Posts Tagged ‘business’
Improv and Gamification: Structure
I’m taking the free Coursera course on Gamification, taught by Kevin Werbach from the Wharton School of Management. The book For the Win, which Werbach coauthored with Dan Hunter, mentions four basic elements of gamification:
- Motivation
- Meaningful choices
- Structure
- Potential conflicts
Werbach and Hunter use the structure element to ask: “Can the desired behaviors be modeled through a set of algorithms?” For San Francisco firm Keas, structure comes in the form of challenges participants undergo during the workday to improve their wellness, Microsoft gamified identifying translation errors in Windows 7 dialog boxes, and airlines provide better service as you accumulate more miles.
Measuring results in improv is a less exact process, but ComedySportz gets around the problem by having the audience vote to see which team gets the points for a pair of competing games. The idea that the show is a competition, where the players try to win but don’t care if they lose, provides a hook that makes the experience more than simple entertainment.
For businesses, organizational performance is often based on revenue, market share, and similar targets identified by the executive team. Individual employee performance is measured versus criteria set for each employee, but how do you provide an overall structure for a project, department, or division? Chip manufacturer Intel uses a Plan of Record, or POR, to identify goals and, in some cases, methodologies at all levels of the enterprise. That which adhereth to the POR is blessed; that which doth not is condemned.
Developing a structure to measure performance can be difficult, especially when applied to creative workers. Don’t feel compelled to gamify a process — the best gamification structure might be none at all.
Improv and Gamification: Introduction
You can divide improvisation into two rough categories: short-form and long-form. Short-form improvisation consists of games (also called “scenes” or “forms”) that last about 3-8 minutes and, generally, have specific guidelines to which the players should adhere. Many organizations, including ComedySportz and Theatresports (from which ComedySportz was derived, with the permission of Keith Johnstone), use team-on-team competition to enhance the audience’s experience. Winning a round gets a team points, which are compared on a scoreboard, and provide a clear metric for the state of the show.
Gamification, the practice of applying game elements to business and social activities, has become increasingly popular. Kevin Werbach of Penn’s Wharton School and Dan Hunter of New York Law School (and adjunct faculty at Wharton), two leading gamification proponents, wrote For the Win, a book that’s available inexpensively on Amazon through Wharton Digital Press. In their book, they describe how companies have gamified internal processes and customer/product interactions to add fun to what might otherwise be boring situations. If you’ve ever become mayor of a business by checking in on FourSquare, you’ve been gamified.
Werbach and Hunter go into significant detail on how gamification works, but I’ll focus on four points (mentioned on p. 44 of the book) over the next few posts. They are:
- Motivation
- Meaningful choices
- Structure
- Potential conflicts
I’ll tackle each point from the perspective of an improviser who also spends time in the business world.
If you’d like to learn more about gamification, you can take Werbach’s Gamification course on Coursera.org. The next section of the course starts on April 1, 2013, but he offered it in the Fall of 2012 and, with luck, it will be available again for readers who learn about the course after the current session ends.
Managing Post-Project Doldrums
We’ve all fought our way through huge projects and felt the satisfaction of releasing a product to market or finishing the run of a show. The feeling of relief that washes over you is amazing…you see everything you worked for come to fruition and hope your audience appreciates it.
With that relief comes relaxation and, on many occasions, a sense of being adrift, without immediate purpose. Some companies help you “manage” your feelings by throwing you right onto another project, but freelancers are always in search of their next gig. It’s hard to turn down work, but it’s also hard to manage your energy and emotions after a big project concludes. This concern is especially true if you’ve already started a new assignment and have to work while you’re dealing with the end of the previous one.
I’ve found the following techniques help me deal with the end of project blues:
- Thank your colleagues for the work they’ve done. Very few projects are solo efforts, so you should make the time to acknowledge others’ contributions. It’s hard to throw a party for a virtual team, but emails and phone calls serve the same purpose for information workers.
- Walk away, even if just for a day. I have a hard time with this one. Because I work from home, I can work any time I want and for as long as I want. When I need to decompress, my wife and I like to disappear to Vancouver, BC for a couple of days. Yes, I take my laptop or (now) Surface device with me, but I strictly limit checking email to twice per day.
- Spend time with friends. I’m lucky to have been part of ComedySportz Portland for 17 years. I’m an employee of the company, as are all of our players, but I’ve become close friends with many members of the group. For me, getting on stage and performing is often the therapy I need to attack a new project.
- Sleep.
How to Apologize
It’s never easy to apologize, especially when you’ve angered the very people you count on for your livelihood. The National Hockey League, specifically its owners, potentially reversed seven years of increasing goodwill and fan excitement when it locked out its players in an attempt to force the players’ union to accept an odious Collective Bargaining Agreement.
The players (rightfully) dug in and, on January 12, the two sides ratified an agreement and 48-game schedule they could have reached months ago. So how do you make up for three months of no hockey and a loss of 34 games per team? One good place to start is by putting your money where your mouth is. The dispute was about money, so that’s the currency you use to apologize to your fans.
The social media team for the Calgary Flames, a team I’ve followed since I was an intern as the U.S. Consulate in Calgary during the summer of 1989 (the year the Flames won their only Stanley Cup), sent out these three tweets today:
For the first two home games this year, you can get a beer spilled on you at the Saddledome for half price, buy Flames gear for 50% off until the end of the first game, and have a guaranteed win of C$50,000 (with another C$50,000 going to charity) for the 50/50 drawings at the first two games. That’ll go a long way toward regaining their fans’ support.
Apology accepted, but this is the third time we’ve missed games during Gary Bettman’s tenure. Don’t let it happen again.
Improspectives 
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