Key Messages
Learn How Games Can Help Solve Common Business Challenges And Unlock Creative Ideas
Organizations can experience bumps on their journey, and often it is due to a breakdown in communication between teams, absentee motivation among employees, or a lack of imaginative ideas from the leaders.
However, there could be an entertaining option to get the processes running once again: gamification!
Gamification refers to the application of game elements in non-game settings.
It isn’t just for fun; games are highly engaging, integrative and alluring.
They can aid businesses to surmount common organizational obstacles – like inadequate business aims or tedious meetings – through creating an effective learning environment for IT management and personnel alike.
This book delves into common corporate predicaments and offers outstandingly practicable examples of games that may help solve them.
It demonstrates how games can enable businesses create sincere and productive conversations among workers, reveal inventive concepts, discover new directions for originality, and more!
Moreover, readers will also understand the extensive advantage brought by incorporating game components into business operations; why games make organized meetings fairer as they encourage further collaboration; and finally recognize how games equip managers with leadership improvements too.
The Benefits Of Learning By Doing: How Businesses Can Use Games To Unlock Employee Potential
One way games can be used in business is to facilitate learning by engaging the senses and allowing employees to ‘learn by doing’.
MIT professor, Seymour Papert and entrepreneur Idit Harel coined this type of learning as ‘constructionism’; which combines multiple senses – such as seeing and touching – to increase information absorption.
Games offer physical objects like colorful cards or game pieces that must be maneuvered or arranged, creating spaces where thinking outside the box is encouraged and skills can be built.
For businesses, this kind of activity allows people to build new skills as well as think up creative solutions.
Additionally, it helps managers level the playing field and create an atmosphere where individuals work together on a common goal.
When people are playing a game, their background or job position doesn’t matter – what matters is their ability and desire to play together.
This temporary reality creates a different set of social rules where everyone plays on the same playing field.
So when businesses look for ways to help employees learn new things and explore new ideas, gamification can be an effective tool that encourages growth without subtracting from traditional approaches such as meetings or training sessions; thus enabling managers unlock their employee’s potentials through purposeful play.
Keeping Employees Motivated Through Establishing A Company Identity: The Value Of Playing Align
When it comes to running a successful business, having a unified vision across multiple teams can be crucial for success.
With this in mind, companies should always check in with their employees to ensure that they are happy and fulfilled with their roles and connected with the company’s overarching purpose.
One way organisations can do this is by developing and maintaining an identity based on distinct core values.
To help with this process Align offers an interactive game which helps companies explore and implement core values that resonates with all members of the team.
Align is an online values game made up of four to eight players sitting around a physical board, each armed with their own tablet.
Each player will receive either a challenge, event, dilemma or chance card which describes different scenarios that the group then must work together to solve.
When deciding how best to respond each player will be assessed on how well their decision aligns both the game’s core values (courage, passion and customer focus) as well as the three organisational areas of employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction and total sales.
At its heart Align encourages team collaboration by utilizing real world scenarios that facilitates communication between teams from across different locations — resulting in improved decision making which thus leads to better performance for your organisation overall.
Play Team-Building Games To Improve Communication And Encourage Collaboration
LinkXs is an innovative game that can help businesses boost team performance and create collaborative behavior.
This team game helps individuals become more comfortable with collaboration by asking players to work together to complete tasks.
Players are divided into groups, each with access to partial information.
This encourages them to negotiate and collaborate with each other to obtain the missing pieces of information in order to complete the task successfully.
Through this experience, players learn new ways of working together cooperatively.
They may discover skills such as how to optimize productivity, assisting their teammates, dealing with potential conflict or balancing their own personal goals against those of the larger team – all of which feed into better team performance and cohesiveness.
Effective communication is essential for a successful team, making games such as Sudden Survey great tools for helping develop these skills.
Quickly playable on company days or as part of a training program, this game gets teams of 3-5 participants exploring a topic related to the meeting/training content in just 9 minutes!
Through activities like networking, gathering knowledge about peers and asking questions sensitively, teams can quickly hone useful communication skills.
Overall, LinkXs and Sudden Survey provide great tools for training employee teams into efficient collaborative units – fostering better team performance and bringing out the best in both individuals and entire organizational cultures.
Make Business Meetings More Productive With The Meeting Design Game
Business meetings don’t have to be dull – there are ways to engage everyone and get the most out of your time together.
One such way is by using elements of play in your meetings, as suggested by Dan Roam in his book Gamification for Business.
The Meeting Design Game is one way to make business meetings more interactive and effective.
It’s a game that’s played either alone or in teams, wherein participants spread design element cards on a table and decide together which to discuss in their meeting.
Participants get to move cards themselves if they have ideas related to them, and then assemble action plans for topics they pulled toward them.
This helps create priority lists while engaging everyone involved.
Using elements of play like this can help optimize business meetings and ensure vital information isn’t forgotten.
Everyone will be engaged without feeling bored and tasks can be completed efficiently with more meaningful discussion at these meetings.
Game Helps Businesses Strike Balance Between Exploiting Existing And Launching New Initiatives
The Business Branching game is a fun way to learn how businesses can allocate resources between old branches and new ones.
It’s based on Rita McGrath’s value cycle theory which deals with how businesses should use their resources when dealing with five stages of development; launch, ramp-up, exploit, reconfigure and disengage.
Through this game, companies will be able to understand how to move from one stage of the value cycle to the next without facing bankruptcy in the process.
The goal of the game is simple – it’s all about launching new branches before existing ones die out.
Participants are asked to create concrete initiatives that will help them move upstream or sideways (from an old business branch to a new one) as well as deciding which resources need to be allocated at each stage of the value cycle.
The Business Branching game offers a unique way for companies to take advantage of both ongoing projects and its new opportunities by effectively distributing its resources between them in order to survive in today’s competitive landscape.
Companies that understand this balancing act will surely come out ahead!
Innovate Or Dinosaur: A Collaborative Game Unlocking Organizations’ Innovative Potential
Are you feeling stuck in a creative rut? Are you starting to question your ability to generate original ideas? If so, an innovative game called Innovate or Dinosaur may be able to help.
This fun and challenging board game is designed to help weary organizations unlock their potential for creativity and innovation.
It can provide a playfully competitive environment where everyone can brainstorm ideas, reframe problems, and come up with solutions.
The game is divided in two parts: the Explore board, where players identify key problems within their organization, and the Evolve board, which challenges participants to refine their ideas, put them into action, and note how much effort it took.
Combining dice rolls with instructional cards stimulates organizational creativity by creating a stimulating atmosphere of exchange between players whilst also providing fresh perspectives on common challenges.
Innovate or Dinosaur has already been proven to help many companies break out of their innovation ruts and produce creative, polished results.
One international property management firm worked with the authors of this book and saw amazing results from playing this game during one of their company ideation sessions – what started off as something skeptical turned into multiple teams efficiently generating inspiring new ideas that would help optimize performing assets at lower costs.
So if you feel like your usual brainstorming techniques aren’t getting you anywhere anymore, then Innovate or Dinosaur might just be the perfect way for you to get unstuck and start generating some new creative ideas!
Playing Wallbreakers Helps Managers Understand How To Motivate Employees For Positive Change
When it comes to being a great manager, the job entails much more than just leading a team.
You have to be able to handle the difficult conversations and make tough decisions that are in the best interest of your organization.
That’s why it’s important for you as a manager to constantly check in with yourself and consider ways of improving your management skills.
Fortunately, there are game-based leadership development tools out there that can help you do just that.
One such tool is Wallbreakers – a game designed to help teach effective leadership by motivating employees to adopt changes instead of resisting them.
It starts off with a made-up situation in which players have three stages (start-up, implementation and anchoring) to address while having to consider several factors such as change intensity, available resources and employee personality types.
In this game, players represent their team on the gameboard with a small bus – with each bus containing pawns representing different personality types.
Each round begins with players choosing one ‘gear’ card which represents the pace of change before considering how they can balance implement change without forgetting about their department’s daily tasks.
There is also an element of ruthlessness because players can kick uncooperative employees off their buses should they choose too – but this actually allows them see not only how leadership skills can used when dealing with different people but also strategies for getting employees on board any proposed changes in real life scenarios without hassle or stress.
Wrap Up
The final takeaway from the Gamification for Business book is that games can be a powerful tool to help organizations unlock their innovative potential.
Whether it’s having employees practice alternative roles, opening up new ways of thinking, or bringing about positive change, games can be far more than just a fun way to pass the time.
For companies looking to implement gamification in their workplaces, one key piece of advice is to always recruit a facilitator.
This person will ensure participants stay focused and not waste time on arguments while also keeping everyone safe, ensuring heated debates don’t boil over.
When following these tips, businesses can make sure they get the most out of gamification and reap the rewards of increased productivity, creativity, and collaboration.
