Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers

Well, the authors say nobody has a monopoly on creativity in brainstorming sessions. Creativity can be nurtured through simple strategies, techniques and practices, and that's what this book is all about. With the right tools and environment, everyone can experiment with being creative, often leading to great "aha" moments, big breakthroughs, and surprising results.

We should highlight at this point that games-based brainstorming is not suitable for all organizations or all meetings, by any means. However, if you do work in an environment where freeing the creative spirit through games makes sense, you'll find this book a treasure trove of helpful ideas.

The authors' techniques are activities that have been developed, tried and tested by corporate trainers, facilitators, and educators over the years. They harvested many of the games from Silicon Valley – a hub of creativity and innovation – and compiled them into one book.

The result is a rich compendium of games that offer original ways to meet challenges Mind Tools members will come across every day, such as problem solving, decision making, pitching, blind spot analysis, communication and delegation.

This book says PowerPoint presentations are a thing of the past. Instead, raid the office supplies cupboard for pens, paper, and sticky notes and get everyone thinking creatively, actively and visually. But only if this playful approach suits the situation, of course.

So who's this book for? Well, if you're a group facilitator, corporate trainer or team leader, it's an invaluable addition to your toolkit.

Why rack your brains to come up with new icebreakers, brainstorming techniques, or ways of engaging a group? This book gives you more than 80 activities, with easy-to-follow instructions.

Now, some experienced facilitators will have heard of many of the games before. Some of them are creative twists on familiar techniques, such as the elevator pitch and the SWOT analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. But even the most experienced among you should find some new games to add to your portfolio.

The authors have spent years facilitating teamwork and consulting for business clients. Gray is the founder of XPLANE, a visual-thinking company recently acquired by the Dachis Group, which helps big corporations tap into the value of social technologies. He regularly conducts workshops for educators, corporate clients, and the public on creativity and business transformation.

Macanufo is a consultant at XPLANE and helps large technology and government clients with their vision, strategy, and communication plans. Brown owns BrightSpot I.D., which specializes in visual thinking to support organizational and group success.

So keep listening to learn five types of questions that can lead to creative answers; to hear how imagining your company making headlines could help your team think big; and to learn how turning your product or service into a speedboat can pinpoint what's slowing it down.

The book is neatly structured and therefore a quick and easy read. The first three chapters set out the concept of games and tell you all you need to know to be a successful gamestormer. The last chapter is a case study of one man who put some of the games into action, with great success and surprising results. The four middle chapters describe the games in detail.

If you're an experienced facilitator, you can flip straight to the games, but let's get to grips with the concept first and establish exactly what a game is, in this context.

Firstly, a game needs a space where the rules of ordinary life are temporarily suspended and replaced with the rules of the game. Players must agree to abide by these new rules of interaction, creating a safe environment.

A game needs boundaries in time and space – a moment when the game begins and ends. A game also needs what the authors call artifacts – objects that hold information. In a ball game, the ball would be the artifact. In chess, it's the chess piece. In the meeting room, it's the sticky note or the colored dot. Finally, a game needs a goal – something to work towards and a way of knowing when the game is over.

In gamestorming, goals are not precise or defined. They're fuzzy. Likewise, the path to these goals isn't a clear set of steps, but rather an open space, a framework for exploration and experimentation, for trial and error. And the goal may change in the process.

This is the big difference between creative work and traditional business or industrial work. In a traditional business process, a clearly defined set of steps leads to a specific goal. In visual terms, the path between A and B in this case would be a straight line. In creative work, that path will look more like a squiggly line, or a set of squiggly lines, maybe with a few loops.

On the topic of squiggly lines, you'll find a lot of them in this book, along with many other sketches. Most of the games come with illustrations that bring them to life and make them easy to understand. The pictures give the book a playful feel and really help to get you in the creative spirit.

So what are some core gamestorming skills?

Firstly, questions. In order to fire up a brainstorming session, to light the initial spark, you'll want to pose some good questions. And you'll need to keep asking them as the session goes on, adapting them for each stage of the process. This is why questions come in five categories: opening, navigating, examining, experimental, and closing questions.

Opening questions kick off a session, for example: "How would you define the problem we're facing?" or "Which are our worst performing areas?" Then, in the middle of a workshop, you're going to need to use experimental questions, such as: "What else works like this?" or "What are we missing?" or navigating questions like: "Is this helping us to get where we want to go?" Closing questions wrap up a session and define the next steps, for example: "What can we do in the next two weeks?" or "Who's going to do what?"

Another core skill involves creating artifacts and meaningful space. As you heard earlier, artifacts can be sticky notes, index cards or colored dots – they're items that carry information or can be used as markers. In terms of space, games need boundaries, for example a flipchart, or a grid drawn on a flipchart.

Employing visual language is another key gamestorming skill, and in this section of the book you'll get some basic lessons on how to sketch. Maybe you think drawing isn't your forte. In this situation, that doesn't matter. All you need to do is master how to draw 12 basic shapes, called glyphs, and then combine them to draw any shape. After following some simple instructions, even the most reluctant artists will find themselves sketching human figures, animals and buildings.

The last core skill we'll look at is improvisation, or the ability to quickly respond to the unexpected. Maybe your team meeting has gone in a direction you hadn't planned for or maybe you've had to call an emergency brainstorming session. The point is that if you've mastered the core gamestorming skills, such as sketching, asking questions, and using artifacts and space, then you should always be able to think on your feet.

Now we understand the concept, let's look at a couple of the games.

The games are divided into four categories: core games, games for opening, games for exploring and games for closing. For each game, the authors describe the object of play, or what the game's all about. They suggest an optimum number of players and duration of play, describe how to play in a set of simple steps, and define the strategy behind the game.

Let's look at one of the opening games, called Cover Story. This is a game about visioning, about imagining an ideal future state for your organization that's so impressive it landed the organization on the front cover of a well-known magazine.

This game encourages players to think big, to dream of something they might not have thought possible. You play the game in the past tense, as though the organization has already made it onto the front pages.

For this game, you'll need a large piece of paper and some marker pens. On the paper, draw a few templates, one representing the front cover of the magazine, a few representing the inside pages, some spaces for photographs and captions, and a speech bubble for quotes.

Divide the players into groups of four to six and ask each group to fill in a template. Encourage the players to imagine the headlines when your company comes up with a great product, outsmarts the competition, or has a massive impact on society. Imagine the photographs, the sidebars, and the great quotes. This is about imagining the best-case scenario for your company and then taking it one step further.

Get each group to present its vision, then allow time for discussion and feedback. As an optional extra, you could ask two players to role-play an interview based on the cover story, with one player acting as a reporter and another as the CEO or company spokesman.

One word of warning: make sure the players don't descend into analysis and pragmatism. This game is about envisioning the absolute best, even if it borders on fantasy thinking.

So what can we learn from this game? Well, the idea is that the themes the groups come up with will be telling – areas of consensus reveal shared hopes and they plant seeds for real possibilities. You just might find the game inspires more ambition and encourages some leaps of faith in the future.

You can keep the posters up in your office or in a communal area to remind your colleagues what they're aiming for and what just might be possible.

If this sounds like it would lead more to embarrassment than creative solutions in your organization, then perhaps gamestorming isn't for you. It's certainly a good idea to think about how your team would react to this type of activity before embarking on a gamestorming session.

With that proviso in mind, let's look at the section on exploring games. Here, you'll find creative variations on some familiar techniques. For example, when doing a SWOT analysis, why not create four posters and get players to write the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats on sticky notes and stick them on the relevant poster? This gets everyone moving around the room, participating and thinking visually.

Another exploring game is called Speedboat.

This is a quick game designed to help you identify what your employees or clients don't like about your product or service, and to brainstorm what's standing in the way of reaching a specific goal.

On a white board or large poster, draw a speedboat with anchors attached. This is where your newfound sketching skills come in. Give it a name, relating to the product, service, or goal under discussion. Above the boat, write your main question. This could be: "What are the features you don't like about our product?" or "What's standing in the way of progress toward this goal?"

Then ask players to take some time to think about the features of the product or service, or the environment surrounding the goal.

Ask them to write down on sticky notes any features they don't like or any relevant variables that could negatively impact performance. Players could also estimate how much faster the speedboat would go without these "anchors" and write that down. Maybe there's a lack of leadership, not enough time to complete the project, or not enough delegation.

Next, ask them to come up and post sticky notes on and around the anchors in the picture. Discuss the content of each and listen for observations, insights and "aha" moments. If a number of people identify the same problem, you know this is an area that's causing frustration and that's really worth attacking.

Remember, though, this game isn't about listing complaints or even about problem solving. It's about identifying what's going wrong and getting some consensus around it. Problem solving is a different stage in the process, and there are plenty of other games in the book to help with that.

Finally, the authors offer eleven closing games. Once you've created a buzz of ideas, it's vital to come up with action steps. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Well done is better than well said," and turning ideas into action is the hallmark of a truly outstanding company.

You'll find techniques to agree and assign responsibility, create a timeline for action steps, prioritize, and decide what is new, useful and feasible.

The book ends with a fascinating case study of one man, Toby Daniels, who put a number of the games in this book into practice at a designers' conference. Thanks to visual thinking, collaboration and interaction with others at the conference, Daniels came away with a viable idea for an invention, but one that was quite different to the vision he had when he started out.

The case study illustrates the power of collaborative thinking and teamwork. Reading this one case study, however, might leave you wanting to hear some more real-life examples of gamestorming in action and the final chapter ends a little abruptly.

Be aware also that there's a fair amount of jargon in the book that will take some getting used to. And you may find think some of the games are only a slight variation on others, meaning there's a repetitive feel in parts.

That said, with more than eighty games, there are plenty of new, innovative activities to choose from and this book is a great resource for anyone involved in this type of group work.

"Gamestorming," by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo, is published by O'reilly Media, Inc.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.