Caterpillars can fly, if they just lighten up…

Two caterpillars were sitting on a wagon and a beautiful butterfly floats by. The one caterpillar then says to the other, “You’ll never get me up in one of those things.” Please take a minute [...]

Co-creation with frontline staff

In theatre, an invisible fourth wall separates the audience from the onstage action. People in the audience are passive observers and not active participants. Breaking that wall invites the audience into the fictional world. It [...]

KPI’s – keeping score

Whilst most companies use measures, key performance indicators and dashboards, they may work against the overall company goals. KPI's work in a similar way to a score track or health points etc in a game [...]

The Play is the Work     

The best games call on us to use our talent and imagination to play, learn and excel.  So do the best workplaces. I didn’t start out making games. But I quickly recognized that play was [...]

Duolingo review – how to apply Gamification smarter

Have you ever thought: “I want to learn to speak _____”? That same energising thought got 300 million people to try out Duolingo, a freemium tool to learn any of 36 (and rising) languages. These include little-spoken [...]

Entrepreneurial Ludic Learning

Play, entrepreneurship, and management are concepts in business. Risk-taking, changing habits, and cognitive and creative rigor stem from these big three. Playing games and creating games not only can teach high-level concepts but also build [...]

How games do feedback better than your boss

For most people there is a clear delineation between ‘Work’ and ‘Play’, and with it the sad assumption that ‘Play’ is enjoyable and voluntary, and that ‘Work’, being its polar opposite, is unpleasant, and an [...]

Play is Work

Games are a type of work if you think about it. We invest our time in games. We give games our attention and our mental capacities. But why do we do that? What makes play [...]

Simple Ways of Making Work Playful

Playfulness is a rather unique phenomenon that when utilised effectively can be a useful resource for enhancing social awareness and community building within workplace environments. According to Johan Huizinga’s ‘Homo Ludens’ “play is older than [...]

How board games can achieve behaviour change in the workplace

Scavenger hunts, blindfold exercises, tower building… are you familiar with any of these workplace team building activities? These are examples of how organisations might try to encourage collaboration and team-building skills in a learning environment. [...]

The Dangers of Competition in Workplace Games

Bringing Collaboration into Play Right now, gamification and games are so focused on online implementation that you could be forgiven for thinking they’re mainly about tech. But online is just one playing field, and tech [...]

Are You Leading Play in Your Organisation?

When did you last play in your organisation ? How often do you leave a meeting room uninspired with the solutions presented ? Do you need a more positive and energised workforce ? Organisations are [...]

Time to get serious about Stakeholder Engagement

HOW MUST-WIN BATTLES FAIL In an ever more complex world, large organisations rely on their ability to react or proactively change through large scale strategic initiatives, or as they are sometimes called, Must Win Battles. [...]

To Play at Work, See What You Do as a Game

One of the most prominent personalities in gamification, Andrzej Marczewski, wrote in his well-received book Even Ninja Monkeys Like to Play: Unicorn Edition, “Work is actually very similar to play and even more like games. [...]