The Role of Serious Play

What is the role of serious play in the boardroom?

I remember my first real experimentation with play to solve a serious business problem and it occurred way back in 2001.  I was a Senior Strategist with ICE and we were working on the second largest e-commerce initiative in Canada for a packaged travel company (packaged vacations).  We had recently wrapped up a 2 months planning phase that culminated in a dangerously heavy set of bound documentation.

I was approached to attend a meeting with all the top brass on the client side as the Information Architect on the account was concerned that even after all this work there was no clear consensus nor understanding on all the components involved.  This lack of clarity appeared to exist on both sides of the fence. There were so many third party systems, each packaged and altered by additional third parties and no-one could come to a consensus on how to build the solution let alone begin narrowing down features for the 1.0 release.

There was less than an hour before this meeting and I found myself sitting in my office unsure of how to bring clarity where a 2 month process seemed to have failed.  Should I dig out some of the documentation and work through it?  I kept coming back to what was needed.  We lacked a contextual understanding of how all the pieces interacted.  What we needed was a method for both teams to both understand and communicate so as to be able to make tough decisions on where to focus.  What features would be on the table? What experience would/should be deployed?  At what cost internally and externally?

We had to simplify things.  It was then that I acted, trusting only my instinct.  I grabbed the packs of crayons I kept in my desk drawer and headed out to the meeting.  When the Account Director saw me carrying a stack of blank paper and all my crayons, I believe he panicked.  He went on for quite some time before finally handing the floor over to me.

I remember so very clearly standing in front of this room of fully suited executives and puzzled looking agency types.  I placed the paper on the table and dumped the crayons into a giant pile as I began to set the context and outline the instructions for the exercise.  I will never forget the silence that settled over the room.

It was my good friend and client lead Stu who saved the day.  He stood up, the whole room watching him and no one moving.  He proceeded to take off his jacket, hang it over a chair, and move in to "get the best crayons before someone else did."

Within minutes I had a roomful of people hunkered over pieces of paper, scribbling away with their crayons.  Within 30 minutes we had over a dozen drawings up on the wall and everyone was moving around listening as each "artist" explained their drawing.  It was critical that we had pictures from both the client and our agency staff. And it was Stu's drawing that brought the house down.

It showed a stick figure in front of a computer (or so we were informed by the artist whose greatest skill was not drawing).  From here, all of the systems were clearly identified with where they interacted in the ticket purchase process, front of house and back of house.  It caused our technical leads on the project (agency side and client side) to finally nod in agreement.  But this was not the major breakthrough for this project.

There was a strange item with a large wheel and a giant tube coming off of it.  And from this was a line leading to a stick figure horizontal above the ground.  The line continued in a giant arc to what some might say was a plane.  "This is a giant cannon.  And this is a customer being fired from the cannon to the plane where he will take his trip."  We all had a very good laugh.  But this crayon drawing captured the one thing that had never been talked about - that no one knew what happened between when the money was taken, the ticket issued and the vacation began.

And this is where the real opportunity existed for the client to create a Wow experience.  To close the loop pre-flight and post-return.  This was the real breakthrough for the project.

When I run exercises like this today I start earlier in the process for the customer (when they start thinking about a vacation perhaps?).  I also have words to describe the user experience and process lifecycle. But what has remain unchanged is how using simple tools and play can break down problems that prior to the session seemed unapproachable, unknowable or even unsolvable.

Image Source: D'Arcy Norman, Techie Kev