randomosity

Gamestorm­ing by Gray, Brown and Macanufo has the slugline ‘A Play­book for Innov­at­ors, Rulebreak­ers and Change­makers’ and it lives up to its rather lofty ambi­tions by provid­ing solid and sys­temised routines that can be imple­men­ted to cre­ate an envir­on­ment for innov­a­tion. The book provides a recipe-like guide to a wide (100 or so) vari­ety of exer­cises and scripts for groups of indi­vidu­als to employ to open up the flood gates for the free flow of ideas, break­ing through impasses and gen­er­ally mak­ing great things happen.

The books starts with many of the stand­ards — affin­ity dia­grams imple­men­ted with stick­y­notes, to ima­gin­eer­ing exer­cises such as forced rank­ings and story­board­ing. The intro­duc­tion dis­cusses the gen­eral the­ory of how mak­ing play is how we can effect­ively accom­plish ser­i­ous busi­ness object­ives. The pro­cess of mov­ing from A (and identi­fy­ing where one wants to go) is presen­ted in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways so as to find the appro­pri­ate ways in which people can per­ceive a pro­cess for them­selves. The tech­niques inher­ent in work­ing with groups effect­ively in in present­ing innov­at­ive of quirky exer­cises are treated thor­oughly in order to provide the found­a­tion for effect­ive deliv­ery and execution.

The treat­ment is as one might ima­gine light — there are a lot of exer­cises con­tained and the authors can only go into a lim­ited amount of detail on each. The vari­ety is quite diverse. The detail is suf­fi­cient to get you star­ted and then let­ting lead­ers play them out as might suit the occas­sion. Dia­grams are sprinkled through­out that enhance and cer­tainly lighten the present­a­tion. Hav­ing used many of these in the past I would wish for more disc­sus­sion and pos­sible vari­ations on some to really explore how par­tic­u­lar exer­cises might be most effect­ively played and what issues might arise and how best to deal with these. The cases presen­ted towards the end of the volume are good on-the ground examples of how games can be chained and com­bined and give some example of how gamestorm­ing fits into the busi­ness environment.

Des­pite my per­sonal desires for more dis­cus­sion, I would heart­ily recom­mend this book. It is not a lin­ear read, but is it very eas­ily approach­able and a very use­ful tool to add to the manager’s bookshelf.