Last Friday, at the invitation of Jonathan Taplin and Erin Reilly of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, we conducted a 90-minute session at the 2012 Annenberg Innovation Summit on the USC campus. The objective was to summarize the thinking that came out of a day of presentations and panels with high fliers from the worlds of academia, technology, urban design, entertainment, non-profits and government. People like Henry Jenkins, Anne Balsamo, and John Seely Brown.
We used our ERGO (Environment, Roles, Guidelines, Objectives) game structure to design the session. The game involved 100 people seated at 12 tables. In 90 minutes, the group came up with 800 ideas grouped into four different themes and ranked from 13 to 1 in order of ‘impact in the next five years.’
The objective of the game was to generate and rank as many ideas as possible in the time we had, and then look at innovation as a process of identifying patterns and connections in large datasets.
Objective
As communicators, our 800+ ideas are our material the way a rock is a sculptor’s material. What we do with the material is what a sculptor does to a rock–chip away at it to reveal patterns and narrative elements concealed within the rock that are made visible through our process.
THE MYSTERY TABLE:
We noticed a really interesting outcome to Friday’s game. (Remember: Outcomes are different from Objectives, and are where most of the value of a game resides.) Of the 12 tables, one table performed better than the others. It was a table of seven women and one man. Their ages varied. And because we asked everyone to sit with people they did not know, we can assume at least some of them were new to one another. Yet their focus was better, their tempo faster, their agreements quicker, than any other table in the room, as far as we could tell.
Why? How? It is a mystery begging to be solved.
The people at that table understood our game well enough that they were able to adjust one of its guidelines without affecting the game in any way except to make it go faster. That choice probably gave them an extra 5 minutes over the duration of the game that could be spent on idea generation instead of game mechanics.Many of the other tables got bogged down in game mechanics for 10 of the 90 allotted minutes. That gave the Mystery Table a 15-minute advantage over the less agile tables. That’s 17% more productivity over the 90-minute period.
I never saw them ask for help, but I saw one of them listening whenever a nearby table asked for help. That’s one way they communicated and shared efficiently. The work at other tables would come to a complete standstill as they got an explanation from Jenkins or Balsamo. The work at the high-performing table never stopped. I want to know more more about the Mystery Table, about what made their process so efficient.
If we’d have had another half hour in our session, we could have dug into the Mystery Table’s process. What was the game like for them? What choices did they make that kept things clear and focused? How did they listen to one another? How did they yes-and? How did they sort out any confusion they might have had? How was the decision made to change one of the game’ guidelines to make their ranking process more efficient? What secrets would this Mystery Table have revealed to the rest of the participants?
I am going to follow up with at least one of the people at the Mystery Table and let you know what he or she says about their process. Stand by.
Outcome
Huge fan of 
There are thousands of characteristics of poor games, and thousands of poor games played in business every second of every working day. ‘Reading Your PowerPoint Deck to Your Audience’ is a poor game. ‘Kissing Ass’ is almost always a poor game. The ‘Eight Axes, One Budget’ game Barb Groth walked into was a poor game. She saw it, and suggested an adjustment. That’s what gamechangers do.