Gamestorming

I have grown into my current role of business architect following a path that has taken me to almost every role in an IT shop at least a couple of times. The perspectives I have gathered along the way have proved invaluable in doing my current job but every so often, the process of getting a team's to articulate in clear, actionable terms how they would get from their current state to the desired future state can prove to be very challenging. Every traditional method of eliciting requirements and mapping as-is or to-be process in my experience has it limitations and does not readily fit the needs of the team or project at hand.

Gamestorming- A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers introduces the reader to some off the beaten path ideas for brainstorming, process mapping, prioritization, customer persona definition, problem scenario identification, requirement elicitation and much more. The games are uniformly interesting, well defined and easy to play. More importantly it is a large and diverse tool-set that one can pick and choose from. In acknowledging that business processes don't always follow a linear path from current to future state and may indeed have a largely fluidly defined end-game, the authors make a very compelling case for practitioners in the field to try their idea of using games to accomplish where traditional methods often fall short.

One game I found particularly thought provoking is The Anti-Problem game. It proposes a way for teams to "get unstuck when they are at their wit's end. It is most useful when a team is already working on a problem, but they are running out of solutions". The objective is to find a problem that is the exact opposite to the problem that needs solving. The more extreme the opposite the more likely the team is to solve their actual problem.

I would highly recommend the book to anyone whose role involves understanding complex processes and systems, building consensus among team members, generating creative ideas to solve an existing problem, designing a new product or concept and root cause analysis.