Gamestorming

Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo

Like The Quality Toolbox, this is a book chock-full of usefulness. This book provides a fun approach that makes it possible for collaborative activities to get everyone participating in creative and design-oriented activities. From planning meeting, generating ideas, understanding customers, creating prototypes, or making better decisions, Gamestorming is a way for groups to “work better together.”

Divided into Opening, Exploring and Closing sections, the structure of the book will be familiar to anyone with a facilitation background. I am constantly dipping into this book for activities for team meetings, project kickoffs, development meetings, lessons learned and a whole lot of other meetings.

This book delves into the usage of visual thinking to increase effectiveness and I find dramatically shorten the length of time needed for a group to solve a problem. This book proposes that visual thinking can:

• Using a simple, shared visual language to increase understanding and information retention;
• Applying improvisational discovery to keep participants engaged;
• Mapping the big picture, solving problems and innovating as a team;
• Creating visual meeting artifacts to drive decisions forward.

What is especially cool is that there is a great webpage dedicated to these games that I hope you will find as useful as I do. It is full of exercises, activities and advice.