Gartner Group predicts Gamification will be a key trend that every CIO, IT planner and enterprise architect must be aware of as it relates to business.
Quick Introduction: Gamification is the process of introducing game mechanics into activities to make them more game like. The Game Mechanics are principles, rules, and mechanisms that run a behavior through a system of incentives, feedback, and rewards with reasonably predictable outcome. Game mechanics are just the basic blocks. They can be utilized in many different ways and interesting ways to drive simple to very complex sequence of actions suitable for different frameworks or desired results. Some examples that you might be already playing are Mafia Wars and Farmville. Engaging communities is the key, not charging money for the use.
Recently in a podcast with Tim Ogilvie, CEO of innovation strategy consultancy Peer Insight and co-author of a new book Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers we entered into a discussion of Gamification:
Tim: I have a sense that there’s a change in the leadership philosophy of U.S. organizations that will be necessary. This appetite for affordable experimentation and this idea that the most competitive company, it knows how to pick where to learn and how to learn afford?ably. That’s still truly not really codified and taught in schools and so it’s hard for me to picture how that change happens. Clearly some of it might be generational. There are those of us in charge that grew up during the M&A and Six Sigma era of the ’90s, and we’ll pass the mantle of leadership to people who grew up in the 2000s, and maybe that will be part of the answer. I think part of it is going to have to be to get the academic world to support the research around leadership environments that encourage experimentation and failure. That, to me, seems to be one of the things we’re doing to make it harder instead of easier. Maybe I should say, that seems to be part of one of the missions is to create this really solid grounded academic understanding of permission.
Joe: I think that people are already doing it though, Tim, because my take on it is that’s what the gaming industry has done with the Wii’s and the Xbox’s, Gamification is that trial and error and hypothesis, that’s how kids learn. It’s become part of our culture.
Tim: I think it’s really interesting, play is becoming more part of our culture than it was in the ’80s and ’90s and play might actually be ?? I think you’re on to something ?? play might actually be the gateway to design thinking. Because if you think about it, I want to conduct a learning experiment, I can do that if I think of it as, “I’m just playing with this and it’s not going to cost that much and I’ll learn something and then we’ll take another run at it based on what we want.”
Joe: That’s how they’ve adjusted the learning. I mean they’ve grown up with Mario. Mario and Luigi beating against a wall finding an opening. That’s all trial and error. It is how they learn the game. Look at the use of instruction manuals anymore.
Tim: Yes, I totally see it. The 25 year horizon that I’m talking about will be heavily fueled by a much more open attitude towards constructive experimentation and playful exploration, and you can only see how that will be great for Lean and Six Sigma just as it will be for design thinking. Ultimately, I don’t see design thinking as the panacea that’s going to stamp out all of our misguided notions about how business works. We know a lot about how business works, right? I just say it’s another set of tools. Personally I feel like I’m in an exciting time period where it’s struggling to be born in the mass market. It exists wonderfully in the design department, right, but the design department isn’t in charge of too much in American business today, and the idea about design thinking isn’t, “We just need to have 10x larger design departments.” But the idea, it’s the same thing for quality. We’ve had that VP of quality and he had a staff, and the answer to quality wasn’t to quadruple the size of his staff. The answer was for him to put himself out of business by making every production worker their own quality inspector.
That’s going to be the answer for design thinking, too. If you have every, ultimately, every worker who has as many growth responsibilities using design thinking to solve problems, in addition to analytic methods, then that will be an amazing future. Maybe 25 years is too long a horizon, Joe, as you talked about the generational change in philosophy. Maybe it will happen in 15 years. That will be exciting.
Listen to the podcast with Tim Ogilvie: Design Thinker exposed as Left Brain Dominant
About: Gabe Zichermann is an entrepreneur, author, highly rated public speaker and gamification thought leader. He is the chair of the Gamification Summit and Workshops, and is co-author of the book “Game-Based Marketing, where he makes a compelling case for the use of games and game mechanics in everyday life, the web and business. Gabe is also a board member of StartOut.org and facilitator for the NYC chapter of the Founder Institute.
For more information visit: http://www.tedxkids.be
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