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How a humble board game can unlock creativity in your ideation sessions- Aimee Reeves UX Australia 2019
- 1. Aimee Reeves How a humble board game can unlock creativity in your ideation sessions
- 3. How might we help businesses overcome barriers to staff training?
- 5. How might we get more creative, richer ideas from our ideation sessions?
- 7. START 2025 Move forward to Star Move forward 2 places Move back 2 places Move forward 3 places
- 8. #4 New technology means that half of your frontline jobs will be automated in 5 years’ time. How do you prepare your staff for the change? Your older staff are reluctant to train in a new tool or technology that is essential to the operation of the business. What do you do? #1 X 20 X 4 X 5 Resource card
- 9. The Challenge #7 Some staff in your business are reluctant to engage with training that is provided on online platforms. What do you do?
- 10. Give people a reason to play
- 11. Keep it familiar
- 12. Keep it simple
- 13. Keep the outcome you want to achieve top of mind START 2025 Move forward to Star Move forward 2 places Solution Card What is your idea? Why will it work? Assets played People Tools / Technology Process / Strategy Coins Your Name: Number: Number: Wildcard
- 14. Embed principles of effective ideation • More is better • Time box it • Build it up (Yes and) • Have fun • Write it down • Individual then group
- 15. LinkedIn: Aimee Reeves, Human Centred Design Lead at BizLab, Department of Industry, Innovation and Science Email: Aimee.Reeves@industry.gov.au Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- Thank you all for being here today. I would like to start by acknowledging the Gadigal people, the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting today and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.
- My name is Aimee Reeves. I am a senior project lead and designer from BizLab, a team in the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science. My job is to work with project teams across different parts of the department through a design process to tackle challenges facing government.
- The project I am going to talk to you about today was to tackle one of these challenges. ABS data was showing us that overall, Australian businesses investment in staff training was in decline. This is in combination with predictions that the Australian workforce will need to be continuously learning and upskilling into the future as our work is influenced by things like technological changes and an ageing population. So we wanted to understand why training investment was in decline, and how we might help businesses to overcome any barriers they were facing to training their teams.
- So, we did some research, we identified some areas of opportunity where we could help businesses, and we ran our first ideation workshops with business owners. And while we got some good, well formed ideas from those sessions, we also got a lot like this one… This idea is suggesting paid trips for long term employees to motivate them to stay with the company. This was in response to an insight from our research that some companies are not training their staff out of a fear that if they train their staff, that staff member will leave. So this team was exploring the idea of incentivising staff to stay with a company once they have increased their skills. While this idea isn’t bad in itself, the people who have written it down haven’t actually described what it is or the problem it addresses in enough detail for it to be useful / usable. It is also more of the beginnings of an idea than something that is fully fleshed out. This wasn’t giving us enough direction for the next phase of work, deciding which ideas as government we might be able to support. We’d taken a pretty typical ideation process to get here. Given people time to understand the opportunity areas, asked them to come up with 8 ideas in the space of 2-3 minutes individually through an activity called Speed Thinking, then given them time to discus and theme their ideas as a team, whittle them down to a select few they were most excited by and explore them in more detail through this template. The teams then shared their ideas back and voted on each others. This all took place over the space of about 2 hours. While as I said we did get many good ideas out of these sessions, we were also getting a lot of ideas that looked a bit more like this without that level of detail that we needed. So our question became: How might we get more creative, richer ideas from our ideation sessions?
- So we sat around, having a brainstorm about what we could do to help us to get better ideas Now one of the principles or rules that we take into our ideation workshops is to have fun – because we know if our participants are having fun, they’re more likely to come up with creative ideas And we landed on a board game, because what’s a better way to make it fun than to create a game? Once we started talking about this as a team we all got really excited By the next day, we had a working prototype that we could “play test” – this is our project team having a go and working out the game mechanics through play
- So, what did our board game look like and how did it work? This is our board game We had tables of ideation participants / game players of about 4 people We gave each team a company profile which told them who they were, for example GreenHealth: Company name: GreenHealth Industry: Health / Pharmaceuticals About your business: You are a major producer of vitamins and supplements for the Australian market. Your point of difference is your use of Australian botanicals and ingredients in your products. Your key target audiences are ageing Australians, health conscious young people (in their 20s-30s) and young families. Your 2025 goal: Increase your market share by 25%. Grow your team from 400 to 2,000 staff. Break into international markets, targeted at South East Asia and China. And then we told them that each of the team members on their table were part of their Executive Team, and to reach their company’s 2025 goal they were going to have to overcome a number of challenges along the way And when they faced a challenge, they would each have the opportunity to come up with an idea individually for how to face that challenge, that they would share back with the team The team would then vote on the idea that they felt would best address the challenge The only rules for this were you only had 3 minutes to come up with that idea, and you weren’t allowed to vote on your own idea
- So, what were these cards? The challenge cards were developed based on the insights from our user research. Each of these were challenges that real businesses were facing when it came to training their employees. For example: “Your older staff are reluctant to train in a new tool or technology that is essential to the operation of the business. What do you do?” The mega trend cards were bigger societal patterns / trends on the horizon, for example: “New technology means that half of your frontline jobs will be automated in 5 years’ time. How do you prepare your staff for the change?” The resource cards were things like: People, Tools / Technology, and Processes or Strategies. For each solution, participants needed to identify which “resources” this would use. This was to help them to think of solutions beyond this like an “Apportunity” and consider what they would do for example if they didn’t have any tools or technology left. This was to promote some more creative thinking from our game players.
- The previous idea I showed you was at the end of 2 hours of ideation. This idea was produced by a participant after just 3 minutes. This solution was in response to the challenge: “Some staff in your business are reluctant to engage with training that is provided on online platforms. What do you do?” Her solution is to: Understand where the resistance is coming from, address those concerns, and take them through the online training / technology in a different way to overcome those concerns. The benefit for us of this activity was the share back after each person had developed their idea, because they had to share back and “convince” the other players we also captured a lot more verbally and were able to dig deeper into these ideas than in our previous session, for example: Why do you think this will work? What have you seen like this before, if anything? In the process of playing the game, the other players on the table were testing and building on these solutions. This idea is after just 3 minutes!
- So, what are some of the things we did that helped this to work for us? Primed at the beginning with their company goals (get successfully to 2025) We also gave them a collective identity – they were GreenHealth! We didn’t loop back to this throughout the game too much, but it meant they had a bond and a reason that they were working together This removed some of the discomfort that can come from ideation when you don’t know the other people on the table and we’re asking people to be creative and put themselves out there Followed that up with individual goal, so whoever’s idea was voted on got “Employee of the month” Sounds silly, but was a very powerful game mechanic and behavioural driver to participate
- Our game board looks quite similar to a classic Monopoly board. We used the landing on a square, draw a card system. Helps participants to be able to engage with our game quickly and meant it was approachable – most people have played Monopoly before We also borrowed game mechanics from other games For anyone who hasn’t played Balderdash, the basic premise of the game is that one person will read out a word, and the other players need to write down fake definitions for what that word means. The player who read out the word writes down the correct definition, and then they collect everyones bits of paper and read out the fake and correct definitions. Then people guess and vote for which one they think is correct. The only rule is they can’t vote for their own. This game drives a lot of creativity because you want people to pick your idea, so we borrowed this with our “employee of the month” idea which worked really well for us
- Only have the rules that you need! We were pretty simple with our rules and how to play and I think that helped people to engage with the game quickly It wasn’t too abstract and didn’t have too much game jargon that people needed to get across And enough detail and depth that we could action them / build on them Out of the box ideas – not just apportunities!
- Think about what you want to walk away with and design your game around that For us, it was about a range of ideas on a lot of different challenges And enough detail and depth that we could action them / build on them So even how much spacing we had between our tiles was deliberate, so when we were play testing this we wanted to make sure that people would land on a number of challenge and megatrend squares in a 30 minute game so we would come away with a good number and variety of ideas