We often do not get voluntary participants. People are forced to come to programs and consequently, it undermines the implementation of other game mechanics. How do we overcome the challenge of voluntary participation?

My response:

• First, there’s an assumption that participants DON’T want to go to training — I think they do. I think their work gets in the way. If they had their druthers, they would volunteer to come, but the system they are a part of (aka, their work environment), prevents/hinders/discourages them from doing so. If it’s choice between learning and utilization, utilization wins (particular to professional services.) Examine the SYSTEM they are a part of.
• Motivation comes from goals. Perhaps if were to get clear on the learner’s goals, we could more clearly map to motivation. If they don’t know their goals, their motivations will be fuzzy, IMHO. If their goal is to figure out their goals, then even that helps.
• The tension in most learning, as was noted in Joe’s post, is that is about the “message” that the organization wants their employees to learn/regurgitate/live. So absolutely, there are training situations where there is a need for compliance and people are forced to go. We look for ways to make those trainings more palatable (like gamification) rather than stating quite clearly, in this GAME of WORK, here are the rules. This is what you must know to survive and thrive. If your goal is to keep your job, guess what, you gotta play by these rules.
• The medium in which this message is given (yes I’m channeling McLuhan, he is Canadian after all) usually kills the motivation (yes, I’m thinking death by powerpoint)
• The challenge is the capture the energy in a forced training situation. Where is the energy? In onboarding (new hires or acquisitions), the energy has to do with anxiety of joining a new organization. The motivation is to understand the lay of the land – expectations, tools, etc. How does one channel the energy into something positive — either connections with each other, with their new organization, or voicing/airing concerns in a safe way. This is not new.

I think with gamification and voluntary participation we are perhaps asking the wrong question. It’s not just about the individual but the system they are a part of. Use gamification, but use it in a way that makes the experience more authentic — bring in randomess and the gaming aesthetic it creates rather than a point system. Allow rules that channel and focus the energy in the room — rules that open up the experience rather than shut it down by someone “telling” you what to do. Create teams that support collaboration rather than competition.

Gamification can be useful with the right framing.

Two things happened that piqued my interest: a friend shared a TEDx talk by Seth Priebatsch: the game layer on top of the world; and I talked to another friend about the difficulty of selling anything called a “game” into corporations. As many others have concluded, you have to change the name of the game. Call it anything but a game. Which begs the question — what do we call games?

What are games?

What are games? What are some of their characteristics? Learners are actively engaged in a simulation/fantasy or solving a problem, where they will fail multiple times in order to succeed. The game is filled with feedback mechanisms. It’s about getting the points, not so much having the points (for most people anyways). It’s about status in the game, and often about playing amongst a community of gamers, whether that be in a multi-player game or in a single player game where you compete with your friends.

Sounds kind of like….

Discovery learning

What is discovery learning? Here’s a quick introduction.

• Basedon theories of  Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky.
  • Dewey – primary premise was learning by doing, learning is experiential and social; experiential was often defined as “using your hands” — building a house, taking apart a radio, with a group of peers.
  • Piaget – showed that a child is not an empty vessel, but is an active participant in learning about the world; assimilation and accommodation are means of adjusting the understanding of the world. Created the idea that children learn differently from adults and go through “stages of development” — not all of his theories have stood the test of research.
  • Vygotsky – best known for Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and the bringing out the social and cultural influences on cognitive development. ZPD is the zone between what an individual can learn on their own versus what they can learn with guidance or social interaction. In a sense, it is the optimal learning zone. Related ideas include scaffolding and situated learning.
• Architectures for discovery learning
  • case-based learning
  • incidental learning – results incidentally from an interaction, such as a crossword puzzle.
  • learning by exploring/conversing – asking questions to solve a mystery, discover an object
  • learning by reflection – a teacher never gives a direct answer, but instead answers questions with questions, forcing the students to reflect.
  • simulation-based learning
• How discovery learning is different
  • active rather than passive
  • process-orientated rather than content-oriented
  • failure is important
  • opportunity for feedback in learning process

Sound familiar?

Games as discovery learning

So let’s call games what they are — guided discovery learning. Games are guided by the rules of the game, where you get feedback on how you perform, instantaneously.

Change the name of the game to “guided discovery learning.”

Hmmmm…. I think I can sell that.

But what about…

The fear with guided discovery learning (aka games) is that you will not cover the course content and it will take to long or will be too expensive to create. I’ve been struggling with these questions — how do I design a game so people learn the ‘right content’? Well, it’s about the process, not the content, so that’s the wrong question. I’m not selling a learning PRODUCT, I’m selling a learning SERVICE. Games are a type of learning service. That means coming up with a business model that works in the service economy. OK, some more thinking to do here.

We don’t need to learn how to play games — games are already a part of our world. (Seriously go listen to Seth’s TEDx talk.) The problem is that they are just not fun yet. The bigger problem is that we just haven’t figured out a business model for adult learning games that works yet. How do we create and sell guided discovery learning that’s relevant and cost-effective?

Castronova, J. (2002). “Discovery Learning for the 21st Century: What is it and How Does it Compare to Traditional Learning in Effectiveness in the 21st Century?” Action Research Exchange 1 (1)

Bicknell-Holmes and Hoffman (2000) Engage, Elicit, Experience, Explore: Applying Discovery learning to Library Instruction – LOEX. Presentation.

Social Development Theory: Vygotsky. TIPS website – http://tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html

Here’s a story ..it happened to me…

Several years ago I was traveling to an client event in another country. I had been in my new position a couple of months at most. My boss was meeting me there, and  was to brief me on the details. I arrived a couple days early to visit with family — a good thing because on Day 1, the client called asking me to come. Boss was still in New York. So in I went.

Upon arrival I was told that a critical video that we created was stuck at the border.  I was to get it released ASAP. I smiled and said “yes, I’ll take care of it.” I had no idea what they were talking about. Couldn’t find my boss. Panic began to eat at the edges of my brain. I called everyone I knew to get the cell number of the one guy who could release the tape. He was eating dinner.  He apologized, and said he would take care of it as soon as the border customs office opened. Whew!

And then the real whammy happened on Day 1 @ 2 am (ok, technically Day 2). My boss called. She missed her connecting flight. She managed to get a flight to a city that was actually further away. Clearly geography was not her strong suite. But crazier still, they threatened to deport her because of something she said when she crossed the border: “work”. Never, ever, say you’re coming in to work in another country unless you have a work visa. I gave her this advice. Repeated it. To sum up, she would not arrive until much later on Day 2 — if she arrived at all. Me alone with the client (that’s plural client not singular) for another day. Didn’t really sleep.

Got up, put a smile on my face, and explained the crazy situation. Then volunteered to do whatever work they needed — and sure enough, they put to work. The tape arrived. Boss arrived. The rest of the event went swimmingly. We all survived.

When I got back, I was treated as a hero — if they could have given me the consultant equivalent of the purple heart they would have.

END OF STORY.

I can’t help think I could have been better prepared.

Is it possible to train for the unexpected?

YES, YES, YES!!!! Except I wouldn’t call it training…

• Step 1: Tell people the unexpected will happen.
• Teach them the power of negative thinking (book I read once). Have a team brainstorm about all the things that could go wrong and how you could prepare for them. What are the backup plans? This lesson I learned in radio — some technology will fail, some tape will break (yup, good ol’ analog days), some interviewee will *not* show up. Be prepared. Have a plan. Rehearse your plan.
• Who will answer the “red” phone at 3 am? The hardest thing is feeling that you are alone in a situation. The one thing that made a difference to me was connecting with one person who was still at the office at 7pm. Hearing a friendly voice tell me that she would do “everything she could to help me” made all the difference. Thank you team mate!
• Focus on the work that needs doing. I did my best to stay focused on the work that needed doing (get video, get boss, help client) It helped keep most of the anxiety at bay.
• Stay positive & stay focused on the needs of your client. It would have been very easy to fall into victim mode (“I’m not good enough”, “I can’t deal with this”, “I’m an impostor”, “it’s his/her/their fault”, “it’s not my job!”). Look it’s not about you, it’s about the client. So get over it. Put your “game-face” on, and as trite as it sounds, go out there with a positive attitude. What can you do to help?

Ambiguity, complexity, and the distributed expertise of teams creates “black swan” events. How can we deal with the unexpected, emergent behavior of systems? I think there’s a  game to be created here (or maybe several already exist?)

This isn’t training — it’s strategy.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

There are many older pieces still to add, and many new ones running around in my head. But hey, check it out and I welcome your feedback.

Game Purpose/Audience:

• Imagine a sales force or set of experts who have extensive knowledge on how to solve problems for customers but feel that they don’t have time to contribute to a knowledge base describing the solutions.
• Assume this set of experts primarily uses email and is also very competitive.
• The purpose is get contributions to the knowledge base

Game description: The game is very simple, and is reminiscent of the expert questions in LinkedIn.

• The dynamic would be to use email based polling/fill-in the blank
• Send a question on Tuesday
• Responses are submitted via text answer to email (form-based submission)
• All answers are posted to a board/web page
• A reminder is sent on Thursday to ask people to vote on the answers Friday
• Get people to vote on the answers on Friday – crowd source the vetting process
• The best answer is chosen by EOB Friday based on voting results – posted on board
• Every Monday leader board results are sent out with the who won on Friday the top contributors/leaders to-date

The key will be to get support by thought leaders and influencers within the organization.  You may even want key leaders participating in the knowledge fest.

Game variations – levels of expertise

• Depending on the dynamics of your organization, you may also want to send out multiple questions at a time – similar to the crossword of the NY Times, getting more difficult as the week progresses. This would allow for junior people to participate at the beginning of the week, and those with deeper expertise to participate at the latter part of the week.
• This would require a more complex scoring system – weighted more heavily towards more complex questions

Acknowledge leaders

• Recognize the leaders on a monthly basis – at the end of each month, give a prize to the best answers for that month (highest score)
• Also give answers to the most prolific if you want (highest attempts)
• The reward can be non-monetary or just simple recognition. Dinner with the CEO? Gift certificate for dinner? Amazon reward? It depends.

The key is start simple. Perhaps after a year, there can be multiple questions or questions for each department. See where it goes, see who answers, see where the energy is. The hardest part will be coming up with good questions. If this is a product based company, and you have a helpdesk, there may be a natural connection.

Just a simple idea to use a simple mechanism to share knowledge within the organization.

Initial thoughts:

• Wireless communications have untethered our social norms
  • Sherry Turkle observed how we have become tethered to our virtual identities via cellphones and other devices.
  • What used to be considered rude – answering the phone while talking face-to-face with someone – is now the norm (in most of North America)
  • I don’t know what the social norms are in other countries/cultures.
  • Establish a new norm in your learning environment – via ground rules or other means. Discuss and create the norm up front.
    • Discuss how the backchannel can be used. What appropriate to say and not.
    • Give a list of web sites related to your topic for those who will want to surf the web (if laptops are allowed.) Have people surf in areas related to your topic.

• Presenters need to change their expectations.
  • Don’t expect full attention - design with this in mind.
    • Tell the learners what to pay attention to – keywords
  • Expect the back-channel conversation – bring it to to the foreground occasionally during the presentation or have someone moderating it and bring it up. Give the audience the #hashtag so you can let them know that you  know and so that you can follow. Give them the venue for the backchannel.
  • Stop presenting – let the audience engage with each other, either face-to-face table talk or just via the backchannel.
  • Or if you want to be authoritative and have the power – ban latops and blackberries from the room. I’ve seen this done in corporate settings. But you know, people might resort to passing notes.
• Partial-attention learners
  • Initial research into attention and performance showed that even when people are performing other tasks, they would still hear a message when primed to listen for a target word. (Treisman, 1964 Attenuation Theory). Does this mean we should be keying our learners for target words?
  • Perhaps as learners we should learn how to better target our attention and learn when to switch
  • Perhaps presenters should provide break points, pauses that allow for the swtiching.
• Treat the presentation like a game
  • What if we were to treat the presentation like a game?
  • The presenter sets the rules – back-channel rules, front-channel rules
  • The presenter sets the goals – prize to indivdual or table group that can complete a task within a certain amount of time or that answers the quiz at the end.
  • Points for the best answer…
  • Have to think about this one more.

Just some initial thoughts on changing/setting expectations and skills we can learn and sharpen. The game has changed in intensity, lets change with it.

Addtional note (added later 10/14/09): there are two types of attention under current research: top-down attention (attending to a task such as looking for keys or listening to a presentation) & bottom-up attention (automatic attention to something salient or attention-grabbing, such as a fire-alarm or key words) . See full blog post from Scientific American: link.