OCR loops, which stands for “Objective, Challenge, Reward”, are a pattern of game design that I learned from the experts at Ubisoft. They are used to describe various levels of motivation in such a way that challenges can be distributed throughout the game to keep the player engaged.
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When I was working with the Codesign-it collective, I often heard about the Open Forum (often know as OST, “Open Space Technology”), a method that they were deploying in collaborative innovation projects with clients. In July 2018 I was able to witness how it was used by the members of the collective themselves as part of the “Summer Sprint”, their annual off-site meeting. This was an opportunity to observe more closely the ins and outs of this technology, whose origins can be found in citizen-run open forums.
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During an update of our courses at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, I was told that we would no longer be teaching about planning poker in Scrum projects. Apparently, measuring velocity was no longer part of the orthodoxy. I found this puzzling, as I had taken the rituals of estimating and measuring velocity to be part of the core processes of Scrum. Had I misunderstood the framework, or were there other forces at play?
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What happens when we take the analytical work of a game designer and feed it back to a group of people working on real-life collaboration problems?
Thanks to the invitation of Myriam Hadnes I was able to put on my mad-scientist hat once more and create a workshop for the Never Done Before community of facilitation professionals. By definition my workshop had to be something new and for this one I thought I’d use as a starting point a talk from Alex Jaffe called “Cursed problems in game design“.
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Many years have passed since I first started this blog, and after several life changes the original intention that I had for it no longer drives me with the same energy. It is time for a fresh start.
When I pressed him to give me feedback, Greg Serikoff, one of the founders of the Codesign-it collective, gave me a piece of advice that stayed with me: that I shouldn’t wait until a text is perfect before sharing it, that I should be ready to bring out more unfinished products into the world.
It struck me as a great paradox.
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I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Myriam Hadnes for her podcast Workshops Work. From the initial question “What can video game design teach us about workshop design?” we ventured into education, codesign, Agile, facilitation and even existentialism. That was so much fun to do!
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From October 2017 through March 2018, I spent 6 months as a resident of the Codesign-it collective in Paris. This residence was an opportunity for me to learn new skills and to dive deep into the world of facilitators, consultants and coaches.
Codesign-it! is not a company in the traditional sense of the term. It is a collective of independent professionals brought together by one question: “How do we invent the world of tomorrow, together?”
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By Fabien Bataille
This article was originally published in French on Fabien’s blog Agile, Lean et Compagnie
As part of my research on new ways of working in organizations, which currently abound, I recently discovered Holacracy. It is used by Zappos, the
largest online shoes seller, in the United States
(see here [FR]). Closer to us in France “SOPRODI” (SME in industry in Clermont-Ferrand) and Antonutti-Delmas (SME transport, near Paris).
This new mode of business management, which was invented by the American company “Ternary Software”, then sold under license through the structure “HolacracyOne“, is now spreading around the world.
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The Agile philosophy is not only applicable to IT projects. It makes sense in any collaboration context, because it is just a better way of working. My recent experience of Agile with primary school teachers has shown me that the approach truly can be used everywhere and that it will quickly be of benefit to the team that uses it.
No matter how engaging an experience is, or how much effort you put in designing cool rules and goals: If someone feels forced to engage in an activity, they will find it utterly boring. In this fourth and final part, we are addressing the last aspect of what makes a game fun: Voluntary participation. How does this notion apply to Scrum?