You might start with an overall goal. Get all the cards? Sink the other person’s battleship? Build the most hotels? You’ll devise actions that move the game forward, setbacks for the players to keep it interesting, and rules and constraints that challenge your groups as the game unfolds.

Games seem easy; game-like learning takes time. It also takes a willingness to try something, test it out, see what’s not working and try again.

How can we use these principles for game-like learning to reshape our interactions with elected officials, our stakeholders, and our colleagues?

We learn by doing.

Monotonous recitations and PowerPoints in the dark? We all know that’s not effective communication. How can you involve your audience? Text voting, face-to-face discussion, moving pieces of paper on a map, writing on a poster – these are a few ways to bring some interaction to a discussion. Can you take it to the next level? What information are you gathering and how are you showing the progression back to your group? The more involved they are, the more they will remember.

Don’t be afraid of prototypes.

There are usually high-stakes in a public presentation, but an internal working group can try and try again. Test your ideas out; don’t wait until they’re perfect. Make a dummy quickly (10 minutes is quick, 10 hours is not) and try it out. You’ll have fun doing it, and the faster you can test several ideas, the more information you’ll have about what’s fun, what’s working, and what’s not.

Focus on doing, not talking.

Adults tend to spend a lot of time discussing ideas and less time trying them out. Bring out your inner kid, the one who was willing to go with it – that tree’s a spaceship? Sure! Let’s try it. Change our presentation style? Let’s test a few slides!

Don’t underestimate your audience

You’re smart. So is your audience. Don’t bore them or give them dumbed down information assuming they won’t get it. Play sounds childlike, but making an interesting experience is harder than it sounds.

How to start?

Give it a try.

Resources:

Institute of Play

Prototyping from the D.School at Standford

The post Fun and Games at Work? appeared first on The Public Leadership Blog.

There is a lot of emotion and learning in this field and I can’t pretend to have a deep understanding of the politics or medical treatment of autism. But in our conversation, I was struck by how many people in our relatively small group had personal experiences with people with autism. Each said some version of “if I’d had this kind of understanding of autism, I would have been a better coworker/travel companion/group leader/friend”

We talked about the conferences Silberman describes, organized by people with autism, and their environment in which they communicate non-verbally using color-coded name tags, have quiet places where they can reduce their environmental stimulation, and places for group activities that appeal to them, such as sharing meaningful objects.

As our world welcomes the rising numbers of autistic individuals in our schools, and our workforce, I wonder how we will expand our understanding of diversity to include a broader range of personalities and neurological conditions. We often rely on tools such as the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQi) to understand our colleagues, and ourselves, but are we limiting our workplace?

Not everyone with autism today will work at SAP, but as our population expands and autism continues to be present, will we be prepared to bring more people who are different into our workplace? Expanding our systems to accommodate and include more diversity in behaviors and preferences may be difficult but it should also lead to more innovation and creativity.

We can adopt tools similar to the ones the autistic participants designed for their conferences to engage introverts (a green name tag that indicates “I’m interested in discussion but I’m shy about making the first move”), and to encourage focus and decompression (quiet rooms, no technology). By starting now, we may be ready to follow in the footsteps of others who are including autism in their workforce. Or maybe we’ll take the initiative and work with autistic individuals to design work environments that are welcoming and inclusive now.

SAP: Shifting the perception of people’s abilities: A conversation about Autism at Work

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