Gamestorming

Foreword

In the early 1960s, the celebrated children’s author Peggy Parrish introduced us to Amelia Bedelia, an overly literal housekeeper. Among other things, Amelia makes a sponge cake with real sponges, replants weeds when told to “weed the garden”, and hits the road with a stick when she’s told that the family is going to “hit the road” when leaving for a camping trip. My children squeal with laughter when they read about her comical adventures.

I often find myself laughing along with my children, until I think of the Amelia Bedelias I’ve met at work. Suddenly, the mistakes that people make while trying to perform their jobs aren’t so funny. Mistakes that stem from a lack of clarity about the goals and objectives of a project or the failure to consider the ramifications of making a process change in a complex system. Mistakes created from teams who haven’t given themselves the freedom to explore alternatives, or from teams who haven’t invested the time to choose thoughtfully from the alternatives they’ve invented or discovered.

Although the loss of productivity caused by these kinds of mistakes is considerable, these mistakes result in more than that. They generate frustration among the team as work must be redone. They result in unnecessary meetings, because once the mistakes are realized, yet another meeting must be called to figure out what to do. The mistakes clog up our email inboxes, because instead of being comfortable in knowing whom I must email about what, I instead ...