There are powerful sets of insights that can be drawn in analogies between serious games and lean agile transformations. Let’s capture a few of the timely highlights, as paraphrased quotes from Tom Grant’s recent blog post http://www.netobjectives.com/rules-governing-software-innovation-dont-work.
Here are some key guiding insights for an enhanced understanding of the dynamics inherent in lean and agile transformations…
- The “rulebook” needs to be simple, but reaching a level of mastery takes time
- If the game’s “rulebook” is too lengthy, you’re going to lose a lot of people.
- In contrast to extensive “rulebooks”… one of the virtues of many serious games, as well as both Agile and Lean, is their simplicity…. It’s not hard to gain a superficial understanding of the basic working principles, and that provides enough working knowledge to get started with execution.
- Deeper learning, in the same fashion as mastering chess, happens over time.
- Just because you have an established “rulebook” does not mean it necessarily applies directly to every transformation without adaptation
- Agile and Lean approaches do work and have broad applicability; this stands in stark contrast to some “sensible” methods that may have made a lot of sense on paper, but turned out to be disastrous in practice.
- However… we also know that no two companies are alike, and the differences are significant enough to make strict methodological copy-paste a foolish effort… rather, invest time in tailoring what you’re attempting to get out of the game or transformation (“design for cause”) in order to increase effectiveness.
- Sometimes the focus should be on the intended “experience” rather than the “rulebook” itself; this inverts the “rulebook” focus by only designating the minimum set of rules in order to elicit a target experience (http://www.netobjectives.com/blogs/rules-governing-software-innovation-do-work):
- Rather than a “rules first” approach, the “experiences” or “outcomes” become the objective for the transformation.
- This means a set of “goals” drive the rules to be applied (related to “design for effect” in serious gaming).
- The corresponding transformation measures progress along an “experience journey” rather than a “rule adoption journey”.
More to come on this as related discussions proceed in the future… You can also learn more on this topic from Tom’s blogs at netobjectives.com.