Playing

Arguably the most enjoyable part of the process, playing the game, means more than just creating a fun experience. It means making sure that the serious aspects of game come through in a way that enables you to get the insights you need to solve the problems that motivated the games.

Playing a Game

As you prepare for Game Day, you’ll need to spend time organizing your team. Conducting an Innovation Game is too much work for a single one person. You need a team organized around the following roles.

• Planner: The person who plans for and prepares your team for the games. This means making sure the team is clear on the questions you want to answer, the games that you’re choosing to get these answers, and how you’re expecting to take action on the results.
• Organizer: The person who handles logistics. For in-person games, this means securing the facility, making sure the food and materials are handled, and so forth. For online games, this means scheduling participants.
• Greeter: For in-person games, this is the person who greets customers and invites them to the game. This role is played by the facilitator in online games.
• Facilitator: The person who runs the event.
• Helper: For in-person games, this person acts as “go-fer” for the team, helping them with materials. This role is not needed for online games.
• Observers: Observers watch participants as they play the games, helping gather comments that help the team post-process the results. For in-person games you typically want roughly 1/3 to 1/2 the number of participants.
• Photographer: For in-person games the photographer records the event by taking *lots* of pictures.

Each role is essential to the success of the game.

Planner

The planner is the project manager for the event. They are responsible for ensuring that everything runs smoothly. How this happens varies considerably, and depends on many factors unique to your company and its corporate culture.

One area of difference concerns the degree of internal collaboration required to manage the project. In some companies the planner will follow pretty much whatever process they want without much input from other people. In other companies, the first step of the Planner is to organize a cross-functional team who will work together to define the goals and/or questions of the market research and how the organization intends to act on the results. Both approaches work fine. Innovation Games® and the process for using them should be leveraged in the context of your existing project management structures, not as a replacement.

Other areas of responsibility for the planner include making certain everyone on the team is prepared for the game. This means that each member of the team knows their his or her role and the responsibilities associated with that role, with a special emphasis on observers, as because observers are the people most likely to unintentionally cause problems during an Innovation Game by trying to participate or control the process.

The responsibility extends to the customers who will play the games. The planner is responsible for making certain that invitations are sent to customers that frame the right set of expectations for participation.

The planner may have additional responsibilities ranging from formalizing the budget for the games, selecting who whom to invite, making decisions about any gifts given to attendees, and so forth.

Organizer

The organizer manages the logistics of the event, including, but not limited to:

• Securing an appropriate location
• Purchasing food
• Acquiring and preparing materials
• Inviting and keeping track of participants
• Preparing placards and coordinating itineraries
• Helping to collect results after the games are finished
• Managing the real-time logistics.

The organizer has a big job, and if you’’ve never done it before, you may wish want to consider hiring an outside event planning service to help you make certain things go smoothly.

Greeter

The greeter (or master of ceremonies) welcomes participants, inviting them into the event and establishing a warm rapport. It is often a good idea to have the project manager who presides over the subject area explored by the game be the greeter. The advantage to this approach is that the greeter can leverage their an existing relationship with customers who are playing the game. A key disadvantage is that it is hard for the greeter to be an observer because the greeter has varying responsibilities throughout the playing of the game. , and as a result, product managers who are greeters may find that they miss a lot of what’’s happening during the playing of the game. While Although very few of the roles can be shared, the planner and greeter can be the same person.

Facilitator

The facilitator manages the playing of the game. They have the following responsibilities.

• The facilitator explains the games being played, describing their use and answering questions from participants. To maintain consistency, it is best if the facilitator is the only person answering questions. In describing the games, the facilitator should emphasize that the primary purpose of the games is to better understand customers. As such, there are no right or wrong answers.
• The facilitator controls the pacing and tempo of the game. While never rushed or hurried, the facilitator may pick up the pace when group interest starts to wane or allow things to progress more slowly if a lot of information is being shared.
• The facilitator monitors participation levels. For example, if a relatively quiet customer is nodding their her head in agreement but not speaking very much, The facilitator might ask them her to state their her point of view on a topic. Similarly, the facilitator will encourage customers to provide feedback and questions directly to other customers.
• The facilitator manages time. This isn’t the same thing as rigidly adhering to a pre-determined schedule. Instead, it is making certain that everyone is aware of, and agrees to, the overall timing of the event.

The most important responsibility for the facilitator is to manage the game so that the outcomes created are most likely answer the goals that motivated playing the game in the first place. In service of this highest level goal, they are given complete authority over everyone. Using this authority properly often means that the facilitator must be fearless when interacting with participants and managing the customer team. By “fearless”, we mean that the facilitator must be willing to ask tough questions of participants. At the same time, the facilitator may have to go so far as to ask observers to leave the room if their presence or behavior hinders the game. For these reasons it is often advisable to hire a third party or use someone who is not intimately associated with your product as your facilitator.

Helper

A helper is the “go-fer” for the facilitator, so named because he /she is ready, willing, and able to help with anything that might be needed. I’ve used helpers to do such things as making certain customers playing Product Box have all the materials they need to collecting and taping Speed Boat anchor cards to the walls.

Observers

Observers watch participants as they play the games, recording their observation on 5×8 5[ts]8 cards. These cards will be collected and processed after the game. It works best if observers remain close enough to participants to overhear their shared conversations, but far enough to let participants speak privately if they so desire. Observers should refrain from speaking directly with participants.

Observers should write down anything that they think is important. It is really that simple. The goal isn’t to write down only the most “important” or “meaningful” observation. In fact, striving to capture the “perfect” observation means that you’’re going to miss most of what is going on, as because your brain is no longer observing, but trying to draw meaningful conclusions. Instead, the goal is to capture a lot of observations and then use the post-processing phase of the game to sort out the meaning of these observations.

Observations can include such things as:

• Statements about products or services. Examples might be “Sarah said our flip-shifter doesn’’t connect with the mega-cranzer.” or “Ramesh wondered why we don’’t offer integrated training – [md]he said he’’d pay for it.”
• Reactions of participants about the topics that have been discussed, such as “No one seemed to agree with Ramesh. Should training be included?” and “Lots of customers need special end-of-month reporting.”
• Things that surprised them. “Why didn’’t anyone point out our on-line training videos?” and perhaps “Ming got our prices all wrong – how could that be?”
• Things that seemed to generate a lot of discussion. “Lots of discussion about a potential partnership with Acme.” “Need to explore more about distribution channels.”

Observers are typically drawn from the product team. It is best if your observers represent different disciplines, such as engineering, design, development, manufacturing, sales, customer service, distribution, and so forth. More observers are better, provided you don’’t overwhelm your customers – five customers and twenty observers is not a recipe for success. A better ratio of observers to customers is between 1/3 to 1/2 of the total number of customers. Thus, if you have 18 customers, you’ll want between 6 to 9 observers.

You need to consider the benefits and drawbacks of associating observers to with customers with whom they have personal relationships (such as in sales or marketing relationships). Some of the benefits include the natural rapport and comfort that exists and the ability to better convey some of the deeper motivations of the customers’ behaviors during the game. Some One of the drawbacks is that familiarity often lulls observers into a false sense of confidence. They become lazy in recording their observations because they’’re sure they know how their customers will respond, and fail to capture when customers don’’t act according to their pre-conceived ideas. A related negative behavior is when an observer forces a customer’s response to fit their pre-existing ideas.

It is essential that observers do not use laptops, PDAs, or cell phones unless it is a genuine emergency. Using these devices during a game is rude and disrespectful to your customers.

Bad Wedding Photographer

Perhaps my favorite role is what we jokingly refer to as the “Bad Wedding Photographer”.” The purpose of the “Bad Wedding Photographer” is to take lots and lots of pictures of the event with a high-resolution digital camera to help in processing the results and motivating others to take action based on customer feedback. In fact, many times people who have used Innovation Games have commented that the event a photos of the event were simply invaluable in helping others understand what customers did during the event.

We refer to this person as the “Bad Wedding Photographer” because we want to eradicate the notion that you should have a small number of highly posed or otherwise professionally created photos. Posing or posturing for a photographer will inhibit the free flow of information that is essential in an Innovation Game. You’’ll get the best results if you try to take so many photos that customers forget that a photographer is present. A good target is 200 photos. You almost certainly won’’t take that many, but trying to take that many will help customers feel comfortable with the person taking photos.

The Day of Your Innovation Game

The day of the actual event is where all of your preparation comes together. Although it is common to have some unexpected surprises, good preparation makes for a good game. The remainder of this section provides some general tips and techniques for playing the games. The detailed information on how to play each game is contained in the game descriptions in this web site. The Tools and templates detailed agendas that will give you a sense of time and how long to allow for the games help you plan the detailed agenda, including how much time you should allocate for the activities that often go along with the game.

• Arrive at least two hours early, and longer earlier if you’’re playing a game that requires a lot of setup. Many of the games can require several hours to set up. I’’ve played versions of Product Box and Prune the Product tree that have taken four to five people three to four hours to set up. In the first photo sequence, we started with a traditionally prepared meeting room, and several hours later had it organized for Product Box. In the second photo sequence, we started with an empty conference room and organized for Prune Tthe Product Tree to be played over lunch, working side- by- side with the hotel wait staff.. Give yourself plenty of time.
• Have a plan for what you should do with customers if they arrive early. OSome options include letting them do other work, to giving them demos of products or simply engaging them in small talk. Avoid starting to play your game until you have all of the customers you want.
• Have a contingency plan in case a large number of your customers arrive late. In this case you may want to begin playing your originally planned game with the smaller number of customers so that you can manage your time. Although this can make it awkward for customers who arrive late to join the game, you’ll still have the opportunity to get as much information as possible.
• It is helpful to share contact information. An elegant way to do this is to purchase a business card holder and pre-load it with the business cards of your team.
• While Although I’ve rarely had a problem with customers using laptops, PDAs, and/or cell phones in an inappropriate manner, you may wish want to communicate your policy to attendees.