Are You Having Too Much Fun at Work?

Jess McMullin has a great post on Boxes and Arrows on ‘Using Design Games’ to get requirements and tacit knowledge out of people's heads and into the real world. He uses 'MetaMemes', the first version of ThinkCube, as an example of a product to support creativity. Games create a great environment to allow people to relax and have fun, which is very conducive to creative thought and stimulates great conversations. I find games work really well when you need people to collaborate and work on fairly complex problems.

The challenge Jess touches on in his article is one I find very interesting; getting buy-in for using games. The stigma of playing games is definitely a barrier to getting people to adopt games at work. Over the years I have used different incarnations of MetaMemes at different companies and there is always a little hesitancy at first. During the game people relax into it and as they do the ideas come fast, but after a successful session the participants seem a little embarrassed at having fun at work. I have explained and shown people the concept that thinking and laughing are not mutually exclusive, and to the contrary, laughing is a sure sign of a very creative session.

In the new version, ThinkCube, I definitely downplay the game aspects to focus more on the innovation process. ThinkCube’s core mechanic is still fundamentally a game based on combinatory play, but some of the more ‘game-like’ elements have been removed. You can still play a game variant of ThinkCube, but through my play tests I found that having less game elements allowed for faster adoption than MetaMemes.

I still fundamentally believe that companies that are open to playing games at work have a far better culture for innovation. I consider ThinkCube a ‘Trojan Horse’ to sneak fun and innovation into stuffy companies. I am providing the tools to start a grassroots innovation revolution one cube at a time (yes the pun is intentional i.e. help people escape their Dilbert cube hell).

Happy ThinkCubating,