For me, 2010 was a year for attending many conferences but I only did one planned training session – Innovation Games® Master Course with Luke Hohmann – and it was awesome.
I am writing this post to share with you a little of what happened. Below is a photographical tour of the 2 day workshop. You can click on the images to see a higher resolution image.
It all started with name cards
Who knew what a fun activity this could be? It’s not everyday that I get to use glitter glue …
Never enough wall space
With interaction knobs turned to “11”, the walls were covered with Big Visible Charts or Information Radiators. Note for Agile teams – you can never have enough wall space. A projector was only used for a little bit on the second day.
Grow the Product Tree
Grow the Product Tree is a variant of Prune the Product Tree where the participants create all the leaves. So no pruning, only growing. This is how to play the game if you want to generate lots of options.
Luke Explaining
Luke spent a lot of time telling war stories about using games. For me this was great. Lot’s of learning and gems. In the photo below we were discussing running parties and galas in online games.
Spider Web for Financial Services Product
Big paper = Big Ideas! Map out how your product interacts with related products.
When and where to Use Games
Here we see what games might be played to support a team at various points in the planning horizon. For example, at the strategy level, we might want to answer the question “What is our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)?” and we might use the game Product Box to help answer this.
Same but for Product Development Lifecyle. For example, after the release of a product, we might want to answer the question “What do customers like about the product?” and we might use the game Show and Tell to help answer this.
The above diagrams show that all you need is an image and you can create a brand new game.
Where to find out more?
You can find out about the different Innovation Games® here.
