Gamification: it's the small stuff that makes the big difference

Let's say you're giving a talk on some subject. You're lecturing at a convention, and your talk is set right after lunch. Its theme is fascinating, and your presentation is nearly perfect. You believe in the material and are proficient in presenting it to an audience. One would even say you are charismatic and articulate. Nevertheless, the late afternoon and the audience's digestion system are a force to be reckoned with. After a while, you notice that most audience members are a bit drowsy.

Luckily, at this exact moment, you arrive at a very special slide you prepared in advance. It is a detective puzzle, a mystery that may be answered using a term found in the previous slides. Suddenly, everyone is wide awake: they participate, speculate, and make guesses. They all want to solve the puzzle. What happened here?

Incorporating gamification tools into organizations has many advantages. Gamification increases the enjoyment of a project, sharing among workers, creativity, and engagement. You can create gamification frameworks, such as a digital escape room, and adapt them to promote business objectives such as lessons learned or implementing insight databases.

You can also integrate gamification rules into smaller agile solutions. Since the agile process promotes values such as presenting products at an early stage and continuously within short periods, agility, flexibility, and efficiency, integrating small, concise gamification solutions into the process will generate excitement, interest, curiosity, and suspense.

So, how can we utilize gamification solutions, and what can we gain from it?

1. Encourage curiosity: consider the presentation mentioned above, and now assume we are scheduled to present a series of tutorials or a workshop consisting of several meetings. We can incorporate a puzzle featuring the same hero into each tutorial or workshop and thus attain the effect of an ongoing mystery story. Of course, the puzzles and narrative must be related to the content field we are discussing. This gamification element might be small and concise, but nevertheless generates ongoing suspense, which produces an extensive impact that wraps up our workshop nicely and assists in increasing the participants' engagement. The knowledge we share becomes more than a top-down process; it interests participants, who become more involved.

2. Add some humor: a smart document can be made enjoyable to read by adding colorful elements such as emojis and icons and some cute and amusing sayings, all adding a humorous touch to an otherwise uninspiring document. These elements can also be added to tutorials, surveys used in need charting processes, etc.

3. A short game goes a long way: let's say there's this knowledge retainment product you wish to implement into the organization. It's a booklet, a long one. You yourself admit that it is quite an arduous read. Nevertheless, the knowledge it contains is vital for our workers' regular work and training. We are interested in them learning and implementing the knowledge, and adding some fun to the process will only help us attain positive results. So, how do we do it? At the end of each chapter, we can present them with a small game based on the knowledge learned. Word games, memory games, and many more can be easily designed using the Wordwall These games can also be integrated into knowledge items in the portal.

4. Encourage "out-of-the-box" thinking: the best way to hold a brainstorming session or encourage creativity and innovation in the organization is to be creative yourselves. When you take people out of their regular, predictable mold and introduce an unexpected element, you encourage them also to escape this stagnated thinking and think creatively.

5. A short game at the beginning of every meeting or when your team has reached a dead end will encourage teamwork and will assist in forming a team that thinks and works together. A lighter atmosphere allows people to toil for a cause happily. Creativity will follow.

These are only some ideas. Your creativity is the limit, and nothing is limiting it. So, what are you waiting for? Go play.