How a humble board game can unlock creativity in your ideation sessions

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) AIMEE REEVES: Thank you all for being here today. I didn't have any of that stress bread. I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners on whose land we're meeting today and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. I'm Aimee and I am part of the department of industry and science. My job is to work with project teams across my department and other departments and take them through a design process to tackle some projects. This is the team. The particular project I'm going to talk to you about today is one where we were looking at how we might help businesses to overcome some of the barriers they had to staff training. So, ABS data was showing us overall Australian businesses investment in training their staff was in decline, in combination with predictions that the work force will need to continue to upskill into the future as there are technological changes and an ageing population. So, we wanted to understand why training investment was decline and how we might help businesses to overcome any barriers their businesses were facing to train their team. So, we did some research, we identified some areas of opportunity where we could help them, or we may be able to help them, and we ran system of some of our first aid ideation workshops. We got a number of ideas and then we got one thing this - suggesting paid trip for long-term employees to stay with the company, which sounds like a nice idea. It was in response to our research that some companies are not training their staff out of a fear if they do train them that staff member will leave. This team was exploring the idea of incentivising the staff to pay with the company after they've received their training. While this idea is not bad in itself, these people are not written down some of the details. We had about two hours with a group of business owners and that was about the maximum we could get based on the people were we recruiting. We had given people time to understand the opportunity areas, we asked them to go through speed thinking where they come up with eight ideas individually and talk among their team to narrow them down. And then we would ask us to tell us which were the top ideas and why. We did get some ideas, but we did get something this. So, the question was how could we get any more creative ideas out of our team. The next session we had less time. So we sat around as a project team having a bit of brain storm about what might help us to get better ideas and one of the rules that we take into every ideation is if people are having more fun they're more likely to be more creative. We landed on a board game because that's the way of making things more fun than turning it into a game. By the next day - this is the day after. So, a few of our members of team took a bit of convincing that it wasn't too crazy to create. So, we thought we would play test it. I love this photo. You can see Anna with a big smile on her face and we had a great time designing this and how it could work. This is some of our participants playing the game a few days later. So, what did our board game look like and how did it work and how did it help us to get the results we needed? This is our board game. We had tables of about four players, so four work shop participants. We gave each team a company profile to start which told us who they were. So Green Health, they were health and pharmaceutical company, major producer of vitamins and supplements wanting to grow your business, this is where you want to get to in 2025. So that gave them an idea of who they
2. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 2 of 3 were. And they were the executive team of that business and their job was going to overcome some challenges you company might face to get yourself to 2025 and meet that goal. So, they had that purpose to play the game. Every time they did face a challenge they would be asked to come up with a solution on their own first and then share it back with the rest of the time. Then they would talk about the ideas and then decide which one they could take forward. There are 20 challenge cards were based on the insight from our interviews and research. So, this one, for example, is talking about your older staff are reluctant to train into new technology but that is edges to the operation of your business. And we had megatrend cards, these were the trends on the horizon that we saw. Next, new technology means half your front-line job will be automated in five years’ time, so how do you prepare your staff for the change. We also had resource cards like people, tools and technology and strategies. Participants needed to decide which resource card they would play. The wanted to think about some of the other solutions if they didn't have the resource cards left. So, we were giving some them constraint s to think of more creative solutions. This is an example of the kind of solution that we got. So, I think the important difference is this was produced by a participant by after three minutes. So, this is compared with the one I showed you at the end which was two hours of ideation and talking to and getting to the end point. This was in response to the challenge. Some staff are reluctant to go through ideation so what do you do? You might notice if you have a fewed if ideas, the core is you wanted to understand where the resistance is coming from, across some of those concerns and take anyone who was resisting through the online technology and training in a different way. She wanted to go through the crux of it. But the other benefit of this active was that in the process of asking people to vote and say, QC, I really like Sonia's idea, or I like Tony's idea, was that - it was kind of helping us to get some of that richness around it. Why do you like that idea? We had a facilitator at each table with the players just to help them to do it? Why do you like that idea? Would you do this in your business? It gave us more richness. So, what are some of the things that I think helped this to work well for us. One of them is to give people a reason to play. We prime them at the beginning with that 2025 company goal and we give gave them that collective identity. They came in from different companies but at that stable they were Green Health, they were together. I meant they had a bond and a reason to be working together and it helped them to step back from their everyday an get into a more creative head space. Its loss - also move away from the uncomfortable feeling when working with strangers. We also had employer of the month for the best idea. And whoever got the most stickers at the end of the month becomes CEO. It sounds silly but it was a powerful behavioural drive. And that gave people that collective goal who were more motivated by let's help the company succeed and they gave an individual goal as well. Our game board looked like a classic monopoly game. We used the landing on a scare square system, rolling a dice and turn over a card. AIMEE REEVES: We also borrowed game mechanics from other people. Like Balderdash, the basic premise is someone will read out a word, others need to bring down the base definitions, the player who started it off reads out all the fake definitions and the real once and they to vote which one is
3. UX Australia 2019 -29th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU2908B) Page 3 of 3 correct. It's always a pretty good game. So, we borrowed that with the employer of the month. It helps them to be more creative too. Prfr lso keep it simple. So, for - my time hasn't tracked. So, having the rules that you need. We were simple with our rules and play and that helped people to engage with the game as well. Didn't have a lot of game jargon but it had enough detail and depth for our solutions in terms of a solution card on the next slide that we were able to action them and take them away. We even thought about how do we position our megatrends and challenge scares that people are landing on enough so we get the solutions that we need. I think you can also think about embedding principles of effective ideation. We think about having fun, time box it, building it up, so a lot of the things I talked about address those as well. And the facilitate or helped with that. We weren't saying I hate that person's idea. It's like what do you like about that person's idea. I just wanted to finish on this picture. I had it on the screen before, this is a group of quite senior managers dressed in suits who have come in for a more serious meeting or consultation with someone from government and look at them having a big laugh, having a great time. I think sometimes to get those serious results we need to take ourselves a little less seriously. That's me. Thank you.