Mind of an Innovator

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There are many definitions of innovation, but we believe there are 3 core aspects:

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Innovation must be disruptive,

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Innovation requires action

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Innovation requires failure

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Innovation isn’t just for the innovatively minded any more. It is increasingly expected that individuals across any organization or institution be innovative, embrace innovation.

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Without an innovative mindset you can’t move forward.

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Now, imagine a game sweeping through your organization and everyone was playing it.

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To do well in the game you need to both perform certain innovative behaviors, and recognize others performing these behaviors.

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This is Mind of an Innovator.

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This game focuses on 5 fundamental innovative behaviors.

Building off others ideas, because innovation is of course collaborative. Doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Asking questions that both provide clarity and take the idea in new directions.
Totally divergent thinking, big ideas, creative possibilities to the power of 10.
Turning barriers into opportunities, making a negative a positive.
Open and affirming; cultivates the soil of innovation at the most basic level.

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In the game, in it’s simplest form, you try be the first to recognize other players when they exhibit these behaviors. You see you get points for either giving recognition or receiving recognition

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(IDEO’s Wave of Innovation) Early on in the creation of the game we decided to use the innovation process that we are teaching through the game and this process requires iterations and expects failure. And we had no shortage of that. But the key is to seek insight in your failure. We will be stepping through some of our biggest failures which resulted in our biggest insights, making the game what it is today.

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In the beginning, we assigned each of the behaviors a token. These tokens are different colored cones and discs, which are pieces from the board game, Talisman. Things went ok, teams were slow to warm up and lacked engagement and understanding of the tokens.

For the next test group we mistakenly left the Talisman game and it’s tokens at home, so we improvised by using colored index cards in replace of the tokens. Fortunately the test group not only participated in the game, but also were the most enthusiastically engaged group to date. The exchange of cards (slapping them down like in the card game Slap Jack) started early and was a vital part of the activity until the session ended.

In preparation for the next test group, we bought colored poker chips to use instead of continually raiding the Talisman board game. During the testing, we observed, despite our hopeful assumptions, they appeared less enthusiastic about the game.

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Following the session we spoke with some of the team members. We found they preferred the crude cards, enjoying having a deck and the physical aspect of the slapping down the cards made for a more engaging game play, and suggested/asked to write the categories on the cards.

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We then took this feedback and begin to design cards, identifying engaging, funny, associative images and descriptions relating to each of the card categories.

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The next failure was keeping track of points during game play. We tried providing a crude homemade tracking sheet (2 areas, given and received), but this still gave them trouble tracking.

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We better understood the problem the players had with keeping track of their cards and their score of given and received. We met to design a point tracking system and came up with a game board.

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Here is the game board with color coded areas with a spots to “check” when cards are given and received and an area to calculate scoring.

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On to big fail number 3. Teams now had their cards and their game board to keep track, but they were still having trouble getting warmed up and fully engaging in the game.

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Tried to solve it by giving better directions in the “I do. We do. You do.” approach, but still no success.

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We tried different venues and situations, still not successful.

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The huge break through came when we decided to add another dimension – make the topic of conversation fun and low-risk (not relevant to daily life) so players can play without the cognitive overload. Similar to Apple to Apples and Cards Against Humanity, we came up with Problem Cards (running the gambit from whimsical to mundane) and Thing Cards (again, random things). Players take turns drawing one Problem card and two Thing cards (see Figure 2). The players use this as the innovation content to which they apply the innovation behaviors on the cards.

This was great, but now how do we transition this from playing a game with made up things (theory) to real life (direct application)?

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We then thought, “what if you warmed up with these artificial off-the-wall problems and crazy resources…” Like this one: how do you solve painful dentistry with hammocks and high anxiety goblins?

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Then after warming up our minds, we swap out the made up problem with a real life problem? But kept the random things the same? Let’s play a round like that?

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Next we progress to swap out the random things with an actual team resource and actual team attribute. Ta-da! We’ve successfully scaffolded from thinking big with the imaginary to thinking big with reality, applying the innovation mindset and reinforcing the innovative behaviors all the while! Success!

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Here you can see a group playing Mind of an Innovator.

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What’s next?

- Further testing of these approaches of transitioning from the theoretical to the practical application.
- We will be experimenting with scripting a more official introduction (possibly record a video of it) to the game play specifically for use in introducing the concepts and how to play.
- We are trying to figure out a component for online participation because we have a significant number of remote employees in the organization, who usually connect with other through either audio or video conferencing. We see potential in expanding beyond innovation to other skills (leadership, change management, etc.), and to track and display badges in some sort of forum. (http://media.capella.edu/NonCourseMedia/MOAI/index.html)

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Thanks! Let’s go play!

Mind of an Innovator

Justin Lee

Mind of an Innovator