One of the most inspiring reads I have had recently is "Reality is Broken" by Jane McGonigal. This book got me in to the whole concept of "Gamification", the process of making boring things at work more like games and hence more fun. In particular I am interested in turning day-to-day business systems in to more engaging "gamified" systems which are more fun to do. Take a few minutes to listen to Jane's potted version on TED.
The amazing thing that caught my eye was that there are more than 11 million World of Warcraft (WoW) players who have collectively played more than 5.93 million years of WoW between them since 1996. That is around 10,000 hours each, which is about as much time as you spend at school between 6 and 16. Malcolm Gladwell will tell you that anybody spending 10,000 hours doing anything must be a virtuoso, but a virtuoso at what?
Jane decided to find out with her PhD research.
Her conclusion was that the WoW players were experts at collaboration, namely cooperation, coordination, and co-creation. These are just the skills we need in my workplace, so why aren't they so common? Basically because my workplace is not designed to make it easy to be cooperative, coordinated and co-creative. It is assumed that these things will somehow happen, by virtue of the fact that the building is filled with intelligent people with degrees, and that is what they do . . . . . isn't it? Ironically, the degree has probably trained us to learn independently and keep things to ourselves - sharing is called cheating in education circles!
This has to change, and it is changing. And the workplace needs to be better designed! So lets get on with making the work place work more effectively, and be more engaging and more fun.
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