Ken Thompson, CEO of Bioteams.com (Dashboardsimulations.com) and I are thrilled to announce a new partnership between our two firms.
...I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing 
Phaedra Boinodiris, former CEO of womengamers.com and current Global Program Manager of Gamification and Serious Games for IBM. She works out of Raleigh, North Carolina.
The concept of “carrots and sticks” has existed since the beginning of civilization. The questions that flummox business leaders are:
1. When should we use carrots (aka rewards or incentives) and when should we use sticks to improve employee performance?
2. What is the optimal reward or incentive that nudges employees to adopt desired behavior?
3. How can businesses get continued gains from employee loyalty programs?
Let us revisit Roger’s Bell Curve of adoption. When confronted with new products, ideas, technologies, etc., some people adopt very quickly as “innovators,” others follow as “early-adopters,” others are “middle-adopters,” and the rest are “laggards.” As shown in the diagram below, the distribution of “types” tends to follow a bell curve. In addition, behaviorists have demonstrated that individuals tend to suffer from status quo bias when making decisions—i.e., they prefer the status quo and move from one segment of adoption to another only after calculating the effort to change (also known as mental accounting) and assessing the reward for change (also known as anchoring). Mechanisms need to be developed to “nudge” individuals into overcoming these decision-making frictions. These mechanisms include Gamification.
As we all know, rewards—ranging from employee-of-the-month parking spots to Pink Cadillacs (Mary Kay) to company-paid trips to Hawaii to bonuses—incentivize top performers (i.e. innovators and early-adopters) to go for the win. When companies introduce pure Game Mechanics gamification (digital or non-digital) to employee settings, top performers continue to win. Innovators and early-adopters embrace pure Game Mechanics because it introduces “fun” into their initial risk-taking behavior.
In short, the use of pure Game Mechanics as a nudging mechanism can suffer from a “top performers’ curse,” in that it simply incentivizes these employees to behave the same way they would have behaved without the “carrot.”
What carrots will change the behavior of middle-adopters? Why do real-work, data based, points-badges-and-leaderboard (PBL) mechanisms fail when it comes to employee engagement? I attribute this failure to a lack of understanding of the Rogers’ Bell Curve when designing Gamification nudging mechanisms.
When designing nudging mechanisms, the key questions to ask are:
1. What behaviors do you (the employer) want to see from the employees?
2. What workarounds (or recidivism to non-desirable behaviors) need to be prevented?
If the employer has good answers to these questions, he/she can create mechanisms that nudge middle-adopters to the desired behaviors. In short, employees get the carrot and the employer gets the win.
Serious Games allow middle-adopters to go through the “unlearn and relearn” cycle faster. This, in turn, enables them to trust the change and adopt faster. This is why Serious Games-based mechanisms work so well with respect to employee engagement. An interesting example is provided by Persuasive Games iconoclast Ian Bogost: Cold Stone Creamery required all new hires to practice their ice cream scooping technique with a game simulator before serving customers. This produced faster on-boarding of new employees and higher employee retention.
At PAKRA, we find that when Serious Games are used in conjunction with Game Mechanics in real-work processes, it provides even more sustainable success than when Serious Games are used in isolation. The results that we see when our clients use both Serious Games and Game Mechanics are given here.
In their seminal book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein discuss how to design mechanisms that “nudge” individuals suffering from “status-quo bias.” The goal is to improve the decision-making of individuals who practice “mental accounting” by “anchoring” at specific values when making choices.
Thaler and Sunstein share a story about a lottery designed to reduce speeding in a town in Sweden. Everyone is familiar with “Your Speed is __” markers set by the road to spur drivers to reduce their speed. What this Swedish town did differently—as pictured below—was to choose cars randomly for registration in a lottery if they slowed down. Drivers did not know whether or not their lottery registration depended on slowing down—yet the lottery had the intended effect, which was to induce drivers to pay attention and slow down at a greater frequency than they would in the absence of a lottery. This was a clever (and easily implemented) system for nudging behavior by offering a reward.
This brings me to Rogers’ Bell Curve, popularized by Geoffrey Moore in his book, Crossing the Chasm.
When confronted with new products, ideas, technologies, etc., some people adopt very quickly as “innovators,” others follow as “early adopters,” others are “middle adopters,” and the rest are “laggards.” As shown in the diagram below, the distribution of “types” tends to follow a bell curve. This empirical regularity in the adoption process (known as Rogers’ Bell Curve) was first discussed by Joe M. Bohlen, George M. Beal and Everett M. Rogers in a 1957 analysis of farmers’ adoption of new hybrid corn seeds.
In deciding whether to be innovators, early adopters, middle adopters, or laggards, individuals tend to rely on the anchoring and mental accounting studied by Thaler and Susstein. This brings us to the question: How do we nudge individuals to adopt more quickly?
The solution is obvious: design “easy-to-use” mechanisms that nudge individuals into quicker adoption. Fortunately, we have an entire industry dedicated to designing such mechanisms. These nudging Gamification designs go by many names: Serious Games, Meaningful Play, Pure Game Mechanics, and Gamified Environments.
PAKRA and other companies in this industry are dedicated to designing mechanisms that help customers, employees, and even farmers reduce status-quo bias and adopt more quickly.
And these mechanisms work: An emerging literature shows how Serious Games, Meaningful Play, Pure Game Mechanics, and Gamified Environments make middle adopters embrace new products/services, new technologies, new processes, new “anything” more quickly than they otherwise would. On a related note, the industry may be new but the ideas are not: The use of Games to plan, adopt, and change behavior (while having fun) goes back thousands of years; in fact, many game-related mechanisms stem from warfare and conflict resolution.For the nerds, here is a quick overview of how some of these terms originated:
1. Serious Games was first used by Clark Abt in 1970.
2. Meaningful Play in game design was introduced by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in 2003.
3. Gamification was introduced into business-speak by Nick Pelling in 2002.
4. History and classification of Game Mechanics can be found in Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans.
To us any mechanism that nudges people to adopt and change behaviors is a Gamification mechanism.
Despite its storied history, in the past few years I have repeatedly encountered controversy (see references) surrounding what is (and is not) included in Gamification.
Controversy 1: Gamification consists only of pure game-mechanics; Serious Games are excluded from Gamification.
If you Google the phrases game mechanics, meaningful play, gamification, and serious games, you will find blogs, articles, slide-shares, videos, and books in which the authors parse the differences among these concepts. Rajat Paharia, CEO of Bunchball, is among those advocating that we exclude serious-gamified environments and include only pure game-mechanics in our definition of gamification.
Marginalizing the value of serious games seems completely ridiculous, given that serious games have been proven to help nudge middle adopters! For evidence of the value of serious-gamified environments, see the discussion by IBM's Phaedra Boinodiris and Michael Hugos’ book, Enterprise Games. You can also visit our website to review results our clients experience.Controversy 2: Gamification only includes Digital Play.
In an April 2014 blog by Brian Burke of Gartner, gamification was redefined to include digital play only. This, in turn, led to many heated web discussions on the subject. In his blog, gamification expert Andrzej Marczewski pointedly wrote: “Gartner has now stated that gamification is nothing more than technology, and without technology, it is nothing. Whilst we know that is nonsense, the readers of Gartner don’t.”
Excluding non-digital mechanisms from the definition of gamification is simply silly, because we have endless evidence that non-digital mechanisms help nudge middle adopters! While I cannot even begin to conjecture the reasons for Gartner’s denial of history, I can point to Ken Thompson of Bioteams, who makes the case for having non-digital games to address problems of fail-fast learning.
It boils down to this: Do the individuals, businesses, and organizations that we are trying to “nudge" care about these epistemological kerfuffles? What they do care about are the following:
1. How do we acquire and retain customers?
2. How do we hire and retain employees?
We’ve all heard the adage “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
As Gamification experts, we can be more helpful to our customers if we are more inclusive. Let’s ask what problem needs to be solved, and then figure out which tool in the gamification tool-kit is best-suited to fixing that problem.
Click for video here:
...Question: "Do you expect your customer relationship management (CRM) tools and Social Apps to enable you to do your job better?"
Answer: "Yes! Of course!"
This past September, we determined that CRM tools and Social Apps used to acquire and retain our customers were not enabling us to do our work better.
The word enabling means it should optimize value-added (VA) activities and minimize non-value-added (NVA) activities. Lean methodology defines a VA activity as a work activity where the following characteristics all hold true:
If any of the above is violated, then by definition the activity is a NVA. For example, cutting and pasting, clicking several times to get what you need, reviewing, and rework are all NVAs.
In this edition of Gobsmacked™TV:
...For too many years, women leaders and managers did not want to discuss or even acknowledge our femaleness; we wanted to focus solely on leadership and management skills and results. It was as if we were supposed to ignore the fact gender exists.
Recent triggers and public discourse about women in leadership and management once again made gender acceptable to discuss out loud. Some of these triggers are:
1. Sheryl Sandberg’s (COO, Facebook) book, Lean In
2. Debora L. Spar’s (7th president of Barnard College) book, Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection
3. Sallie Krawcheck starting the #investinwomen campaign by buying 85Broads.com
4. More women CEO appointments in Fortune 1000 companies
5. Recent discussions and public discourse following Dick Costolo (CEO of Twitter), tweeting about his board composition: “You’re not seeing my point. You give people an easy out by just checking a box. The issues are much bigger than checking any 1 box.”
There are many myths and truths about how leadership styles, gender bias and culture (nature or nurture) affect “access” to education/capital/opportunities and career growth (AKA, glass ceiling) for women. We believe inclusion or exclusion of women affects performance of companies and organizations, as reflected in financial statements, operational success, reputation and brand. There is research about this (see references below), but the best summary came from Sallie Krawcheck in a tweet: “We can’t prove correlation or causation but it’s a hell of a coincidence: When we have diverse teams, returns are higher.”
We set out to continue this conversation by interviewing women leaders from around the globe, from various market verticals and with various organizational goals (corporate, not-for-profit), and asking them questions about how and why they:
1. Make career choices
2. Manage risk
3. Mentor or sponsor
4. Leverage networks
5. Hire
6. Make decisions
7. Manage teams
8. Influence outcomes of organizations
9. Remove group-think of corporate boards
10. Face and overcome hurdles
To help us do this, I invited Professor Sharon (“Sherry”) Peck to ask the important questions and write about it. Sherry is an associate professor of business in Capital University’s School of Management and Leadership (her bio is given below). She and I spend many hours discussing these issues. I think you will enjoy her style of asking questions and eliciting responses that will help all of us gain a better understanding of the role of gender in leadership and how it drives outcomes.
When I was telling people I was planning to use the real-estate of PAKRA blog pages for this issue, they asked me why. Here is why:
1. Women are buyers for our products and services as much as men are.
2. Women are a larger percentage of users of our products.
3. Behaviors such as critical thinking (“what one does with what one knows”), risk-taking, competitive drive and communication are some of our game-scoring mechanisms. These behaviors, in turn, drive business-process KPIs or outcomes and how people learn. We cannot claim we understand the behaviors better by ignoring gender. It might not play a role in how we build learning adoption, but maybe it does. We will learn something.
4. PAKRA's founders are deeply passionate about this issue.
The first interview will be published later this week. We plan to publish one-two interviews per month. Come back and read, share and comment.
In this edition of Gobsmacked™TV:
...
Experts and users of Google+: We have lots of questions for you. Come, join our Google+ community Gobsmacked™.
...Current estimates indicate that Google+ (which started in 2011), has 343 million active users and 100,000+ communities, whereas LinkedIn has 238 million users and 1.5 million LinkedIn Groups.
Most LinkedIn members use their profile for professional branding purposes. The active LinkedIn members engage in business development and job search/placement activities. In contrast, initially many Google+ users used the features for personal interactions such as photo-sharing with family, hangout with family and friends. Also many G+ users don't realise that their personal posts are making it to the public webspace and that they should reset their visibility preferences of posts and "About" page. Those users detered others from engaging with them.
However, the demand and growth of Google+ has been phenomenal this year. Moreover, after LinkedIn deployed an unprecedented and Members-UNfriendly policy called Sitewide Automated Moderation (SWAM), thousands of professionals and small businesses are exploring and migrating to Google+. Those who are active in Google+, are more than ever separating their professional profile from their personal profile and are engaging at different levels.
If you are considering to put your efforts into only one channel that helps you manage your customers better and more effectively, then you must start by comparing the features of each channel. The following tables compares all the known features available (as of September 1, 2013) with a free LinkedIn Membership and a Google+ profile (which is free).
The features marked in "blue" are the ones that we consider as very user-Friendly. The features marked in "red" are the ones that we consider as user-UNfriendly.
Overall
| Feature | Google+ | |
| People | Circles, Pages, Communities | Connections |
| Companies | Circles, Pages, Communities | Company Pages |
| Posts | Text, Photos, Links, Videos, GIFs |
Text, Links and Image files |
| No limit on text/character count |
Limit on number of characters in post |
|
| Tag people and pages with @ and + |
Tag people and companies with @ |
|
| Add hashtag for global SEO | Does not contribute to SEO | |
| Discussions | Communities: Private, Public with invite moderation, Public-Open | LinkedIn Groups: Private, Public with invite moderation, Public-Open |
| Home | Home | Home |
| Login | Email Automatic sign-on with login to any other Google products |
|
| Like | "+s" | "Like" |
| Mobile App | Available | Available |
As a consummate change-maker and a Games-based learning pioneer, Ken Thompson writes, speaks and deploys Games to teach corporate teams, the consequences of their decisions and help them manage change in business processes. He is the managing director of BioTeams Design and Swarm Teams.
RD:> Are you a gamer?
KT:> My kids are fanatical gamers. They humiliate me all the time, when I play with them. In fact they no longer include me even when they play Xbox soccer. So! I would not describe myself a gamer.
RD:> How did you get into Games and stuff like that?
KT:> I am a social mathematician. My educational background is in mathematics. Then I worked for more than thirty years in change management. I wrote books about teams, social networks and change management. I gave a TedX talk about high-performing teams.
Over two decades, as a hobby, I have been building these models, simulations and games. In the last five years or so, my clients started asking me to commercialize these simulations and games.
Some are pure simulations. For example, I have a simulation that optimizes how one organizes a sales process; another is about determining ROI from social campaigns.
Many are games and are based on immersive-learning principles. Most of these games are paper and pencil and role-based games, i.e. hybrid or blended learning game. Typically, a game runs for a full day with a leadership team.
RD:> I completely relate. We did those for twenty years prior to starting PAKRA.
KT:> Yes! In these games, I add:
(1) Realistic and relatable constructs i.e. stories with artifacts.
(2) Then there are, what I call, “golden rules”. By “golden rules” I mean: You should “Always do this” or You should “Never do that”.
(3) Basic resource constraints.
(4) Dilemmas and conflicts. Dilemmas, such as, “I want six pack abs” and “I love chocolates”.
(5) There are, of course, roles and metrics.
(6) The component of social learning where I facilitate in-person or online.
They typically play these games for 3 rounds. The first round is to normalize the mechanics and at the end, the players will be supremely confident. Then in the second round, the unexpected happens; for example, the suppliers increase prices, the market demand collapses, competitors eat their lunch, Euro spins out of control etc. In the third round, the innovation happens. Almost all participants find these blended experiential learning as the best way to learn.
CustomerThink Founder/CEO Bob Thompson recently interviewed me.
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