Enterprise gamification…yes or no? Twitter #innochat Thursday May 22

May 21, 2014 by Leave a comment

What do you think about gamification for the enterprise? Smart innovation that helps deliver results? Or horrible idea that treats people as Pavlovian animals? Well, this week’s #innochat will examine that question.

#innochat? What’s that, you ask?

#innochat is a weekly conversation that takes place on Twitter, covering topics related to innovation. It’s open to anyone and is a great chance to add your perspective, learn how others view the topic, engage in a debate, and make connections. The general format:

  • Use the #innochat hashtag in your tweets
  • Follow the moderator, usually Drew Marshall or John Lewis, who will post the questions for the discussion
  • 4 or 5 questions are used to structure the conversation

#innochat runs for one hour every Thursday at the same time:

Innochat clocks

It’s my pleasure to be the guest for this week’s #innochat. For our topic, I’ve chosen: Applying gamification to enhance innovation outcomes. Click that link to read the framing post, and here are the four questions that will structure the discussion.

  1. What is your definition of gamification?
  2. True or false: Gamification is fundamentally about points, badges and leaderboards. Why?
  3. Given a magic wand, how would you use gamification to enhance innovation outcomes?
  4. What are the potential negative outcomes from gamification?

Share what you think about gamification. See you Thursday May 22, 2014.

I’m @bhc3 on Twitter, and I’m a Senior Consultant with HYPE Innovation.

 

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How to determine what rewards matter to employees

April 29, 2014 by Leave a comment

In the field of enterprise innovation, rewards programs are a relatively common component. This is a response to the fact that participating in innovation often comes on top of an employee’s existing duties. Organizations want the cognitive diversity, they want novel ways of addressing needs, but they also need to satisfy customers and keep the lights on. Rewards programs are put in place to provide additional value from participating in the innovation efforts (on top of the intrinsic motivation to help solve a challenge).

Rewards programs have a well-earned bad reputation for being de-motivators. Simplistic approaches – cash, gift cards, merchandise – can inadvertently wreck employees’ motivations to participate. When done poorly, they become what Daniel Pink described as de-motivators. Which then opens the question…how to do rewards “right”?

I think what matters is the type of work. Even Pink talks about how his research about motivation relates to what he terms “creative tasks”. I want to pick that up and propose the following matrix as a way to think about what rewards matter to what types of employees:

In this matrix, two attributes are keys to understanding what types of rewards would appeal to employees. Ambition level speaks to how much responsibility the person desires to have. And how much impact on the organization’s outcomes the want wants. Cognitive complexity includes what Pink calls “creative tasks”. Work that is more cognitively complex will have a high level of uncertainty, and require learning, trial-and-error and an iterative flow. To help make these characterizations of work more tangible, I’ve added some example occupations for each square in the matrix.

Together, cognitive complexity and level of ambition determine what rewards would hold appeal. If you like tasks that follow well-known rules, rewards that allow you to gain new knowledge are less interesting. If your objective is a paycheck and a great life outside of work, opportunities to meet with the CEO hold little appeal. If one’s interests run toward ways to increase career options and take on greater responsibilities, a $25 Amazon gift card offers little motivation.

I just wrote more about this in my post, Keys to success with an innovation reward program. There, I’ve described a spectrum of rewards that run from cash/merchandise through innovation program options. I map the matrix to those, and provide specific examples where rewards were done wrongly. Learn from those mistakes.

I’m @bhc3 on Twitter and I’m a Senior Consultant with HYPE Innovation.

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Four categories of enterprise gamification

April 22, 2014 by 1 Comment

When you think of gamification, what are the common things that come to mind? Points, badges, leaderboards. These items are in the cognitive toolkit. But looking at the sheer variety of game mechanics, you can see that’s it’s a much broader field than that:

Game mechanics list

These 48 different mechanics (via SCVNGR and Badgeville) aren’t the complete list, but they provide a sense for the possibilities. However, the quantity of game mechanics makes its difficult to coherently analyze what, if any, means are relevant for an initiative. I found myself facing that in some work I was preparing for a client. My job-to-be-done? Provide an accessible way to understand the different gamification techniques relevant to crowdsourced innovation.

Having done some gamification work previously as a product manager, I called on that experience and various research on the topic. The following are the categories that made sense to me in the context of the enterprise environment:

Gamification categories

You might notice that I’ve couched the descriptive statement of each in the first person. That fits the approach to gamification, which is about motivations of individuals, what matters to each of us. Here’s a bit more about each.

Achievement: I work to attain an objective. This category calls on the desire many of us for mastery. To be well-versed and proficient in something. There is a sort of competition, but it’s against a standard, a benchmark. Not others.

Recognition: My contribution is acknowledged. Recognition is a form of feedback, an affirmation of one’s capabilities or position and a manifestation of status among peers. Recognition strikes me as the most powerful form of motivation.

Competition:  I compete for a limited number of awards. These gamification techniques appeal to the desire to compete. They can elevate people to moments of excellence in their participation (think of sports you’ve participated in previously). Powerful when used in an appropriate context.  But it’s a category that needs to be treated with care. Clumsy implementation of competition gamification can poison an initiative.

Valuables: I want to secure something of value. Valuables can address avoiding the loss of something or gaining something new. Valuables include the things you might expect: points-based rewards systems. But they can include countdowns to do something (I need to do something before I lose the opportunity), or competition to win funding for an idea, for example. Very useful, but Valuables need to be handled with care to avoid unintended consequences (e.g. high volumes of low value contributions; mindset that participation only happens when there’s a reward).

I’ve applied these different gamification categories to different innovation scenarios in my new post: The gamification framework for business innovation. I also look at the purpose of gamification there, some common misperceptions about it, and five key design principles.

I’m @bhc3 on Twitter, and I’m a Senior Consultant with HYPE Innovation.

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