We’ve all attended a meeting, taken a course, or read an article that moved us no further than to pique our interest. Putting new insights into action is the payoff for attention spent. And we multiply that payoff if we take a moment to reflect on a more broad understanding of the concept or technique we found so interesting.
Objective of play
Here, There, Everywhere emerged so that workshop participants might detail – sometimes in front of the room, sometimes just to themselves – how they will change their behavior once they return to work.
Source
Here, There, Everywhere was created by David Mastronardi and Eric Wittenberg
The Make a World game appeals to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners because of its layers of interaction. It’s useful (and downright fun) because it lets players imagine the future and take action to create a first version of it. All successful ventures start with a vision and some small, initial effort toward crystallization. Alexander Graham Bell’s vision for the telephone started as highly rudimentary sketches.
Measures of success vary across an organization. Executives concern themselves with company-wide Objectives involving Revenue, Cost, Profit, Margin and Customer Satisfaction.
Further down the org chart, management and individual contributors rate performance against more detailed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tracking customer behavior: a product manager may measure app downloads, or number of shopping cart items per visit. These customer behaviors clearly affect the larger corporate Objectives, but how? and which have the most impact?
The goal of this game is to generate ideas with silent sticky note writing.
Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a “postmortem” to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming.
A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful.
