach, we look at the business process and take the perspective of the organizational actors in that process. The organization's goals and strategy are a starting point for us.

Why specifically game design? Because it is ultimately about designing meaningful behavior, and hopefully that is what we're trying to do in organizations as well. And since behavior cannot be designed directly - although some managers seem to thinks it can - game design has developed ways to deal with this "second-order design problem". The design process we have developed is adapted from the game design process as it is described by Tracy Fullerton. It consists of five steps.

The first step is setting the experience goals. In other words, which behavior, which way of working do we want to see in the organization?

The second step is envisioning the so-called core mechanism. This is where creativity is needed. What are the actions that the organizational actor(s) will be repeating most often, which should have the experience goals as an outcome?

The third step is building a representation of the core mechanism. This is the phase where you build the prototype, which borrows from techniques of paper prototyping developed for game design.

The fourth step is testing the prototype and adding rules to the system. This is the most important stage, where we should make sure rules are kept to a minimum and organizational preconditions do not hold back an innovative design. The process we are designing should meet the three core design principles of discernability, integration (Salen & Zimmerman's concept of meaningful play) and recoverable loss.

The final step is refinement, where you make sure the "playable" prototype meets the original experience goals.

The central element of this approach is working with the paper prototype and constantly adapting it in a number of iterations. But there is of course much more to say about this process, such as the techniques involved in the different steps and the ways in which mechanisms observed in games can be used as inspiration in the design process. We'll be talking about it at the EGOS Conference in July as well as individually with organizations that have expressed an interest in field testing this methodology. These field experiments are crucial in moving this methodology forward, refining it and judging its effects.

Presentation at Game Research Lab Spring Seminar

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This is the presentation that Marinka Copier and I gave yesterday at the Game Research Lab Spring Seminar in Tampere, Finland. Overall it was a high quality seminar with interesting papers and fruitful discussions.

With regards to our presentation, I would say that people in the game studies community are curious as well as hopeful about the application of game design principles in education and organizations. On a conceptual level, there are some issues with our approach that were discussed. I will not bother you with those here. Some members of the audience wondered why we look at game design in specific as a source of inspiration. What is wrong with traditional organization design, they asked. One of the problems is, of course, that these traditional organizational structures are not fitting anymore for our current (network) society and for the new generation entering the labor market. Also, there has traditionally been a tendency towards "overdesign" in organizations (describing and prescribing everything down to the smallest procedure). Game designers know that this doesn't work and have developed ways around this problem.

However, what we took away from those discussions is that the time has come to test our ideas in the field and come back with some case studies. Conceptually, we have gone as far as we can go.

What was interesting to note is that not everyone agrees that interesting and new types of behavior can be observed in World of Warcraft. Almost diametrically opposed to our view was a presentation by Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Based on their research, they argued that the social pressure experienced by team leaders in World of Warcraft was indicative of bureaucratic structures being imported into this environment. However, one of the commentators pointed out that you could also interpret their results as an indication of bottom-up organizations: the fact that the team members have so much power causes stress for the team leaders.

One of the most important questions that kept going through my head while listening to the different presentations was: how can you design an environment inside an organization that creates room to fail and thus allows for trial-and-error? Because that seems to be both one of the most promising as well as one of the most difficult things that game design has to offer to other domains. Promising because trial-and-error means (organizational) learning and innovation. Difficult because it is the game context itself that creates the necessary safe environment for this behavior. Here is a little insight into how Blizzard (the company behind World of Warcraft) deals with this. But there were many other ideas related to this that came up during this seminar and that Marinka and I will be exploring further. And more importantly, that we'll be testing out in the field later this year.

Update on the Learning From Games initiative

I decided to do a quick post as an update on the Learning From Games platform that Marinka Copier and I started last year. What we are working on at the moment is a format for a "gaming lab workshop" (working title) that could be used to tackle organizational problems using game design principles. However, it will take some time to get everyone on the same page about this and to agree on a format that we can experiment with. Bear with us. This is pioneering work.

Two abstracts that Marinka and I submitted were accepted. We will be presenting "The Play Element of Learning: Taking Serious Games Beyond the Magic Circle" at the Breaking the Magic Circle seminar in Tampere, Finland in April (where I participated last year as well). And we will present "The Power of Play: How Game Design Can Upset Organizations" at the Upsetting Organizations conference in Amsterdam in July. So we will be presenting our view on the analogy between game design and organization design to both sides. That should make for some interesting discussions.

Today I was interviewed by Alan Majer of New Paradigm (that's Don Tapscott's company). They are doing a research report for their clients on what enterprises can learn from multiplayer games. Besides myself they have spoken to people like Nick Yee and John Seely Brown. It was an interesting conversation, because Alan proved to have a very thorough understanding of the subject matter and the issues at play. We could get straight to the point and discuss topics such as comparing game design and organization design. We talked at length about how the design principles that cause this remarkable behavior in environments such as World of Warcraft could be applied in an organizational setting.

Apparently the right questions are slowly seeping into the minds of business leaders. I'd better get back to work on finding the answers.