Great things don’t happen in a vacuum. But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you
Great things don’t happen in a vacuum. But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you: “Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers”.
“If you want to stop talking about innovation and start actually doing it, ‘Gamestorming’ is that how-to manual you’ve been waiting for,” said Dave Gray (@davegray), founder of XPLANE, and the author of ‘Gamestorming’ along with Sunni Brown and James Macanufo.
“Gamestorming” features more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. The authors have identified tools and techniques from some of the world’s most innovative professionals, whose teams collaborate and make great things happen.
“Gamestorming” will help you:
- Overcome conflict and increase engagement with team-oriented games
- Improve collaboration and communication in cross-disciplinary teams with visual-thinking techniques
- Improve understanding by role-playing customer and user experiences
- Generate better ideas and more of them, faster than ever before
- Shorten meetings and make them more productive
- Simulate and explore complex systems, interactions, and dynamics
- Identify a problem’s root cause, and find the paths that point toward a solution
Gray says:
My book is a playbook, a how-to manual. It’s not intended to be read and stuck on a shelf–it’s intended to be used. If people use it they will find they are more successful at networked work, by which I mean: working with people and companies that you don’t control, having conversations across organizations and across disciplines, looking beyond today’s business models, and imagining new ways of creating value
My book is a playbook, a how-to manual. It’s not intended to be read and stuck on a shelf–it’s intended to be used. If people use it they will find they are more successful at networked work, by which I mean: working with people and companies that you don’t control, having conversations across organizations and across disciplines, looking beyond today’s business models, and imagining new ways of creating value 
Dave Gray is the Founder of XPLANE, the visual thinking company and a partner in the Dachis Group, a social business consultancy. Dave’s time is spent researching and writing on visual business, as well as speaking, coaching and delivering workshops to educators, corporate clients and the public. He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.
Sunni Brown, M.P.A., is Owner of BrightSpot Info Design, a company specializing in visual thinking to support organizational and group success.
As a consultant at XPLANE, James Macanufo helps large technology and government clients develop their vision, strategy and communication plans. He actively obsessed with understanding what things are, the way they work, and why they matter. He is also an active gamer and occasional inventor of card games.
Gamestorming
Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo
Download the book Sampler: 9780596804176-sampler.pdf In defense of games in the workplace
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