Gaming the Enterprise, Part 2 of 2

by David Mastronardi & Tom Cummings , originally posted here.

In our previous post, my colleague Tom and I recapped Seth Priebatsch’s SXSWi keynote address and introduced the concept of enterprise gamification.

Taking tacit game mechanics already at play and providing deliberate structure and reward schedules gives companies a potentially powerful social business design tool. Enterprise gamification’s power lies in its ability to influence individual behavior and create hivemind, an often elusive enterprise dynamic. While the right game makes this dynamic more achievable, the complexity of influencing human behavior necessitates planning and design. Taking time to understand game mechanics and the psychology of rewards will lead to more effective games, engaged employees and better business results.

The Email Game

To explore these concepts let’s outline a simple game that helps Company X promote its low cost provider strategy. The goal of the game is to lower network storage costs by reducing the amount of email employees store in their inbox. Company X decides to reward employees with one point whenever they delete an email.

Rewards

A well designed game aligns individual rewards with the strategic objectives of the business. Properly incentivized employees will then repeat behavior beneficial to company goals. Two types of rewards exist:

Intrinsic Rewards

Intrinsic rewards come from the enjoyment of the activity itself, reducing email storage in Company X’s case. The best games, often the most addicting, create enjoyment by fulfilling basic human needs:

Autonomy is the feeling that your activities are self-chosen. Company X can incorporate this feeling into their game by giving employees additional ways to earn points.  Besides deleting emails, archiving emails locally can also result in a point. Now employees have choice.

Competence is the feeling of confidence and effectiveness in one’s activities. The accumulation of points gives employees direct and frequent feedback.  The Email Game can provide additional feedback by creating dashboards that track saved space and individual contribution to company cost savings.

Connectedness comes from a sense of closeness to others. The Email Game can create connectedness by allowing org-chart based groups to compete. Individuals will be rewarded for working together to reduce their organization’s email footprint.

Extrinsic Rewards

These rewards come from outside the individual: the Email Game’s points. While not as personally meaningful as intrinsic rewards, extrinsic rewards set the basis for competition, standard measures by which players compare performance. To increase their value Company X can tie their extrinsic rewards (points) achievement to real world benefits, e.g. paid-time-off, gift certificates to the company store, a meeting with the CIO.

Game Mechanics

Rewards explain why people participate, Game Mechanics dictate the who, what, when and where. A well designed game’s incentives harmonize with its mechanics.  SCVNGR, Priebatsch’s company, defines 47 game mechanics. Let’s review four in the context of the Email Game:

Appointment is a mechanic that involves returning at a predefined time to perform a predetermined action. Company X might make the lunch hour more productive by offering a double-point bonus.

Influence & Status uses social pressure to modify behavior. By implementing leader-boards across geographical, organizational and individual levels Company X can create a sense of status and competition.  This mechanic also feeds an employee’s sense of Competence.

Progression is a mechanic by which progress is displayed and measured through the process of completing itemized tasks. A simple daily progression in the Email Game could include two steps:  clicking through all mailbox folders to check for deletion candidates and archiving your entire inbox to a local directory. Successful completion of these activities results in a point.

Communal Discovery is when a community must come together to complete a challenge. The previously suggested idea of group based incentives is an example of Communal Discovery.  This mechanic also directly ties in to an individual sense of Connectedness.

By no means an exhaustive guide, this post introduces fundamental concepts to Game Layer creation. Turning work into a game involves more than bribing employees with points. Developing effective games for your company will be an evolutionary process.  Even the simplest games engage complex behavioral dynamics. Be sure to plan, measure your progress and iterate as new behaviors emerge.

Game on. (Game on)

Gaming the Enterprise, Part 1 of 2

by Tom Cummings & David Mastronardi, originally posted here

Last week, Dave and I attended the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.  Saturday’s keynote was given by Seth Priebatsch, the orange-clad and exuberant Chief Ninja of SCVNGR, a location-based gaming start-up.

The title of Seth’s keynote was The Game Layer on Top of the World.  As he explained, the changes we’ve observed in social media over the last ten years have culminated in the “social layer.”  Real life connections have become online connections. Facebook has become your social life. Twitter has helped you make new friends. The social layer is primarily about these connections. And it’s essentially done being built.

But now that this foundational social layer has been built, Seth believes the “game layer” can be built on top of it.   Over the next ten years, we’ll see (and help build) an interactive layer built on an amalgam of our personal motives. Whereas the social layer is a layer of connections, the game layer will focus on influencing these individual motivations — something far more powerful than simply being connected, especially if those individual motivations can affect a larger group goal.

Seth discussed several ways in which game layering can improve current problems. School grading systems could shift from getting good grades (in many ways, simply a “status” that can change on any given test day) to reaching a new level (indicative of progression and achievement).   Schools could reward accumulated knowledge and achievements, similar to how players “level-up” to a new status in a video game — unlike grades, it’s very difficult to quickly “level down” in most video games.  Email lists can become customer acquisition tools (after all, he argued, Groupon is just an email list with some basicgaming aspects like “free lunch” and “countdown” added on).  And restaurants and bars can increase loyalty among location based service users by shifting from exclusive ownership  (becoming a mayor) to inclusive ownership (joining a society).

What Seth didn’t talk about is the game layer in the enterprise.  The potential exists for an organization to create “games” that will influence individuals to alter their behavior in order to benefit both themselves and the organization as a whole.  While there are game aspects currently at play in many parts of a company, these mechanics are often tacit games — they’re not formally structured as games and lack intentioned corporate outcomes driven by consistent personal motivations.  These tacit games result in intrinsic rewards that vary per employee, while intentioned games result in both intrinsic personal achievements and extrinsic rewards that are desirable to all individuals, and in the end, the organization itself.

For example, many training programs are tacit games.  After a day of training, employees may receive intrinsic benefits like increased competence, more self-confidence, or a larger knowledge base — all things that will help them succeed at their job.  But intentionally adding a game layer to a training program could give employees an extrinsic reward for completing training — a virtual ‘badge’ indicating that they’ve become an expert in a certain topic area.

As the game layer is spread through the organization, the employee can seek out more rewards.  Attend more training?  Earn a badge.  Sign up for an external course?  Earn a badge.   Eventually, after earning several badges, the employee would level-up to a new status, indicating the progression of their acquired expertise.

But these badges and statuses won’t just be virtual tchotchkes.  They’ll be real-world indicators of expertise and competence.  If a coworker is looking for an internal expert, they won’t have to rely on word-of-mouth recommendations or even an internal directory where employees often self-define their expertise.  They would simply seek out their coworker who has reached the appropriate level needed for the task at hand.   Ultimately, the enterprise benefits from this intentional influencing of individual motivations with a work force that is more trained, more connected, and with more clearly identified skill-sets.

Farther down the road, performance reviews and promotions will be able to partially account for how much an employee has learned on the job by simply noting how many badges have been earned or what level has been achieved.  After all, wouldn’t the decision to promote one of two equally skilled employees would be just a little simpler if one had five more “badges” than the other?

At the end of his keynote, Seth showed how communal gameplay can solve complex problems.  Everyone in the audience was given either a blue, a green, or an orange piece of paper.  In order to “solve global warming”, players (the entire audience) had to exchange their color cards so that every person was holding the same color as everyone in their row — instead of a random arrangement of colors, the first row would be all green, the second all orange, etc.  If everyone could achieve this in less than 3 minutes, SCVNGR would donate $10,000 to the National Wildlife Federation! In less than two minutes, the audience won, proving that large problems can be solved if individuals focus on their own personal motivations that drive towards an intended group outcome.

In the next post, Dave and I will explore one way in which game mechanics could play out in the enterprise.

 

KM and the Limits of Human Working Memory

Nicholas Carr’s recent book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains touches on an issue that APQC has been grappling with for several years–namely, that knowledge management is limited by the capacity of human attention, which many claim is being damaged by digital immersion, or excessive exposure to digital media.

via kmedge.org

Absolutely agreed, which is why it is important not only to capture information right away, but capture the meta-information as well. This is why the dynamic signal (flows, as is getting a lot of use these days) is important.

Lessons learned are important (they’re a stock), but equally as important is the context in which the lesson was captured.

Communication as Work: In Real Life

In my last post I wrote about communication being an important aspect of knowledge work and decision making.  I can sometimes get a little too academic with how things are supposed to work and so I thought I’d write a follow-up post that uses a concrete example (IRL for some) of how communication helped me and my colleague, Tom Cummings, just the other night.

The setup here isn’t that important other than to to say we were at the beginning stages of a new project and decided a brainstorming session was in order.  We found an empty conference room, a whiteboard and started to get our ideas down.

Social Business Design aside:  This conference room is what we commonly refer to as a silo.  A silo is anything (an organization, software…a conference room) that keeps information within its walls, making it hard for an outsider to discover what is going on behind them.  Tom and I were working alone, the rest of the company had no visibility into what we were doing.

Five minutes in to our brainstorm we were interrupted by a much more responsible group of colleagues who actually reserved the conference room for a meeting.  We packed up our stuff, white board included, and as there were no other conference rooms available, made camp in the hallway.  It’s important to note that this is really the only hallway that exists in our open floor plan office, so by default it is the highest trafficked hallway we have.

Social Business Design aside: A hallway is very much like a dynamic signal, a ‘dynamic information flow produced by constituents.’ As Tom and I were working in the hallway we were being passed by other employees with different experiences, expertise, points-of-view and tacit knowledge. Our activities were now visible to the rest of the company.

In the hallway we were being passed by colleagues.  They could see what we were working on and chose to either keep walking or stop and engage us.  We experienced both.  Within ten minutes, Tom and I found oursleves in a conversation with two colleagues each knowledgeable and experienced on the work we were doing.  Over the next 30 minutes we discussed our current situation, the vision and goals for the project, recent trends and developments and lessons learned from having ‘been there and done that.’  Afterwards, Tom and I literally went back to the drawing board to incorporate what we had just learned.

Social Business Design aside:  I mentioned that colleagues in the hallway would either keep on walking or stop to talk to us.  This is an example of a metafilter, ‘what’s important to one person may be meaningless to another.’   Those who wanted to participate could, those who had other interests could keep on going.  By being in the hallway (the dynamic signal) we were making ourselves visible to the rest of the company so they could decide to participate or not.

It’s impossible to compare the Dave & Tom-only project to the Dave & Tom + Colleague Feedback project (because the former will never happen) but everyone involved felt much better about latter: more input, more experience, more tacit knowledge.  We had engaged in communication and collaboration that resulted in a much more holistic approach to our work.  Our path forward became more clear, informed and actionable.

You might not have the collaboration luxury of working in the same office as the rest of your company, so this might not be your everyday experience.  The good thing is you don’t have to be in the same office to collaborate with colleagues.  There are fantastic tools available that will give your company all the virtual hallways, metafilters and whiteboards it needs.  But, tools are the easy part these days.  Your company is filled with smart people, gathering knowledge and insights every day…are you prepared to use them?

Communication as Work

A knowledge worker spends a good portion of the day communicating – meetings, status reports, emails, phone calls, water cooler talks.  Much of this activity is considered unproductive overhead; when you look at a calendar full of meetings you wonder when you’re going to get any REAL work done.  And while many popular forms of communication may be inefficient and ineffective, communication is work; perhaps the most important work knowledge workers do.

Knowledge work is aimed at turning information into something decisionable and actionable; too often reports, presentations, survey results are mistaken for such.  While they are a key part of the decision equation, they are not enough.  They don’t provide insight.  The only thing they’re good for on their own is filling repositories.

Knowledge, unlike the data and information contained in reports, is a living & breathing thing.  It can’t be put in your enterprise content management system.  It exists in the heads of employees (often referred to as ‘tacit’ knowledge), constantly being shaped by different stimuli: articles, blog posts, pictures, models, books, conversations with colleagues, etc…  Communication is the process by which this constantly evolving knowledge is applied on data and information to a decisionable end.  This process will generate insights on how to take advantage of the information you have gathered.  Unless the reports, presentations and survey results are subjected to scrutiny and analysis through communication, no insights are created and decisions are delayed or malinformed.

Communication is more than just a block of time on your calendar.  It’s an opportunity to  share knowledge, gain insight, make better decisions and create for your company a competitive advantage.

What does communication look like where you work?  Is it enabling the application of knowledge to data and information?  Where do your company’s insights come from?

Workforce Collaboration & the ‘App Store’

In a network economy, major competitive advantage is gained by having a strong developer ecosystem.  The more software that’s written for a product, the better the product becomes.  Generally.  The vast iPhone App Store catalog sets the phone apart from it’s competition.  The phone is a slick piece of hardware, but if it had the Jitterbug’s app catalog I don’t think it would sell as well.  Why not use the same model in the enterprise?

You’re  standing up your workforce collaboration platform, which is a good thing.  But, much like your cell phone, your collaboration platform becomes superior the more applications  integrate with it.  (Your goal is to make everything social, right? )  Why not set up a framework for developers (assumption: your company has software developers with spare time) to build apps and integrations for your collab platform?  Surely, your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to tackle that amount of work in a reasonable amount of time.  Instead of having them catch all the fish, why not let them teach others how.  It scales better.

A couple of benefits I see here:

1. As you increase the number of systems integrated with your collaboration platform customers (your employees, in this case) will be able to customize their working environment: personal portals/dashboards aggregating tasks, tools, processes, training, policies all in one place.   The promise of these collaboration platforms is that they can do this kind of aggregation, but the reality is that you already have systems that manage many of these things separately and are not ready to get rid of them.  And, to some degree, why should you?  Some of these systems are good at what they do but would be given a big boost if they were made social.
2. Increased user adoption of your workforce collaboration platform (because of #1)
3. Software engineers like this idea (at least the ones I’ve talked to).  They not only get a chance to spend more time in their cube, but they get to showcase their ‘gold nuggets,’ as one developer put it to me.  I think the technical term is egoboo.  Not sure if you have the concept of reputation management in your collab system, but this could certainly play into that.
4. You could possibly crowd-source and prioritize the apps/integrations to be built.  This would help fuel the adoption of #2 and would get the engineers in #3 fired up if they knew they were coding a solution that other employees want.
5. It’ll  get the good, reusable artifacts out from under that one-off CMS you’ve got.  The more systems you can make social, the more value they provide.  See #1.
6. Distribute the scope creep.  From what I’ve experienced, it’s easy to get pulled in lots of different directions.  So many customers (again, employees in this case) are eager for social & aggregation capabilities that you end up with scope creep (read: proliferation).  Not only could you distribute the creep, but you could increase speed to market and customer satisfaction.  It’s really like you’re expanding your project team.

Integration into other systems is a must when it comes to workforce collaboration.   If you’ve got the right kind of business, the internal AppStore makes a lot of sense.  The combination of potentially crowd-sourcing and prioritizing development could take your workforce collaboration software to the next level.

CCRP – Command and Control Research Program

via dodccrp.org

With all that organizations are doing towards bringing in new tools to the enterprise, the bottom line is a better organization: more flexibility, more agility, more net centric.

From what I can tell, no organization has put more time into research of this effort than the military. Traditionally considered the paradigm for command and control, the military recognized the need for change in this new information age as early on as any.

Take a look at the papers on this site. I think you’ll be surprised at what you find and how much applies to your organization. From command and control to leadership in the 2.0 age. Very solid information here.

Skills Management in a 2.0 Light

Now that we’ve got an e2.0 platform up and running we’re looking at our next big phase in turning everything social:  integration with (or replacement of) other enterprise systems.  One of the first that comes to mind is our Skills DB.  The Skills DB does what it sounds like – it’s a database of skills.  However, now that each employee has a social profile on this new e2.0 platform, a portion of which contains skills information, what’s the point of having a separate system that has essentially become redundant?  Additionally, retiring an enterprise system like the Skills DB would certainly help the e2.0 business case.

In the 1.0 world, an employee was required to access the Skills DB once a year and update his/her skills with ‘level of experience’ and ‘last time used’ information; afterwards the employee’s supervisor would log into the system and validate the information.  In the 2.0 world, that process becomes unnecessary.  It will be important for employees to have a current listing of their skills for search and ‘recommendation’ reasons.  But an employee’s skills or expertise will be determined in other ways.  If your e2.0 system is designed to be put in the knowledge worker’s workflow, their profile will be dynamically generated by the work they do:  the documents they author, the ideas they generate, the discussions they participate in, the artifacts they tag, the questions they answer, the reviews their peers generate through feed-back loops.

Now, when a hiring manager is looking for a software engineer with .NET experience, instead of going to an isolated Skills DB (where the info might be a year old), all they have to do is a quick search in the e2.0 tool.  Immediately they will be given much richer, up-to-date, information on all the employees with that skill set.  Plus, the hiring manager will be able to validate the claimed skill by looking through the activity of the employee, the projects they’re currently working on, the feedback from peers, etc…

Some takeaways:

• We can retire an enterprise system – good, bottom line-savings there
• Employees no longer have to compartmentalize logging their skills as a separate part of their day, it’s now in the workflow – good, productivity gain, current skills info maintained
• We’ve completely revamped the way we manage our skills and look for talent to fill internal job req’s.   – process improvement, if we can fill reqs faster, we can get to market faster
• ‘Work’ is now out in the open to be judged  - wow
• Peers can provide feedback in an open, public forum – geez (are we ready for this?), skill validation can now be vetted as opposed to the opinion of one person
• Information (Skills DB) previously accessible/searchable only by hiring managers is now out there in broad daylight for anyone to see/search/use – empowering, organizationally flattening, potential for emergent outcomes.

Requirements

Ever think you know someone really well and then you meet one of their siblings and they’re completely different?  You never could have imagined it.  Same parents, same church, same school, same neighborhood.  What gives?  One goes out all the time, the other stays in.  One got straight A’s, the other never finished high school.  One likes their beef grass-fed, the other is vegan.  I think you get the idea.

Well, IT projects can be a lot like that.  You can have two projects, same goal and they can be worlds apart.  Same company, same vision, same CEO, same culture, same training.  What gives?  Well, I’ve had the opportunity to work in such an environment (project = e2.0 deployment) and I can tell you what gives.  It’s the requirements.  Well, not so much the requirements but from whom they come.   Talk to IT.  Talk to BD.  Then talk to HR, Marketing, Comms.  Then go and talk to your ‘product’ folks.  Worlds apart.  Even though everyone at the company is committed to the same mission, they’ve each got their own role and their own care-abouts.  The ‘thing’ they want designed is obviously going to be biased to what makes their world tick.

So, to whom do you listen?  It’s a tough decision in the ‘social world’.  My advice is actually the same I offered in this post I wrote in June (I was at the e2.0 Conference in Boston).  The difference is that now (more than 3 monhts later) I’ve got the experience to back it up.  Turns out I was right.  Doesn’t happen often.  But when it does I’m going to blog about it.  Here’s an excerpt:

My advice to you is do your homework.  Know the vendor space, know your architecture, know your security model, know your requirements.  Most importantly: know your business and how this new tool set will help you solve your BUSINESS problems.  Do all of this before even approaching a vendor.  Get a sponsor from your BUSINESS.  HR is not OK.  Comms, eh, you’re getting warmer.  IT…COLD.  Get at the heart of what your company does and find out who does it.  Once you find them, they will tell you everything you need to know.   If you can make them happy and solve their problems you greatly increase your odds of success.

Looking back on that advice, it’s a little rough around the edges, but it absolutely rings true.  Jeremiah Owyang has a new post here where he urges companies to bring ‘social’ beyond just the marketing department.  I agree, but if you’re talking internally focused efforts (and I understand that wasn’t his intent, so this is not a criticism) his advice doesn’t go far enough.  You need to start with the ‘core of your business’ folks.  They will cover many requirements of the other functions, but it won’t work the other way around.  Once you get the right requirements from the right people you’ll have created an excellent foundation from which you can become holistic.

Seek Omega: 10 Enterprise 2.0 Sites that Everyone Should Keep an Eye On.

10 Enterprise 2.0 Sites that Everyone Should Keep an Eye On.

It’s very difficult to keep up with news media, blogs and your Twitter followers.  Too many posts, too little time, too much noise.

Some Enterprise 2.0 blogs matter to me more than others.  Some are merely fun, some educational, and some provincial.  Others are just visionary and thought provoking .

So here is the list (not in any particular order).  Feel free to tell them I sent you. 

via seekomega.com

Based on the list of E2.0 blogs in this post, I’d say my definition of ‘E2.0′ differs from that of the authors.

For me, E2.0 has always referred to the technologies and practices of using social media tools to improve the knowledge management, productivity and innovation among employees. There’s no outward facing aspect of E2.0.

A number of the blogs listed started out as Web2.0 blogs, focusing on the consumer side of the house. It only makes sense, though, that these two areas have an overlap.

My definition probably has to evolve to include externally facing tools/applications/processes. However, I still think the focus of E2.0 is about improvements internal to a company.