Since I joined Red Gate in October, I’ve really enjoyed attending our ‘Collab Lab’ sessions. Inspired by Dave Gray’s book Gamestorming, a group of like minded folk within Red Gate get together for an hour every fortnight to try out games and facilitation techniques. We explore how to play the game and discuss how we could use the game or technique effectively in our day to day work.
Last week we tried out the Challenge Cards game. The object of play is described in Gamestorming as:
To identify and think through challenges, problems and potential pitfalls in a product, service or strategy.
If you haven’t already got the Gamestorming book I’d highly recommend going and grabbing yourself a copy, or getting the iPhone app or Android app for handy reference on the move.
The game involves two teams: a ‘solution team’ who brainstorm the strengths of the product or service and a ‘challenge team’ who brainstorm problems or challenges. Each team writes the ‘solutions’ or ‘challenges’ on index cards.
Some of the challenge team’s cards:
And the solution team’s cards:
The real value of the game comes from the fun part, which is when the teams play their cards together. This competitive but collaborative aspect of the game results in rapid idea generation about user needs, problems and context of use and the potential solutions or features which can make the product or service work well for users. There is a form of points allocation, which I’ll explain more about later.
When we tried out the game we decided to use a fictional product idea, which was:
A mobile phone app to manage book appointments with your GP, communicate with your GP surgery and get test results
The benefit of using a fictional product idea was that we didn’t get hung up on internal challenges or focus on one particular product. We are all from different teams, working on different products. So we avoided a situation where one or two people were very familiar with the product, but others in the group weren’t.
We had two teams of 4 and 5 people respectively.
There weren’t any timings specified in the book, so we decided to use the following timings:
- Introduction – 5 mins
- Product / service definition – 5 mins
- Brainstorming – 10 mins (this felt a bit long)
- Playing cards – 20 minutes (we could have done with longer)
- Discussion about the game – 15 minutes
The main things we learnt about playing the Challenge Cards game were:
- The game is great for initial idea generation about a product or service.
- It’s good for getting creative juices flowing and great for coming up with multiple solutions and possible risks or constraints.
- The ‘game’ aspect prevented us getting hung up on personal gripes.
- Because the game has a ‘challenge team’ it’s actually a really positive way to deal with people who tend to be very negative in workshops and brainstorming sessions. Play to their strengths by putting them on the challenge team!
- Both teams were working to a shared outcome.
- It’s a good way to get people involved who are less confident about having a say.
- The game would work well for people who are fresh to the product.
Some of the more practical things we learnt about playing Challenge Cards were:
- Each team should use different coloured index cards! We quite quickly realised we couldn’t visually distinguish the cards on the table.
- You need a big table to lay the cards out on, or alternatively stick them up on a wall (you could use stickies for that purpose but we felt that the feeling of slapping the cards down on the table added to the game play).
- The facilitator should just do facilitation and not attempt to be part of a team.
- Some of the cards can be too general, particularly the ‘challenges’ and could be played on multiple occasions.
- It’s hard to award points to the teams when the problem seems very wide e.g. “I have no service / network coverage, I can’t access the info when I need it”.
- Teams can get very competitive about points allocation and as the facilitator I quite quickly found I was being challenged about whether I’d allocated points fairly! When you pair up the challenge and solution cards it would be useful to write a reference number on them or find some way to cross-reference the cards with points allocated on the scorecard.
- We wanted to keep writing on the cards – the facilitator needs to lay out clear timings.
- We could have done with more time.
- We needed a follow up session to discuss some of the problems / solutions in more detail.
If you have experiences of playing the Challenge Cards game, do let us know if you have any other tips for good game play!