I recently attended an Innovation games ™ class held by Luke Hohmann of Enthiosys , http://www.enthiosys.com , and during and more so after the class, was struck by the power of “conversation”. The class itself was focusing on how to harness the various Innovation Games ™ as Luke has described in his book, http://www.innovationgames.com/about/The+Book , and how we could best apply them but it accomplished much more than that for me. Most of the folks in the class where already familiar with Innovation Games ™ and as well were experienced Scrum trainers, coaches and expert facilitators for Innovation Games ™. The class was extremely well structured and open to evolving as it suited us and was lead by a true master facilitator, Luke Hohmann.
The driving force throughout the class was the conversations we had and oh the conversations we had! It was a revealing experience for me in that the conversations would take us down the various experiences we all have had and by applying those experiences into the structure of the Innovation Games ™ we were able to harness all the data that we all brought to the table and transform that data into real information that we all could use in each of our future engagements and lives ahead.
As I sat on the plane ride home and the last few weeks reflecting and digesting what had happened at the class I came to the realization that at the heart of any product/program/project development I have been involved with (whether professional or personal), that involves more than just a single person, it always begins with a conversation. Sometimes that initial conversation goes well and we head off full of vim and vigor on the journey to completion, sometimes that is where we essentially kill the idea… but in either case a conversation kicks or kills off the process of innovation. To me a conversation is essential to starting the process of innovation. But it definitely does not stop there…
One of the harder parts to innovation in product development is to keep the conversations going in an efficient and effective direction after you have been off building whatever it is you are building. This is but one place where I see the application of Innovations Games ™ helping to move or better yet guide the conversations along.
As we see and know in practicing agile techniques for software development, conversations are a key component to success. In the 12 principles of the agile manifesto they tell us that conversations are important, to which there is no disagreement, Innovation games ™ is one more way for us to accomplish this and to have some fun in doing so.
Let us say that you are deep into a product development effort for a new web based travel site and you and your development team are attempting to make trade-offs now on what features you roll out with in your first release. Do I make the travel site more inclined to handle “XYZ” over “ABC”, Do I need to have feature “DEF” done first or can it wait till after feature “GHI”. Since, there is no way to do it all and have a reasonable time to market you need to ruthlessly re-prioritize. You are battling the ever present “prioritization wall of death” of what your development team and various other internal stakeholders feel are important and working to understand what your consumers want. Since you are practicing agile, you have come to know there are inevitable changes that have been or will be discovered along this journey that would be better to do than something previously thought of. It is also great to involve the possible end-users in this prioritization process so that you can deliver to their needs what they need and want first. This is where a couple of the Innovation Games ™ could help you out, “Buy a Feature” and/or “Prune the Product Tree”. Both are well suited in helping drive out what is more important to do first with Buy a feature being the one most directed at prioritizing features and Prune the product tree helping to round it all out by giving some customer driven shape to the product as a whole. You can read more about all the games as well as play some online at http://www.innovationgames.com .
Innovation Games ™ are a new way to deal with this all and really help to keep the conversations moving in the right direction as well help to find the new directions that may come about. I look forward to applying them in various ways to help our partners become more successful and to help them better harness the conversations that drive products forward.
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