About Gamestorming

Gamestorming helps you lead better meetings using best practices for facilitating innovation in the business world.

Gamestorming: an introduction

Gamestorming collects and makes recipes of emerging methods and approaches to work that have been germinating since the 1970s and are deeply intertwined with the burgeoning Information Age. You can use these methods individually, but we think you'll get outsized results when you try them with your teams and clients.

Meetings give us the opportunity for outcomes unique to any other form of work. Take time, add to it ideas, put smart people in a room to discuss them—and you've created the conditions to produce wonderfully emergent, brilliantly innovative, and contagiously creative ideas. Meetings inspire us when they work. Too often, they don't.

Balancing time, people, and ideas challenges the most skilled facilitators. The raw ingredients for meetings are too costly to leave their preparation to chance; there must be a recipe. And from this seed, Gamestorming grew.

A good meeting has artifacts.

Gamestorming encourages participants to contribute. Because the framework’s goal is to foster more productive collaboration, those contributions are welcome to take whatever shape is best for meeting attendees. From sticky notes to pictures of whiteboards to digital tools, like Miro, you need documentation to capture how decisions were made. You need artifacts concrete enough to reference and share with stakeholders—that also integrate well into your team’s existing process.

Why games?

In the world of instructional design, gamifying something incentivizes “players” to return for more. And the same principles can be applied in a meeting setting to encourage your team to contribute to brainstorming or decision-making processes.

Games create a participation parity with a recipe of their own: a game board (think boundaries), supplies, an agreed upon goal, and instructions for play. You will find these elements in any game, from chess to tennis to Pictionary to Cover Story.

In other words: if you can play Monopoly, you can Gamestorm. Each meeting game (brainstorm or decision-making) has consistent rules. And all games—and meetings—have preparation, opening, exploration, and closing phases (which is also how this doc is structured).

• Prep, work before the work begins.
• Open, where the conditions of the game and the goal are set out.
• Explore, game is running, starting to develop questions arising from opening phase and arriving at conclusions.
• Close, pulls everything together. Must arrive at some decisions.