Gamestorming
Books | Business & Economics / Business Communication / Meetings & Presentations
Dave Gray
Sunni Brown
James Macanufo
Great things don't happen in a vacuum. But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you: gamestorming.This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. The authors have identified tools and techniques from some of the world's most innovative professionals, whose teams collaborate and make great things happen. This book is the result: a unique collection of games that encourage engagement and creativity while bringing more structure and clarity to the workplace. Find out why -- and how -- with Gamestorming.Overcome conflict and increase engagement with team-oriented gamesImprove collaboration and communication in cross-disciplinary teams with visual-thinking techniquesImprove understanding by role-playing customer and user experiencesGenerate better ideas and more of them, faster than ever beforeShorten meetings and make them more productiveSimulate and explore complex systems, interactions, and dynamicsIdentify a problem's root cause, and find the paths that point toward a solution
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Author
Dave Gray
Pages
290
Publisher
"O'Reilly Media, Inc."
Published Date
2010-07-14
ISBN
1449395902 9781449395902
Ratings
Google: 4
Community ReviewsSee all
"I hesitate to call the things in this book games. Literature on game design often includes the elements of feedback and voluntary participation in the definition of the term <i>game</i>, but participation in this book's "games" would likely be required, and not all of them incorporate a feedback loop. They also often lack other components sometimes included in the definition of <i>game</i> such as being closed systems, being winnable, and using abstraction. Despite these limitations, each activity has a clearly defined goal and rules, and if approached with a playful attitude, most could be treated as games.<br/><br/>The authors—Gray, Brown, and Macanufo (which I'm going to assume is a color similar to Maroon)—explain that each good brainstorming session needs to have an opening portion to generate ideas, an exploratory portion to develop those ideas, and a closing portion to determine which ideas to act upon going forward. The book is organized around these three types of activities.<br/><br/>Many of the activities are such mainstays of the business world that many readers will likely already be well-acquainted with them. (Dot voting, anyone? How about a SWOT analysis?) Many were variants on the Post-Up activity, where people write ideas independently, place them on a board, and then do something with them. An astounding number of the activities were things I did during grade school but haven't had any occasion to do yet in professional life. (Okay kids, let's break into small groups, come up with our own ideas, then bring it back to the big group to present.)<br/><br/>Despite this general lack of novelty, several of the activities in the book were things I hadn't heard of before, and I expect to use the book as a regular reference when establishing agendas for brainstorming meetings. I particularly like the idea of representing a meeting agenda as a pie chart over the face of a clock, showing how long each part of the meeting should take (and thus its relative importance). I'd also like to give heuristic ideation a try (creating a matrix of two categories of attributes and seeing what new ideas lay at the intersections)."
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