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.

Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston

This week I am at the enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, read all about it in our Studytrip blog at http://www.ynnostudytrip.com!

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.

Why not start now with Enterprise 2.0?

After a discussion friday with two collegues I wanted have my own wiki and blog up and running on my laptop. I wanted to show interested people how easy this is and tell from my own experience how easy installation was. On saturday I started downloading Wordpress (a blog), on sunday I installed Apache (a webserver), MySQL (a database) and PHP (a scipting engine) and got Wordpress up and running. While I was busy I downloaded and installed MediaWiki (the same wiki software as wikipedia). I guess I spent 8 hours this weekend to get everything up and running. The most part was searching for some help online to solve some issues but I tackled them all. Total cost in cash for this setup was 0 euro's.

The only thing holding you back will be an IT manager concerned with company standards, security policy or open source problems. These issues can be very true and maybe hard to tackle. Some other products are around at a cost to get you started but the most simple way is the one I described above. Sharepoint Services is for free if you have a windows server, which gets you blogs, wiki's and teamsites!

This stuff is out there for free and support is online. Documentation and source code is for free so you can adapt to your wishes. A small server and a very small amount of IT knowledge is needed to get it roling.

If you cannot convince your boss, give me a call (tweet, email or something like that) and we will figure it out!

Enterprise 2.0 conference in The Netherlands

Tomorrow is the second E2.0 conference in The Netherlands. A great line-up with Andrew McAfee and Ross Mayfield among others will bring some great insights! A number of cases are on the menu and we will get an idea about the adoption in The Netherlands. I will be talking about a project we did at Alfa-college in Groningen. Together with a colleague, we will discuss this project from initial thought by the board until the technology hit the floor. Trying to figure out which part of the day is most interesting is actually useless, every topic from keynote to case study seems very interesting.

 

Will we be able to get more understanding on adoption of E2.0? What will be the mayor trends in The Netherlands in E2.0 the next years? Which technologies will succeed and which will fail (don't worry about failure, it is the only way to knowledge!).

 

To get into the mood I already published my slides for tomorrow!

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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.

Enteprise 2.0, an adhoc or a strategic approach

What do you do? Choose a adhoc approach to enterprise 2.0 and just let it happen in your company or choose a more strategic approach and build an enterprise wide platform? The AIIM report is very clear, an enteprise wide approach will get the best results. Because everybody uses the same platform it is far more easier to find your stuff and collaborate with everyone. Think about the problems you get using three project collaboration platforms inside your company. Due to the three platforms your projects will be set in silo's and projectteams will be formed by the platform and not the capabilities of each teammember.

But do you have to roll out to every part of your organization. When you truely believe in the wisdom of the crowds you have to give everybody access to the enterprise 2.0 platform. But enterprise 2.0 will only be used by knowledge and collaboration intensive parts of your comapny. Not everybody will use it so why give them access? These other parts just need other platforms and applications to do their jobs.

Another thought on this is that the adhoc approach is the ultimate user control. Everybody in the enteprise can just start an enterprise 2.0 application and look what happens. The need for integration will come eventually and then it will get done.

In rolling out culture is a very important factor. Digital work and enteprise 2.0 is more culture then technology. Almost everybody uses office applications and stores documents on a network drive, but is this digital working and are you ready to really use an enterprise 2.0 platform?

I think a strategic approach to the right parts of your organization will yield the most benefits. Culture must be ready to even start with this enterprise wide!

What do you think? Let me know and lets discuss this!