Let´s imagine that you are an innovation leader in an organization, and are teaching some other collaborators how to execute innovation projects.
Maybe you are using a Design Thinking based process, where you must follow some steps in order to get the final result: a powerful innovation.
In this case, it is probable that you face a situation in which the team is not advancing as planned and you identify some motivation issues as the main cause. This lack of motivation is normal in new situations, where people lack the familiarity needed to understand how to begin and execute the given tasks. Even apparently simple activities as doing interviews or executing observation sessions, can experience important delays.
Usually, you will find that instead of arguing lack of knowledge on how to execute the assigned activities, the innovators use excuses as "We don´t have enough time".
This is a frequent situation in organizations where innovation culture is not strong enough. But, how can we motivate participants to embrace and speed each step in an innovation process? Can we accelerate adoption of innovation practices?
Gamification has something to teach innovation leaders about how to motivate innovators and encourage them to execute each activity fast and effectively. Specifically, Gamification practices suggest us to use two mechanics: a little dose of competition and a good measure of progress feedback.
Big things are overwhelming. Small things are motivating.
For anyone who have started to explore gamification as a valuable tool to increase motivation in teams, maybe the solution for the lack of commitment in our innovation team is to reward its advances. Maybe we can design a progression route and assign points each time the team finish a task. This way the team will be motivated to advance.
If well designed, this approach has a good chance to increase motivation. But, we can add two improvements to ensure a better result.
- First, lets talk about the size of the challenge. As we have been told that the more challenging, the most engaging a task is, is its possible that we will be inclined to give points only if the team finish a big and significative one. But, as the real problem is the natural fear and avoiding tendency we experiment in front of new and non-familiar challenges, a high demanding task can produce the opposite effect. The feel of being overwhelmed can be magnified and the procrastinator inside each one of us can win the battle.
- Second, lets talk about competition. Well managed, competition against others can help the human brain to overcome the natural fear we feel in front of the unknown. If we divide the team into small ones, we can use some competition to add emotion.
Taking into account these points, instead to ask teams to compete for finishing a whole step in the process (i.e. The empathy step in the Design Thinking process) we can break the task into parts (smaller "tasks") and rewarding the fast execution of the first one. Instead of giving points for being the first team to finish all the planned observations, interviews and investigation tasks, we can give them points for finishing just their first interview. You can add some points to each team who finish the task before a specific date.
Doing just ONE interview sounds much more easy to do, so the innovation team will feel motivated to do it as soon as possible. And by doing it, they will increase the knowledge needed to do the rest of the activities planned in the empathy plan (Maybe six interviews, some secret client video recording visits, and a good deal of desk work surfing internet) and will feel more confident on how to continue the task. Frequently, all teams will find that the the task is not as demanding as they though.
The result is that all innovation teams will advance faster and will enjoy the process much more.
This change can seem to be petty but it can change the experience a great deal. It`s part of the "onboarding strategy". Onboarding is the way a game teach its players the main objectives and how to use controls and mechanics. The first minutes in each game have an enormous importance in how much the player is motivated to remain playing. The onboarding step must let the player to feel herself able and intrigued. And this can be achieved by designing an introductory level where just a few mechanics are presented and some fast rewards are provided for completing an easy task.
Although this approach can help to start in a better way an innovation endeavor, the same logic can be applied to other steps in the process and even to "non- innovation" processes.
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