How Teams Can Get Creative Remotely with Dave Mastronardi

About Dave Mastronardi

Televised in both Koreas, Dave has over 15 years experience at the intersection of business, technology, and communication, helping companies rethink and change the way they do business. Employers include SaaS start-ups and Fortune 50. Industry experience includes: telecommunications, finance, management consulting, travel and entertainment, professional sports, industrial manufacturing. He’s been Gamestorming since before it was cool.  Before GG, Director of Global Digital Strategy at Samsung. Sprinklr before that. Dachis Group before that. Raytheon and EDS long ago.

• Gamestorming the book
• Dave Mastronardi on LinkedIn
• gamestorming.com

Transcript

Luke: Can you say a few words about Gamestorming and how you got into it in the first place?

Dave Mastronardi: Gamestorming the book, the publication is 10 years old this month, actually. and it was 10 years ago this month that I was introduced to it. I was working at agency in Austin, Texas, and I was doing strategy work. And, by way of education, I have a business degree in economics and I have  an MBA.  I didn’t go to art school. I wasn’t a capital C creative. and I was essentially filling up slides with text.

When the agency I was working at acquired xplain the agency that Dave Gray, the author of gamestorming in a James Macanufo, the author of gamestorming had founded and were working at respectively. And so then they became my colleagues and, all of their colleagues became my colleagues and I was surrounded by people who were capital C creatives, and they had gone to art school and they worked in a very different way that I did. They worked out loud as people like to say, and they put stuff on the wall, visual thinking. And so that immediately spoke to me. it was a different way for me to do the work that I was doing individually. it changed the way I work. 

Over the years, with the different jobs I’ve taken, Gamestorming in different forms with me. Now I get to do it as my job is to, help people learn how to work. Cause nobody teaches you how to work. And that’s what it was to me. It was all of the things that professors in school or our bosses. They wanted the outcomes, but I didn’t know how to do it. 

Gamestorming we use  the metaphor of a cookbook. It’s those are the recipes to do all of the things that are expected of you or good for you in a job as you’re figuring out what to do or how to do it, new ideas, how to prioritize,  the step by step for how to do it. I think because that’s my story, that’s what I’m interested in doing now, with Gamestorming.      

Luke: describe that transition a little more,  you came from more of a PowerPoint Excel type background, if you’re talking about strategy, how was that different from visual thinking?

Dave Mastronardi: from a creative standpoint, I think you can be creative on any media, right? you can be creative in a spreadsheet. And you can certainly be visual in PowerPoint. For me, a lot of it was about the process. You were creating the work while you were doing it, and you’re doing it collaboratively with your colleagues. And then you would back away after, the 30 or the 45 minutes of that particular exercise. And it might look a little rough in the sticky notes, maybe scattered all over the place, but you walk away and you’re looking to say, Oh, that’s what I needed. that’s the thing that I needed to create. Instead of me being at my desk, trying to come up with this idea, we just did it. And we came up with a bunch of other ideas and now we can use this to move on to the next activity.

 The term that I use a lot is fuzzy goals. You create these artifacts and it creates this momentum. It creates this energy.  The biggest change for me was doing it in public with groups and with teams and getting the work done while you were in the process of having the meeting or doing the workshop. it wasn’t something that you would have to come back to later. a lot of it was the ins and outs of the facilitation, or how do I set this up? How do I get us to that point in the meeting or in the workshop? That it all came together because sometimes especially early on, you wonder, why are we doing this exercise? Or why did we use that particular, question to frame what it is that we’re doing. But then some point later on you realize how it all comes together. And that was something for me that it felt like magic. 

At first, you want to say somebody who is really good at doing it and. The transition was as much about this first, it was following the steps one, two, three, and just the being, very specific and very, almost anchored to the book and what it said to do and how to do it and how to draw the canvas and how to ask the question and how to move to the next step. it was very mechanical at first. And so I think that was the first part of the transition.

 And then. One step back from that is how do you string these things together to get that output, that magic feeling, where it all comes together in one exercise or one activity by the end of the day, when you look back, it all makes total sense.

and then I think after that, it’s improvisation.  you know what you’re doing, you can do anything you want. so I think that’s the third stage. And I think we talk about it from apprenticeship to practitioner, to master game Stormer. And I think, the mechanics of it. to then putting it together, putting a proper opening, exploring, closing agenda together, and then the improvisation where it’s like magic and the people in the room wonder, how did you know to do that then?

Or why did, but you’ve just done it so many times it flows and you’ve got so many different situations in your database of options. Then you can pick and choose the right ones to do in the moment. Cause you’ve been in this situation before, what’s going to get the attendees, the workshop, hers, going, where they’re stuck.

And I think that’s what I think that’s what magic is.  it’s repetition. and maybe a little bit of an insight that you know, that people don’t have just because they haven’t done it as many times as you have done it.

Luke: you were saying that working in public is important. how do you get that to come together? Because you’ve got multiple people at once. It’s not just you sitting at your computer tweaking a spreadsheet or something. that’s a different feel. You don’t need to communicate whatever you had at the meeting, cause everyone was there anyway. But in terms of the actual dynamics, like how do you get it to work when it does? 

Dave Mastronardi:  you don’t have to actively be working on it for it to be impacting you. I think there’s this saying, nothing exists until you write it down. You have to put the thought or the idea and most of the times those first ones are going to be wrong, but you have to get them out there cause you can’t get to the next one until you get that one down and out and it’s wrong and why it’s wrong. And other people say it’s wrong or how it could be better. And then you move on from it. But you have to get it out. it’s prototyping, right? it’s a, a very rudimentary form of prototyping. 

a lot of times when we could be in person, one of the things that we would seed  as part of the setup before people even got into the room, depending on what the workshop was, we would put stuff up on the walls. we would have, framework cards we would just put that on the desk and then you’re wondering, maybe later on when we ask you to come up with a concept or to explain a concept, you’ve got this somewhere back here. let me explain this concept. Like an exploding engine diagram. now I’ve got 50 or 60 different versions of this that we scatter around. So you look at it. You process it, you press this visual things quicker than you process texts.

 then you move on, but it will come back. that’s why we want to put the work up from every step in the workshop,  you got it out, you put it into the world, you put it into existence. Now, put it up on the wall. So it’s there. And every once in a while you glance at it and somebody else at your table or at another table and another team is looking at it. You can do it in a forced way with something we call a gallery walk. We said, all right, now we’ve just come up with all these concepts. We want everybody to go around the room and look at them and put a post it note, what do you like about it? a question do you have about it? So you forcing them to process it. but they. And you don’t have to be, I don’t have to put this on the table and necessarily also put it into the agenda and say, okay, now we’re going to describe things like an exploding engine diagram, 

 I’ve incepted you right. Now that’s in your mind. And I guarantee you. At some point before the end of this conversation, or maybe it’ll happen before the end of the week, you’re going to think you’re going to think of a concept in the terms of that diagram. 

Luke: How do you think about designing a workshop? How do you weave in these concepts that you’ve incepted people with?  

Dave Mastronardi: When I think about a workshop, first we’re going to start with our open explore, closed philosophy. then we should probably, we were about what kind of technology are we going to be using, then I’ve got to worry about maybe bring drawing into the room. Then what’s the agenda going to look like for the day? Is this going to be broken up and. different time slots across the week, maybe these smaller Springs, how are we going to get people fed that kind of stuff, And then this might be like, what’s the big topic of the day that everything needs to fit around.

And then, okay, now I’ve got that one. And then I pull the next one from the pile and I’ll go through that one next week, but you have to do those things as part of a discipline. So when you’re in the workshop, you can just pull it out. And that’s when it looks like magic.

Luke: you mentioned the Open, Explore, close philosophy, and agendas.  how do you think about agendas given that you have this clever way of basically being able to generate options and then prioritizing them, for pretty much anything that you do. 

Dave Mastronardi: there’s lots of good places to get activities for you to do, but then you start to recognize, not only like when should we use an opening activity, and what should it be or what an opening activity looks like, which is like a warm up. And I think you start to see this pattern.

I see this pattern open, explore close. I think we’re doing it here. We’re starting to explore now. it happens a lot of times. I’ll liken it to. Working out or going to play an instrument where you have to, you don’t go right into the hardest part. You got to warm up first, you gotta play your scales and maybe, maybe you play it a little slower and then you crank up the Metronome and you play a little faster, same thing with working out. You have to stretch, you don’t just get right to the sprinting. you have to do your warmups. So that’s the same way that we approach the workshop. and so opening. The games and you’ll, again, you recognize what you need to do to get people’s head in the room for an opening activity. Then explore is about kind of judgment free.

how does this work? how might it work? what happens if I do this or that? And then closing those all about decisions and commitments, which I think is probably the most distinct of the three where it’s, you are ranking and prioritizing. And, I think those games definitely have a feel for them.

but I think at some point when you get practiced at putting agendas together, you realize that just because a game. However it was written or however, it was intended to be one of those three. You can use it, you can use exploring games to open and opening to explore, but that’s when you have to change the framing question and really understand what it is you’re trying to get out of the workshop and how, a change like that fits into the rest of the flow.

Luke: In terms of the closing ones. Like I find them really interesting because I think usually when people think of innovation and creativity, it’s brainstorming. It’s very divergent. But then,  The most common outcome is people are very happy but overwhelmed at the end of it. And they don’t know what to do. , when I found gamestorming the converging and the closing, I thought it was just absolutely brilliant. There’s so many different ways of narrowing down from option overload to this is the thing we look at next. 

Dave Mastronardi: People generally don’t leave enough time for it. and maybe a way that maybe either a reason or a way to think about closing so that you do leave enough time for it is that when you’re evaluating and you’re making those decisions in shaving off things that you shouldn’t be doing and focusing on the things that you should, you’re having a lot of divergent conversation still, you’re still brainstorming. And you’re getting to the bottom of it. So it’s not so cut and dry that it’s still not creative or imaginative or in that. Brainstorming phase. You end up asking a lot of really good questions about it. And so it’s still as much about the conversation that you are creating by forcing people to allocate a hundred dollars across your seven options or placing a concept on an impact and effort matrix.

 that might not be the final, but it forces you to look at its relationship to others and ask questions. why do you think this is going to be more impactful than that? And how are you defining effort? so you’re still having a very, exploratory conversation, but it does help in, there is a sense of relief when you get to the end and you have your next steps.  Everybody knows what they’re going to be doing when they get back to their desk. Yeah, or they turn the zoom off or, whatever it is now. 

I should probably say, Gamestorming, wasn’t all original activities. it was this collection of, stories that developed out of Silicon Valley. but nobody had ever written down and just put in a collection like a recipe book or like a Grimms fairy tale.

Luke: we’ve been in one breath talking about workshops and meetings is the same thing, but 

Dave Mastronardi: yeah. 

Luke: Is there a difference or not really? Or what’s the distinction here? 

Dave Mastronardi: I think they’re similar in that they could, they can always be better. I think from a workshop, more planning goes into them.  in that sense meetings are somewhat neglected. What I found interesting about this movement to work from home is that so many people were talking about how you should create an agenda now for your meetings that you’re having, because they’re going to be virtual and because people are going to get distracted, and you should engage everybody in your meeting cause they get distracted. 

And I was thinking, this is great. I’m glad so many people are very interested in making their meetings better. But why aren’t you doing this before? Why aren’t you coming up with an agenda beforehand? and why weren’t you making sure that  in your conference room that you were getting input from everybody in the room. There’s some things that aren’t really any different, they may be heightened. but I think what happens is, when you have such a drastic change, people’s antenna go up, their sensitivity, the radar is more in tune, Alright, we gotta do this good. and so how do we have a good meeting? Let me make an agenda for it.

you should have been doing that before. And I hope when, whenever we go back and whatever form it is, you have agendas for those meetings.  in some ways they’re the same. I think meetings can be more like workshops. 

when you asked that question, the first thing I heard was a lot of times workshops turn out better now that they’re not guaranteed to, but I think there’s more planning that goes into workshops because you’re bringing people together usually for a period of time, I guess that is not standard in a way that you would look at your calendar that week and be like, Oh, I have a lot of meetings this week: 45 minute meetings, hour and a half meetings, even, some three hour meetings. What are you doing a three hour meeting if you’re not work shopping, if you’re not doing some of the work? 

 an interesting twist on our virtual situation now is what are you going to spend time in a zoom room for?  when you had eight hours in a workshop and a full, we would want to limit it, of course. But if you had a presentation, if you had to explain a concept, we understand, but  if you’re going to have a three hour meeting and everybody’s going to be virtual and you’re spending, any more than, 15, 20 minutes on education, meaning, okay, now  so is going to share their screen and they’re going to walk through their PowerPoint, make that part of the pre-work, 

especially because of the distraction factor, make sure everything you’re doing is engaging.  try to limit the education type activities, the one way information flow activities to something that you do in pre-work. And like I’m experimenting with the concept, but using the time together to brainstorm, which I know can be difficult.

but also to, to analyze and to ask questions and have the conversation, a structured conversation, in the same way that we were talking about those closing games, right? Like use a game, use some kind of structure to have the conversation. 

 those are the differences, a lot of them have to do around like information flow. And I think if you’re not creating something, when people are together at the same time, which is maybe the most generic hygienic definition of a meeting. yeah. 

Luke: I like this distinction of working in the meeting and not having the meeting to talk about the work that you made. . the biggest pushback that I was having when I was trying to organize meetings in a larger company  is it’s four hours of my time. I don’t want to go to a four hour long meeting. 

It’s not a meeting. It’s a workshop. And then I was still struggling to explain what a workshop is relative to a meeting and why we actually need four hours. And you can’t just, shrink it into half an hour to talk about the key points and then move on to the next half an hour meeting. 

Dave Mastronardi: It’s a hard sell, believe me. I try almost on a daily basis to do that. people have either been in meetings, bad meetings for a long period of time and they hear you say four hours workshop and they think. Sorry, Luke, not, like you really have to sell me, why am I doing that? And then there are other people and they recognize it right away. And a lot of times I’ll just tell, ’em  we get a lot of sticky notes up on the wall. And we use Sharpies and. Whiteboards. And they’re like, Oh yeah, I know you’re talking about and they get it. cause they’ve been there before, and they’d been in a good workshop where you’ve been productive. And then all the other stuff that comes with thinking out loud and working visually, as you are in a workshop, the team building, the trust, the alignment, the clarity that comes out of them. and it’s still remains to be seen. I think at this point, if all of those things map onto one when you’re virtual. 

Luke: speaking of that, what are the differences that you’ve seen now that suddenly everybody is remote compared to actually being physically together and flying people in and, seeing each other face to face and then going for dinner and beers afterwards or whatever also happens.

Dave Mastronardi: time moves differently online. Time moves a lot faster, when you’re in an online setting, 

Luke: people are more  direct?  

Dave Mastronardi: I feel like I don’t have as much time to do all the things that I want. there’s so much friction. what I could do in three hours in a physical space, I might need four and a half hours online for. The time goes faster. people are more easily distracted there. It’s just so much easier for me to pick up my phone right here and Oh, what was that text that came in there’s prep. There’s a, I guess a little bit of, the probably still happens, in the physical space when we’re all together. but I think you do have to be really explicit about that. And you could even use that as one of your openers, what do you see on your desk right now? That is going to distract you from this meeting , and just in the same way we had this, right? if you just go through that at the beginning of the meeting, if I say, Oh, it’s my phone right here to my right. Maybe when I go to reach for it, I’ll remember, I’m not gonna let myself get distracted, but, so time moves faster.

 depending on the tech that you’re using and whether or not it’s the first time, and usually , the more people you get, the higher the chance that tech is going to slow you down.

 unless you’re prepared for that, maybe you have a co-facilitator whose job it is to handle the tech, some kind of release valve, that’s really easy to get as soon as somebody raises their hand or has a question like everything stops, right? this is the nature of the way the internet, or this is why we can’t talk over each other.

What kind of one packet at a time? if there is a sound, if there’s a sound coming in. Here and it’s louder. And my microphone thinks that I’m talking and trying to ask a question, but somebody else actually is my sound went. So there’s all of these, I think, frictions that, will slow you down as well.

If somebody has a question, a clarifying question on an exercise, you can prepare for it in that you’ve have side rooms or you’d tell people, if you have questions. Go in the chat, but that’ll slow you down. one person can slow everything down online. Side conversations are easier when you’re in the room. So somebody would come over after you’ve told the group or you’ve sent them to the breakout rooms to go on, in the next step, in the next activity, somebody would come over and say, I didn’t quite get this, or why did you do this?

But online, they can ask the question and it Stops everything from happening. So that’s something that I’ve certainly found happens. It’s also an opportunity to impose a creative constraint of time, we’re not going to get it all done here. it’s going to feel a little rushed, but that’s so you don’t self edit. a lot of times we hold back and those are some of our better thoughts or better ideas. so you can frame it up. But I think you want to let people know that. No time is an expectation. I think so. I think that’s important. 

I’ve had conversations with some folks who say, we talked about behavior and then they say, introverts are thriving in the virtual world.  you should be making your plan, your facilitation style, as inclusive as possible for all personality types in the room to participate.  that’s something that I’ve heard.

I’ve got a note. It’s on my monitor right now. It says drawing gets eliminated. when you go into some of these digital whiteboards, it’s all text and that’s great. And I’m glad we have digital sticky notes. but something that I try to do is. Again, setting expectations in preparing people for meetings.

Like we’re going to draw and I sometimes use a notebook, a pen, and your camera phone that you upload to. I don’t know, something not as sophisticated as a Mural.co, will work just as fine. But when you talk about people being distracted and, this is something that we’re seeing, we’re running a survey right now, and the results are coming in. And one of the biggest problems that facilitators are just people who host meetings are having is keeping people engaged. drawing is a great way to get people engaged, like doing the work right instead of, Oh, we’re going to get together for 45 minutes and we’re going to watch this PowerPoint presentation. 

You might’ve been able to do that on your own and come to the meeting with questions about the presentation. but drawing, get people drawing in your meeting and in prototyping their own things and that’ll get them engaged and, share with it kind of the way I’ve been sharing with you and, or take a photo of it and upload it to whatever, upload it to your Google slides.

It doesn’t have to be like the collaboration software with all the bells and whistles. Yeah. yeah. you lose this rough edge of creation, when it’s all perfectly aligned sticky notes. And, I didn’t crumble up that sticky and throw it on the ground cause I thought it was a bad idea or, cross it out. You never see that evidence there. And so you lose a lot of that texture of what happens in these brainstorming sessions where it’s okay if your line’s not straight or if it’s a stick figure, cause the point across I think so. And it’s also it’s okay. It’s okay. It creates some vulnerability.

If I can’t draw a perfect circle, that’s fine, but I can draw a perfect circle in any of these software programs and everything just looks like it’s all perfectly aligned and that’s fun to do sometimes  to make sure, Oh, I created this thing and all the sticky notes make a perfect grid, but it also sets it sets a context. it adds a little bit of a sterile environment. And I think it’s more fun to feel the tooth of the paper when you’re dragging your pen across it, or to hear the tape or  hear that sticky note tear  hear at crumpled up on the ground.  

one thing that   has worked for me as a positive of being online is having things like Google search  for images embedded into mural. Even if you can’t draw it, you can probably find 150 images that’ll show you a picture of a, whatever it is and you can just throw it on. For internal purposes, it’s fine. 

there’s a process that goes that your brain goes through as you’re trying to draw something.

Luke: true. 

Yeah. You use that, I guess 

Dave Mastronardi: you do. And you’re not thinking about how the thing works or what’s necessary, or what are the boundaries you’re thinking what’s the picture that I can grab? And it’s, and there may be a very valuable situation, or a valid situation that, having that right picture at the moment expresses it to the team.

But I think from an engagement standpoint, thinking about how you’re going to draw that thing. Or what the boundary is or what the relationship is to something else that maybe popped into your mind as you’re drawing that or another thought how you’d label it. how would you explain it to somebody it’s all done for you with Google image search or when you can bring in the emoji or something. And that there’s, I think there’s a place for those, but I also think there’s a place for drawing as well. 

Luke: yeah. Yeah. moving from an abstract concept to an image in and of itself is useful. that was a technique in the early days of learning how to do public speaking. if you draw out the entire parts of the speech as actual things, the simple fact of thinking, what’s your mnemonic for this part, you’ve got to think of a specific thing and have an image of it. And then that process in and of itself made the whole thing more sticky.  it wasn’t as great as necessarily drawing everything out, but then, I guess some people just feel uncomfortable drawing.

Dave Mastronardi: Which is part of the point of getting people uncomfortable. Yeah. there’s a little bit of vulnerability that goes, and that’s when you’re in the room and people are presenting their ideas .

They’re maybe not comfortable with the way that they draw, but it’s also something that you can address as a facilitator to get people to draw, but that feeling of vulnerability and you can get it in a number of ways is, is one of the great things about the workshop and the bonding that really good feeling that when you walk out of the room, you were in the thick of it and you did something with your team.

Luke: The team part of is really important too. going back to working in public. If everybody does something that makes them feel a little vulnerable and at least you don’t need to go and, communicate with everyone as to what was decided at the meeting. it just built in, 

game storming is a way of achieving outcomes, or even let’s say design being focused on achieving certain outcomes, how has moving design  to remote changed that if at all, is it still pretty much the same? It’s just using slightly different tools and not needing to travel as much or has it shifted?

Dave Mastronardi:  I don’t know if the intended outcome has changed. I’ve been surprised at just how different   I’ve read these online meetings are from not online meetings. And that was a little surprising at first. we talked about time. We talked about the sterility of being in a digital environment. the biggest thing that changes is maybe the timing, in breaking things up. And we’ve talked about it going from workshop to work flow.

If someone were to come to me and said, “Oh, we have to do this thing.  our quarterly meeting or whatever. We have to do it in three hours”. I might say,” you know what, can we get two separate meetings of two hours with maybe a couple of days in between them?”, aggregate, I suppose it’s more time. It’s four hours than three hours, but. having that space in between, if we even met like on a Tuesday and a Friday, and maybe you open and you explore a little bit, then you give a homework assignment and then you come back on Friday and you’re able to do the closing. you get some shower thoughts in there, right? you get to do what you can’t necessarily do if you were to have the full day workshop, right? you can improvise it in a workshop and you can read the room. What you can’t do though, is you can’t have that back of the mind time for what it was that you talked about real, deep thinking, insight development, maybe you dream about it and you see something the next day or a few days later in a slightly different way than you did at the time.

Sometimes  a brief amount of time  can be a good constraint. It can be a creative constraint. You’ve got to play to each of these settings strengths.  I don’t want to see a three hour meeting. On my calendar, right? I’ve got three hours you can call, That’s the fleeting, as it is two hours, it’s still pretty long, but if 

Luke: it’s good, it’s all right.

it can go by pretty quickly. it’s also probably easier to find, for your 15 people, to two hour time slots than one three hours time slot.  That is said with no hard data. Maybe it’s because I would prefer the  two hour meetings.  Play to that in that. In the third hour of the meeting,  people would be burning out and they would be checking their phone and, try to break it up and yeah, it’s fine to give a homework assignment. And then come back to it on Friday and, have that deeper thinking time and people can reflect and break it up that way.  the process is just a little different. The intended outcomes are the same. Nobody’s ever said, at least to me, “I want team bonding.” “I just want clarity”. It’s always clarity on what, There’s always work that they want done.  by the way, if you can have fun doing it, that’s a bonus.  I think the outcomes, the it’s work, I think what we’ve always offered is like a different, or a fun way to do it through drawing and playing games. And, it translates- from the offline environment to the online environment.

Dave Mastronardi: What do you, think?

Luke: i, yeah. I agree. I think that in addition to these shower, thoughts, these visual representations exists in digital form in the meantime, too. So to your point about workflow. If it’s Tuesday and Friday, on Wednesday or Thursday, anyone who’s at that meeting, go on and add a few post-its or move stuff around or group them, or, tweak things. and the group learns as a result when they come back to it on Friday, even if they didn’t have a chance to look at it. it is about the group learning process for me at least. And, and optimizing for that, in that workflow. the fact that you’re virtual does have some aspects to it that are helpful too, which you wouldn’t have  in a physical environment.

Dave Mastronardi:  I did a session. It was a facilitated session. It was a two day session. It was at wework. And it was, a public conference room. And at the end of day one, we had a bunch of shit on the wall, but we had to take it down because after five it became a game room. In your office sometimes, depending on who has the room next, you have to take your stuff down and you can’t keep it up. You don’t have to take it down. there’s no limited wall space when you’re online.

 People can come in and maybe they copy all of the stickies, it’s easy to copy and paste and reconfigure in affinity map without having to change the original. you haven’t come up with new concepts, you get a 

Luke: couple options by reshuffling or 

Dave Mastronardi: exactly. So you have that persistence there that you might have to take things down because there’s another type of meeting in the room in 15 minutes, or it becomes a game room overnight, so we can’t leave the things up.

Luke:  Yeah, the workflow concept I think is a good one, particularly if you’re talking about working in the meeting and not having the meeting about work. We’re hitting closer to the end here. where should people look if they want to find out more about Gamestorming to see if it might be right for something they have on their plate at the moment? what’s the best way to do that? 

Dave Mastronardi: gamestorming.com. Sign up for the newsletter. We have a LinkedIn page.  the website is the best way. there are a lot of activities that you can use. they make perfect sense offline as well as online. and you can test them out, there’s the recipe. You can just go ahead and try it for yourself and see if it works.  And there’s a contact form and you can write in if you’ve got a question. Dave m at gamestorming.group. it’s something that I’ve through the newsletter, let the community know.  this is a big change for everybody. So if you’re wondering about that meeting or, if we’ve got experience or thoughts on a particular piece of software, if you just want to call and talk, about work and meetings, but be happy to, and. Yeah, there’s a great community. 

Luke: for people just starting out the book would be a good first overview. Is that fair to say? 

Dave Mastronardi: Yeah, it’s a great overview. People want to go right to the game. They want to go right to the recipe. but the first 50 pages make the recipes so much better.

there’s a difference between playing games and game storming. And it’s really that first 50 pages that talk about things like opening, exploring and closing. It talks about drawing. It talks about different kinds of things, perspective, and how to get people comfortable drawing. It just sets up the tone. the thing that makes game storming different from playing games, it’s the philosophy really? you can plug any game you want into it, and then you’ll see games, other places that, Oh, okay. Now I know where to put it, but you’ll present it in a different way. And that’s really only available in the book.  Like the first 50 pages, I’m almost positive aren’t on the website.  I highly suggest that you read them if you’re interested in game storming. 

Luke: Yeah. Great. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks very much 

Tagged as: innovation, workshops, meetings.