Finding the right game begins with needs analysis. What is the problem you are trying to address or the area of performance you would like to improve? It is important to establish a set of learning objectives—what you want your audience to learn or demonstrate. Then you can evaluate how well the game met your expectations.
How do you improve team performance? There are many ways of doing this, but this book focuses on thirteen key variables that, in our experience, lend themselves to games. Each of the terms defined below supports one or more aspects of effec- tive team performance that will surface in one or more of the thirty games
described in this book. While these terms may have different meanings in different contexts—a football coach and an opera coach bring somewhat different knowl- edge, skills, and abilities to their professions—we have defined these terms from the perspective of improving individual or team performance. Our definitions are utterly idiosyncratic and may not conform to what you would read in Webster’s dictionary, but we can vouch for the fact that these issues will surface naturally, and sometimes dramatically, as you play and process these games. We hope that the definitions will enable you to more easily match games to specific audience needs or performance-improvement goals.
Coaching. Coaching includes the following behaviors:
• Calling individual or group attention to what is happening in the moment.
• Prompting people to consider whether what they are doing is effective or ineffective. As my P.E. teacher remarked during the archery module, “Your chances of hitting the target would improve dramatically if you didn’t shut your eyes and cringe when you release the arrow.”
• Reminding an individual or group of the need to play to identified resources, talents, or strengths.
• Providing real-time feedback on whether an individual or group is moving closer to or away from stated goals or objectives.
Collaboration. Collaboration includes the following behaviors:
• Identifying the interests, equities, and “stake” held by others in this situation.
Most “teams” assume they are in a competitive situation unless they are specifically told otherwise and tend to define interactions with other teams as
“win/lose” propositions or zero-sum games.
• Identifying the information, talent, or resources that the team and others can contribute to achieving shared or compatible goals.
• Negotiating expectations and protocols for interaction and information shar- ing such that both parties are able to succeed in completing their assigned tasks.
Communication. Communication includes the following behaviors:
• Clearly and accurately conveying the information that is known to the indi- vidual or team.
• Identifying what is unknown, unavailable, or missing.
• Sharing tacit (generally unspoken) assumptions about the problem, the situa- tion, information one has, the resources available, and so forth.
• Providing feedback on the impact of decisions or actions made by others.
• Asking questions, listening carefully, and seeking clarification as needed.
Creativity. Creativity includes the following behaviors:
• Questioning one’s assumptions about the problem, the situation, the rules or constraints, and the information or options available.
• Reframing problems in such a way that you consider a wide range of alterna- tives and many categories of possible solutions.
• Generating a volume of ideas before narrowing the scope down to a handful of possible strategies or options.
• The ability to define a problem from multiple perspectives.
• The ability to engage in lateral thinking and ask questions in a way that helps to solve the problem at hand.
Feedback. Feedback includes providing information that:
• Tells an individual whether they succeeded or failed. This may involve simply handing out the right answer, the facilitator saying “You’re RIGHT!” or
“WRONG-O!” or sounding a bell, buzzer, or gong.
• Conveys the impact or consequences of a choice or an action.
• Allows an individual to modify behavior to “self-correct” in order to become more effective. For example, when you ask someone to scratch an itch
between your shoulder blades, it is useful feedback to say “up and a little to the left” and then sigh “Ahhhhhhh!” when he or she hits the spot.
Goal Definition. This performance goal appears in every game.
Most of us, most of the time, fail to adequately define our goals, whether we are working as individuals or as members of a team or collaborative effort. As a result, it is easy to wander off track, to lose sight of what we are trying to achieve, or to properly prioritize our efforts. Goal definition includes the following aspects:
• Defining WHAT we are trying to achieve.
• Defining WHY it matters that we achieve it.
• Defining HOW WE WILL KNOW IF WE SUCCEED.
• Defining the CONSEQUENCES of failure.
Planning/Strategy. Planning and strategy include the following aspects:
• Identifying what critical information, actions, or choices are needed in order to succeed.
• Figuring out the shortest action path between where we are and what we want to achieve.
• Identifying the probable impact of other players and their goals on what we are trying to achieve.
• Aligning our time, information, resources, and talent in such a way that we make the best possible use of each in pursuing our goals.
Problem Solving. Problem solving includes the following skills:
• Defining the problem. Consider the family’s flooded basement. One partner defines the problem as “how to get the water out of the basement” and pays to have sump pumps installed. The other partner defines the problem as “how to keep water from getting into the basement” and installs six-inch gutters, regrades the ground away from the house, and petitions the local government to install a larger storm drain on the adjoining street. How you define a prob- lem limits the range of solutions you choose.
• Surfacing, sharing, and challenging assumptions.
• Brainstorming possibilities.
• Developing criteria for selecting an answer.
• Weighing pros and cons.
• Choosing (and committing to) a course of action.
• Checking for feedback on whether one has made a correct choice.
Role Definition. Role definition includes the following elements:
• What needs to be done for the team to succeed? Someone may need to keep time, interpret the rules, organize available information, divide the labor, inventory the talent, act as coach, answer the questions, make decisions, spy on what the other teams are doing, be the writer, be the briefer, or test the waters so the team can find out what’s going on.
• Who is best equipped to carry out those tasks?
• What do we expect of the person who takes on this role?
• How can we help or support the person in carrying out this role effectively?
Tapping Team Resources. Tapping team resources includes finding out:
• Who is knowledgeable about what?
• Who has experience in this or related areas?
• Who has a natural gift or ability for carrying out one or more roles or for taking on a specific responsibility?
Trust. The issue of trust usually involves:
• Establishing expectations.
• Negotiating acceptable/unacceptable behavior.
• Specifying consequences.
Values/Culture. Determining shared or conflicting values and exploring the nature and impact of team or organizational culture includes:
• Describing the rationale and motivations that underlie our behavior.
• Describing what we see happening around us and the reasons or explanations that we apply to make sense of those actions or behaviors.
• Examining the assumptions and stories we create about “why things happen.”
• Looking at the image we hold about what our organization or team stands for and the values it promotes.
• Understanding the impact of the gap between “the way they tell it” and “the way it is.”
Working with Information. Working with information includes:
• Doing an inventory of what is known and unknown.
• Developing a common, shared understanding of available information.
• Analyzing what is significant and what is peripheral to the matter at hand.
The following matrix will help you identify those games that primarily address one of the performance goals described above. While many of the games in this book can be used to achieve multiple goals, the matrix will help you zero in on which games address which performance issues.