The value of workshop gamification

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts, David Sherrock and Peter Madison. So how are you doing today, Dave? Very good. Very good. How are you doing, Peter? Not bad, not bad. It's been a fun day. I think I have uh 14 meetings today, and so just working on the phone.

I was gonna say you're context switching like crazy today, then.

Yes, yeah.

It's like so. Do you get a prize for the most number of context switches that you get to in a day?

Uh no, but I do get to give myself a whiskey at the end of the day if it gets too much.

Okay. So that I heard as yes, you are gamifying your uh your context switching with a whiskey at the end of the day.

There you go. And in fact, that's our topic for today. We're going to talk about gamification.

And gamification workshops, right? Gamification just in terms of how to work with things. So I think I always find this quite interesting because I think there was a a few years back, and it's probably five years ago now, where gamification started appearing in all the tools that we were using, whether or not you you've got badges for logging in every day or reporting on various things. And the the concept of gamification of effectively triggering dopamine responses by having us, you know, pat ourselves on the back on a regular basis is well founded in lots of different places. I mean, there's lots of really good things that come from that. And there's obviously some bad things that come from it. Where do you see gamification in workshops or in the exercises that you're doing?

Well, there's there's definitely a couple of places where I find that it's very, very valuable. One of them is where the the material can be a little esoteric or it's a little difficult to relate back to the things you're doing by making it a uh by gamifying it, making it something people can engage with more. You can help them absorb the material better. They can uh they can take that and then uh work out how they can then take that and apply it to their own work more easily. Um and and people have more fun. And when people have more fun, they they tend to enjoy it. And those dopamine responses trigger and uh they feel happy.

And uh I mean I think that there's nobody that who runs or facilitates a workshop would, I think, disagree with people having fun in those workshops is a good sign, right? So um I I don't think it matters too much what the topic is. The idea is, of course, that that people are much more um open to uh learning, to understanding and considering different options and how their behaviors may need to change or whatever it might be, just in a in a positive frame of mind, that's for sure. Not sure that's gamification, though, is it?

Well, no, there's I'm thinking more though of like where there's a simulation that we run. Um, this digital transformation simulation takes four or five hours, and you work your way through uh 12 months of transformation of an organization and airline, and uh that as you go through that, there's a whole ton of like there's learning points as you start to work out to operationally stabilize the organization, and then how do I start to bring in new functionality and new capability? And how do I introduce these in the context of this fictional gamed organization? And you get to make take pick your strategies and uh pick how you're going to approach this, and you get to see, well, what happens if I do this, or what happens if I do that, and you get to try different things, and um, so that that in that context that works very, very well. There's a lot of learning opportunities in there, and uh a lot of opportunities to uh see what might happen and and do it in a in a safe environment.

I I really like what you're describing there in terms of that scenario. I and I think of this as in in education circles, I think they talk about project-based learning versus kind of curriculum-based learning or information knowledge-based learning. And that whole thing that we're very familiar with is learning by putting a problem in front of people and allowing them to solve the problem. And I you know, you touch on the importance of a safe environment to sort of try things out and fail, and try things out and fail so that people learn the the sort of landscape around which those problems are being addressed. And they they there's lots and lots of examples where that's very, very powerful. Um, do you when you're looking at gamification in the workshops, do you do you bring in that sort of badge-based gamification that we often see in the tools that uh uh we can get to?

There's there's a ranking. So the the company that you're trying to transform has uh a I think it's based on operational revenue. And so uh you start at the bottom of this leaderboard, and you're being asked by the CEO to get up that leaderboard, and of course, all of your other competitors, all the other people in the workshop, are also trying to do the same thing. So there is that competition against each other of like who can get higher up. And uh in one of these I ran uh recently, uh the the prize for winning was being taken out for lunch by the CIO. So it's like uh it was uh there was um they're definitely the gamification, like I I want to do as well as I possibly can. I want to strive uh to get the highest points and uh the best score.

It's interesting. So I'm sort of picking up a different layers of gamification, if you like. So there's there's competition, and I'm where oh there's only one winner, you've got a number of teams, they're all vying for the option to go out for dinner with the CIO, whatever that is. I feel that's more competition. It's and and I'm a huge fan of competition. I think it's really powerful. I see this in many different scenarios. I think there's good competition and there's bad competition. And this is the the joke that I always bring in is if you're taking the wheels off the wheelie chairs to sabotage the other team, then the good competition has become bad competition. So it isn't about you know winning at all costs. But I think naturally we compete with one another, we compare, we look at the team next to us, and we want our team to perform at least as well, if not better, than the team next to us. That's a natural desire, if you like, on most teams. And I don't see that as a bad thing as long as it doesn't become a managerial tool.

Yeah, and the the in the that simulation uh there's there's no way of influencing the other teams. So the you're is you do as well as you do. Like so you've got you can't interfere with them in any way. Um at least in a in a virtual setting, because you're all off in your own breakout rooms. You've got you can't like see to bad information or anything like that too. And so it's it's really and the and that leaderboard piece of it outside you're competing against the game itself mostly because the the the CEO in the game is asking you to get up higher. So you're competing against the game and trying to uh get better uh as an organization and solve the organization's problems and help it move forward. Uh there's uh less than you are competing against others. There is the leaderboard between the different um teams, but it's not as visible, and it's really between the individuals, so it's not as necessarily as obvious, although people always ask for exactly the reason you just said people are naturally competitive. They will they always say, like, well, who's at the top? Who's at the top? Does it really matter? That's not really the point here.

But well, but but it's I mean it isn't the point, but it's it's exactly the point in the sense that um you know, a little light competition is is a very natural state of being. Uh, I think the other and if if we call that the sort of competition side of things, the other bit of gamification is the badge winning of, you know, you've logged in for 10 days on the trot, you've logged in for 20 days and so on, or um, you know, you've closed five tasks, you've closed 25 tasks. And all of these little badges that we're beginning to see crop up in many systems. That's the gamification that often is tied directly to dopamine. It's that it's we're all used to this. This is social media like buttons and things like this. And that gamification I find is is more awkward. It's a peculiar thing because it's very powerful, but it can also be very distracting. Have you had experience of that side of gamification?

Uh yeah, I'd uh I have uh I have my Garmin watch on here that I use for my running, which constantly surprises me. You've now done X number of steps overall in the entire lifetime of owning this device, kind of thing. It's like I I I pay myself, I personally pay very little attention to it. It's not what spurs me on to do the next things. I'm more intrinsically motivated than extrinsically motivated for, especially when it comes to things like running. So so that there is that piece, and I think and that's actually a piece to pull out there when we look at gamification that why it will have a different effect for different people. Some people really couldn't care less about the badges or those other pieces. They're not the thing that are gonna motivate them to do the next part of it. Uh it's it doesn't always it doesn't trigger people, or it doesn't trigger every person in the same way.

Um for sure, but well, I find this one quite interesting because it is a very powerful trigger for those who are working to it, you know, led by it, number one. So so it is it can it can um deform the right behavior. And I use I'm I'm thinking it's not that it triggers poor behavior, and I'm not trying to talk about that, but it's more people will you know go out of their way. They'll I mean you use the example of of tracking steps. There are many people who will get off of a lift a few floors early and go and use, you know, do that anything they can to track steps, and um, and they'll then there's the whole bit of of shaking your hand backwards and forwards so that you get a step count that meets what you need to, but is not necessarily uh meeting the objective. And that's part of the problem with this sort of gamification, is is and this this brings us to things like timesheets, right? Where you're sitting there and going, okay, now you know thou shalt fill in your timesheets. There's a gamification element, there's probably tools in there and and so on to make sure that you do that, but now people change their behavior, they deform their behavior in order to achieve a goal because the goal is set externally.

And people were wondering how we were going to tie this back to organizational change.

So well, in a nutshell, we can begin seeing it, right? I'm I'm actually drawn back to to um the work that uh Dan Pink talked about in Drive. And there's a great, you know, the the classic RS Animate video 10-minute introduction to drive that saves most people reading the book. So if you're not a book reader, check out the link in the um in in the notes of this uh this podcast. But what was interesting about Drive is the research that led to the conclusion that most people are intrinsically most motivated rather than extrinsically motivated. And the key bit being those studies that say extrinsic motivation works in a very small set of problems where the task is very, very clear. Steps where the task is very clear, entering items in a system, whether it's work items, closing work items, or adding time into a time management system or whatever it might be. So it works in these clear areas, number one, but number two is it doesn't necessarily work the way we want it to. So and and that brings us to that whole problem around gamification where we've got to be very, very careful. You you mentioned one thing, which is hey, I'm I'm I'm no longer really paying any attention to the gamification on my watch. So, how do we pick up some of those things? What is it that we can learn from it?

Well, uh there's a piece that we use when we're designing metrics, um, because because there's some classic examples of this when we look at metrics and when metrics become targets, they cease to be valuable. And it's the this piece around goal question metric, the like what are the or goal question measurement, and where we're looking at like what is the goal, what is the question we want to answer, and what is the metric we're gonna design to do that, and then what happens when we game that? What happens when we get more of that thing that we're measuring? Because that'll because you will if when you measure it, you'll end up with more of it. So, what's the impact of that to the system? So, and looking at it from that perspective, I mean the classic classic example of this is measuring lines of code written by developers is a classic example because uh yeah, that's easy. If I'm gonna game that, I'm just gonna add a whole bunch of blank spaces and a whole bunch of comments or something, and which means that I I end up with a whole lot more lines written, which means I'm doing good, right? Well, I haven't actually added any value as a consequence of that, because the I'm not really measuring for the right thing there.

It's interesting you say that, because I've I've seen one example where lines of code measurement worked really, really well. And the speci the place where I've seen this working, and and there there were a raft of measurements that were used to look into the the the basically the behavior and the quality of the development teams, and that included lines of code, but it also included um defects per line of code, per thousand lines of code. It included reviewed identified defects. So as a code reviewer, my job was to make sure that I was finding a certain number of defects per thousand lines of code and so on. So, what was interesting, the starting point of that particular conversation was this has nothing to do with management. And it was available for the teams to be able to look at one another and so myself as a developer, I could tell, am I meeting the minimum standards across what the team is doing, rather than a manager coming in and saying, hey, you know, you're not hitting this target.

Yeah, and that I think that's an important part of it, is then when you're measuring things like that, it had the team needs to be measuring this for themselves, not something that's enforced as a way of judging how good are you at this from externally, because then it will end up being used to draw a lot of the wrong conclusions and drive a lot of the wrong behaviors. So I mean we we see that again and again. If it's something that a team has decided to measure itself by, then it's very different. If I'm gonna measure myself by how many lines did I write, how many or how many lines of code did I write, then then if I'm measuring myself by that, I'm gonna make sure that I write good lines of code, I'm not trying to scan the system. If somebody else is measuring me against that metric, then it's a different story, right? Because um I can now get rewarded for doing very little versus getting rewarded for what I'm doing the right thing.

So that brings us like if if I'm just thinking about that one, I think it we've got a really nice distinction, which says that gamification, the badging, the the how many steps have you done, how many work items have you finished, is great for the team to manage, you know, to to learn and set their own standards and and hold themselves accountable to that. So it's a it's a it if we're providing gamification, it's more a pro a case of providing gamification so that should the team choose to, should individuals choose to, they can use that to understand how they perform or what they're doing effectively. So it's it's something of an individual tool. Um if you're looking at an individual tool for for a cross-team performance, that's that light competition that we talked about. Know that the competition is there, that's more about making results visible and seeing how your team is performing and how other teams are performing. And we know that we all want to be on quote unquote the winning team. And winning can be defined in many, many different ways. So I don't think there's anything inherently bad about a bit of competition there, but that's a different piece to the gamification functionality that's more of an individual focus. Would that be right?

I I would say so. In the I life's far more complicated than uh than a video game. We don't have this like uh score at the top right hand corner, which is like counting up every time we uh manage to shoot an alien or something. It's like there's nothing, there's there's no immediate instantaneous feedback to a lot of the things we're doing, especially in knowledge work. So there's that piece of if we're looking at something on a on a large scale, then we've got to look at um how do we know that we're making progress? And that's often where we find like, are we achieving what we're looking to achieve? And so find ways to do that. And uh like uh, which I think actually is possibly another example of where gamification can add value in that it can help you with that. Uh, am I making progress? Am I getting better? Am I achieving that next state that I I want to be in? And so I think there's some pieces there.

So so there's the sorry, just uh just wanted to pick up. There are these great quotes about um people competing against their own personal bests rather than the people next to them. And I think that's that natural combination of the two, where you bring it together and say it's more important that you know we're striving individually to perform better, perhaps.

Exactly. Well, we're we're coming to the end of our time here, so how how would we like to sum this up in our three points?

Well, I let me try this one. So I think we're we're coming to the conclusion that individual like gamification is a great thing. So so for us competing against our own personal best, those gamification tools that we often see are really powerful. When it comes to you know comparison across different teams, there's that light competition, but that cannot easily be an uh it's not something that managers can really rely on. Because the moment we come in and try and and manage and and set objectives based on that, then it almost achieves the opposite, I think. And then the third thing I wanted to just remind ourselves on is we started this about your scenario, the exercise that you use in in the operations world. I think you mentioned airlines, a fictional airline. And I think there's a huge power in that aspect of gamification, that sort of scenario-based learning. And I think we don't use that nearly enough. For knowledge work, complex environments, many, many variables. As you said, there isn't one high score that we're all aiming for. How things are measured varies depends on, depending on our roles and responsibilities and the view, the particular dimension we may be looking at or frame that we may be looking at a problem. So that scenario-based planning becomes a, I think, a significantly, sorry, scenario-based exercises, let me say, is a significantly underused but powerful way of gamifying the work that we do and the learning.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. It's uh I've seen it be very effective at creating the right types of conversation and giving people uh the opportunity to uh to discuss things that they might not have done before. Sometimes when we approach something with the that, and I think I started the conversation with this, when we're approaching with that sort of esoteric, uh, hey, this is like what it looks like in general. Here's the model, here's the method, here's the framework. And then the person is trying to say, but how do I apply that to what I do? Giving them a scenario that they can play around in and work in and that they can understand and relate to gives them uh a way of comprehending and applying those models and methods so that they can truly start to learn it and gain value from it. So with that, I think we're at the end of our time today. And so I'd uh like to thank you as always, Dave. It was uh a great conversation, really enjoyed it. And uh if anyone would like to send us some feedback, they can at feedback at definitely maybeagile.com. And I'll look forward to the next time we get to chat.

Yeah, great opportunity to talk to you soon.

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.