1. Opening and Closing

This concept is so important for managing energy and flow that it belongs on the essentials list. Opening and closing is the way you orchestrate your gamestorming activities. Like breathing, it underlies every activity, giving it rhythm and life.

Think about the opening and closing arguments in a court trial. The purpose of the opening is to establish a frame of reference, set the context, and lay out the themes that will be explored in the trial. The closing argument precedes and prepares the way for the jury or judge to make a decision.

Opening is just what it sounds like—it’s a beginning. To open is to get people thinking and spark their imaginations. To open you need to create a comfortable environment where people feel invited and welcome so that they will open their minds and explore possibilities they may not have considered before. Closing is about bringing things to a conclusion, moving from thinking mode into doing mode. Closing is about making choices and decisions. Break out/report back is a form of opening and closing: you open or break out to find divergent ideas and perspectives, and you close or report back to share ideas and realign with the group.

Here are some risks to be aware of:

Don’t open and close at the same time

You can’t be creative and critical simultaneously. People’s minds just don’t work that way. When you are exploring creative possibilities you need to shut down the critical part of your mind, and when you are making difficult choices, you should not try to be creative. Keep them separate and do them in order.

Close everything you open

If you open something you must close it, or you will risk losing the energy of the group. Opening can feel overwhelming. If you open and don’t close, people may feel as if you have opened Pandora’s box: there are too many opportunities and no plan to tackle them. If people do work in a breakout session, they will be disappointed if they don’t have a chance to share it with others and you may miss an important learning opportunity.

2. Fire Starting

In knowledge work, fire-starting techniques are the spark that ignites the imagination, a call to adventure. They initiate a quest or search. In the wilderness, the way you start a fire is very important, and in gamestorming the same is true. Start a fire in the wrong way or in the wrong place, and you may soon find that things are out of control—you can have a raging forest fire on your hands. By the way you initiate an inquiry you can inspire the kinds of thought, reflection, emotion, and sensation that are most likely to get you the result that you want.

The most common and powerful fire-starter is the question. A good question is like an arrow you can aim at any challenge. The way you frame a question will lay out a vector, a line of inquiry that points in a certain direction. There are many kinds of questioning techniques and they bear careful study and practice. You can use them to change people’s perspectives on a problem, drill down to expose root causes, elevate a conversation to a higher plane, and many other things.

Another common fire-starter is called fill-in-the-blank, in which you craft a short phrase or sentence and ask people to fill in the blank like they would on a test. For example, if you want to explore customer needs, consider how customer needs are typically expressed. A fill-in-the-blank to explore customer needs could be written as “I want ________.” (Fill in the blank.)

3. Artifacts

As you begin to collect, sort, and organize information it can quickly become overwhelming. How do you keep track of it all? In archeology, an artifact is anything made or shaped by a human hand—especially when it has archaeological or historical interest. In knowledge work, an artifact is any tangible, portable object that holds information. An artifact can be anything from a piece of paper to a sticky note or index card. Artifacts make it easier to keep track of information by making it a part of the environment.

The pieces in any game, such as cards, counters, and dice, are artifacts. When you do something as simple as moving salt- and peppershakers on a tabletop to tell a story, you are transforming them into knowledge artifacts for the sake of your tale.

The importance of these artifacts as an aid to thinking can easily be illustrated if you imagine yourself playing a game of chess while blindfolded. It’s possible to hold the positions of all the pieces in your mind’s eye for a time—and most chess masters can do it for an entire game—but it’s much easier to have the pieces displayed on a board in front of you. The shape and color of each piece, and its position relative to the board and to the other pieces, contains a rich set of information that can help you make better decisions about the game.

Artifacts are carriers of meaning; just like chess pieces on a board, they make knowledge or information explicit, tangible, portable, and persistent. When you write an idea on a sticky note you are creating an information artifact. When you have created many such artifacts, they can become more or less useful depending on how you distribute them in your environment. The more information you can store in material objects or the environment, the more your players’ minds are free to engage with the situation at hand.

4. Node Generation

A node is anything when seen as part of a larger system. As a knowledge explorer, when you create artifacts you will usually be thinking of them as elements in something larger. In the opening stages of any inquiry, the first order of business is to generate as many artifacts—nodes—as possible, so you want to begin from as wide an angle as possible. We call this kind of exercise node generation.

One method for generating nodes is called the Post-Up. To post up, you begin with some kind of fire-starter to set the parameters that define your list. To start with a simple example, imagine that you are going shopping and need to create a list of groceries. You could start with a simple question: “What do I need from the store?” Instead of a typical brainstorming session, where people call out ideas and a facilitator makes a list that everyone can see, you ask people to generate their ideas silently, using sticky notes—one idea per note.

Doing this accomplishes two goals. First, since it’s an opening exercise, you will get a more diverse set of ideas by asking people to generate them silently. Second, by asking people to write each idea on a separate sticky note, you are generating a set of modular, movable artifacts that you will later be able to shuffle, sort, and reorganize.

When people are finished generating ideas, ask them to take turns going up to a flip chart or whiteboard and sharing their ideas with the group, as follows: read each sticky note aloud and place it on the board where everyone can see it. Notice that this Post-Up process is a version of break out/report back. The breakout begins when you ask people to start writing ideas, and the report back ends when everyone has finished sharing ideas and the board is filled with sticky notes.

5. Meaningful Space

Imagine trying to play chess without a board. A game like chess relies not only on the meaning of the pieces but also on the ever-changing relationships they have to each other in space. The grid of the chessboard creates a meaningful space as cleanly and as surely as the grid on any map. Both the grid and the pieces are integral and essential to the game.

Just like every other game, chess creates a world that players can explore together. The chessboard (meaningful space) creates the boundaries of the world, and the pieces (artifacts) populate the world.

The rules of the game govern what is and isn’t possible in the world. Chess players agree to enter the world in order to explore the possible permutations and combinations and try to achieve their goals, which, in the case of chess, are achieved at the expense of the other player. However, in gamestorming, more often the players share a common goal.

For the knowledge explorer, meaningful space can be created anywhere: on a whiteboard, flip chart, or piece of paper; on a tabletop or in a room. It’s a way of framing any space to make relationships within it more meaningful. The grid, like the grid of a chessboard, is one of the most common and useful ways to organize space. You can see grids all around you; we use grids for everything from planning cities to managing the numbers in our spreadsheets.

Affinity mapping is a common method that uses meaningful space to sort a large set of nodes into a few common themes. It is a way to rapidly get a group of people aligned about what they are working on together. First, generate a set of nodes using the Post-Up game or some other node-generation method.

Next, create a meaningful space by dividing a whiteboard or other visual area into three columns. Ask people to sort the sticky notes into three columns that “feel like they belong together” without trying to name the columns. It’s important that they not try to name the columns. Naming the columns too early will force them back into familiar, comfortable patterns. Remember that in creative work we are trying to help people generate and see new patterns. While people are sorting, you may ask them to try to eliminate redundancies by placing similar sticky notes on top of each other. Sometimes the sticky notes don’t fit neatly into three columns and you may want to create more columns to accommodate the differences. You should do this sparingly, though, because too many categories will defeat your purpose, which is to find some common themes.

The three (or more) columns serve as a meaningful space, a set of “empty buckets” that people can use to sort their ideas, kind of like a cubbyhole desk or one of those change-sorting machines you see sometimes at carnivals.

Having a business meeting without artifacts and meaningful space is like meeting blindfolded with your hands behind your back. Yes, you can do it, but why would you want to?

6. Sketching and Model Making

Sketches and models are kinds of artifacts. A sketch can be a drawing, as in a pencil sketch. It can be a short skit, as in a comedy sketch. It can be a roughly described outline, as in “he sketched out a plan” or “she sketched in the details.” What do all these meanings have in common? What is the nature of a sketch?

The defining characteristics of a sketch are its informality, looseness, and brevity. A sketch is a preliminary activity that may or may not lead to a more refined, finished version. A sketch is a rapid study, an exploration. An artist might do hundreds of sketches before settling on one idea for deeper examination. Sketching is a way to quickly explore ideas by making them more tangible or concrete.

A good sketch has just enough information to get an idea across, and no more. But sketching out ideas cannot be the sole domain of the artist, sculptor, or actor. Most of us convey our thoughts verbally or in writing, but this is only one channel of communication, and limiting our ideas to a single channel is a serious constraint on thinking.

Pythagoras, Euclid, Descartes, and Newton would never have made their discoveries without the use of pictures and diagrams. Einstein said his thinking relied on images of “a visual and muscular type.”

A quick introduction to visual language should help most people over the barrier so that they can feel comfortable expressing ideas visually or symbolically. Sketching can also include other kinds of modeling exercises, such as a quick improvised skit or physical model making with Plasticine clay and pipe cleaners. The key is to make things real with minimal effort. Rapid paper prototyping is a way to sketch software interfaces. Designers create mockups of computer interfaces using sticky notes, paper, and cardboard, which they can then use to test and try out various user interactions.

7. Randomness, Reversal, and Reframing

Not everything comes to us in order. It’s rumored that William S. Burroughs determined the order of the pages in his book, Naked Lunch, by throwing the manuscript in the air and assembling the pages in the order he picked them up. The Qur’an was revealed to Mohammed in sections, and only later did he determine their proper order. The human brain is a pattern-making machine. We seek and find patterns everywhere we look. Leonardo da Vinci used to find inspiration by looking at stains on the wall:

I cannot forbear to mention...a new device for study...which may seem trivial and almost ludicrous...[but] is extremely useful in arousing the mind...Look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones... you may discover a resemblance to landscapes...battles with figures in action...strange faces and costumes...and an endless variety of objects....

Leonardo da Vinci

We are so good at finding patterns that once we find one, it can be difficult to see anything else. Creating randomness is a way of fooling the mind so that you can more easily search for new patterns in familiar domains. By shuffling the deck, reversing the order, or reframing the familiar, you create enough space for new ideas and opportunities to emerge.

Randomness is an essential element in any kind of creativity. The shuffling and recombination of genes, for example, is an essential element in the variation and selection that leads to the emergence of new life forms. The same principle works in the realm of thought and ideas.

A map of the world with south at the top, for example, invites new thinking about the relationships between nations.

One reason to use modular artifacts such as index cards and sticky notes is that they facilitate randomness; they can be easily shuffled, re-sorted, and rearranged to generate new patterns and ideas.

8. Improvisation

To improvise is to make it up as you go along, to make do with whatever happens to be available, to proceed without a plan. Like a jazz musician, you compose and create simultaneously. When you improvise, you create in the moment, responding intuitively to the environment and your inner feelings. You let go. By letting go of your assumptions and biases, you open a path to new ideas, new practices, and new behaviors. You consciously forget what you know in order to elicit spontaneity, serendipity, and surprise.

Improvisation is a way of thinking with your body. In role play, you take on the role of a character, imagine a situation, and act as you think your character would act in that situation. Putting yourself in another person’s shoes helps you to empathize with that person’s goals and challenges, and can lead to insights and better solutions.

Bodystorming is a kind of improvisation in which players construct (sketch) a makeshift world using cardboard, chairs, or whatever is at hand, and then act out scenarios within that world in order to understand it better.

In the early 1990s, user experience designer Jared Spool and several colleagues developed a design game in which players worked together to design a prototype of an interactive kiosk using cardboard and paper. The purpose of the game was to help designers learn how paper prototyping could speed up their design process.

Because of the fleeting, impermanent nature of the ideas generated by these kinds of exercises, it can be very helpful to have some recording equipment handy, such as a video camera, a small tripod, and perhaps a microphone. If you plan to be doing a lot of this you may want to invest in more professional equipment. There’s a balance to be struck here: while recording sessions is a way to create tangible artifacts that represent temporal experiences, it may also take some of the spontaneity out of the improvisation.

9. Selection

You can’t do everything, and so there are times when you will need to winnow a large set of ideas or options down to a smaller, more manageable set.

Voting can be a good way to do this. We’re all familiar with raising our hands or using a secret ballot to vote on things, but when you have a massive amount of information that you need to cull, there are better, faster ways to use voting to do this. For example, you can give everyone 10 small, round stickers and ask them to stick them on the things that interest them most. When they are out of stickers they are out of votes.

Voting with stickers is an example of a form of currency. Circular stickers are like money that players can distribute among a group of things, to help them decide what matters most to them. Imagine your grocery list again, and imagine that you have a very long list but a limited amount of money. If you had unlimited funds, you could buy everything you wanted, but the fact that your funds are limited forces you to make choices—sometimes difficult ones.

People have a natural tendency to bite off more than they can chew. We are naturally optimistic. But when people do this they easily become overwhelmed and then nothing is accomplished in the end. Voting and currencies help people make the difficult choices about what is important to them. By giving people stickers, or asking them to make marks that represent their votes, you can make the preferences of a group visible and explicit so that they can see where everybody stands and move more quickly to decisions.

Another way to boil down a set of ideas is to sort information according to priority. Forced Ranking prioritizes a list of items by “forcing” them into a linear rank: most important to least important, first to last, and so on. For example, imagine your grocery list again. You could force-rank the list by organizing items by cost, from most expensive to least expensive. You could also force-rank the items in order of priority, from most important to least important. If you have a limited amount of money to spend you could compare both lists to determine the best way to spend your money.

10. Try Something New

The best way to hone your knowledge in exploring skills is to keep yourself honest. You won’t discover and invent anything unless you get used to taking risks and trying new things on a regular basis. Make it a practice to try at least one new thing every time you gamestorm. It will keep you honest, force you to continuously develop and improve, and keep things fresh and alive for you. You won’t inspire others unless you can stoke your own fires.

Think of gamestorming as a toolkit that allows you to plug pieces together in different ways, depending on the way the action is going. The game is the game until it changes. A seasoned knowledge explorer will quickly abandon a game that isn’t working and smoothly transition into another. You can think of each game as a scene in a play—or a skit. The players need to have their heads in the game to make real, meaningful progress.

In a gamestorming environment you might move from a role-playing game to a board game to a building game in quick succession. The games are not ends in themselves, but building blocks that help you get from one point to another. Like a team of soldiers building a pontoon bridge to cross a river, you create a game when you need it, use it for as long as it is useful, and then discard it when you no longer need it. It’s like building a ladder one step at a time because you aren’t quite sure where you’re going; like a cartoon character building a ladder to nowhere.

Be in the now. Look around and grab something, patch it together, make a game from the simplest tools. The game will move you forward. You don’t need to know the final destination; only the next step in the journey. Just keep your eye on the fuzzy goal—the mountaintop, the imagined thing over the horizon—and the next step, the next game, that moves you one step in approximately the right direction.