When my Mom asks me about what I do for a living, often rather than explaining collaboration technologies to her, I gave her a tongue-in-cheek response something like “Oh, I do Dungeons ‘N Dragons for money.” I would go on to explain how I had created a collaboration scenario/ role-playing game that I called “The Business Transformation Game.” This game for private clients like General Dynamics, some Government agencies and pharmaceutical companies was played to help their people learn about collaboration (behaviors) and the appropriate technologies to use. Every time I played this game with clients, the results were so dramatically more effective in people learning about collaboration through a lecture that I began to wonder why everyone did not teach this way?

[More:]

What I learned was that when I created a scenario that had roles that were too close to what people did in their everyday job, they would often freeze up. When they were asked about this, they thought the game was a test for their job and saw participation as a career limiting event. I learned lots of other things through my work with the BTG with a variety of clients, and also learned to make a scenario somewhat different than what the company was doing, but to make the team and collaboration dynamics the same. I also learned to mix up the roles, and assign the guy that was the CIO at the company, a role as a women who worked in PR. Not only did it give him the experience of walking a mile in another’s shoes, but it allowed them to suspend their disbelief and get more involved in the role and game dynamics.

As part of the engagement I would do for clients, I would give an initial talk about collaboration and the technologies to give them some background and context. Then in the afternoon we would play the Business Transformation Game (BTG). Never did I have anyone come up to me years later and ask a specific question about something in my introductory talk. However, I would have people come up to me at a conference years later and say “boy I remember that game we did, it was great how…”

I began to wonder why the game experience had so much more impact than the lecture. I believe it was because of the fact that the players had both emotional involvement and by taking on a role, some ownership in the outcome of the game. I also noticed that the “light bulb” went off above many more people’s heads around collaboration and what was required to be successfull. It was also clear that a high level of knowledge transfer was taking place, and that many of those playing were able to quickly translate from their (or others) role in the scenario to their role in the company they worked for, and a way to apply these new collaboration technologies to a specific process. Many of these people were excited and wanted to get back to work and apply these tools immediately. It was great to see their enthusiasm, but I needed to caution them about jumping in too fast and applying collaborative technologies to inappropriate processes (we have seen people use Lotus Notes for transactional applications) where they would likely get very little benefit.

A few years after I started doing the BTG Michael Schrage, from the media lab at MIT came out with a book called “Serious Play”(Harvard Business School Press, 2000) based on his experiences with some of the world’s largest companies (Sony, Boeing, Disney, IBM, General Electric, etc.) and how they used simulations to innovate, model , prototype, improvise and become more creative. His thesis is not that innovative teams generate innovative projects, but quite the opposite, that innovative projects generate innovative teams.

After doing the BTG, reading Michael’s book, and seeing how collaboration did not work well when demonstrated at a traditional trade show (which uses the Farmer’s market model… here see my dead chicken and rutabaga) booth because collaborative applications actually need two or more people interacting to see how they work. In addition, you want to see how your (distributed) team works using these tools, what the social dynamics are, and which tools are preferred. You can’t do this at a booth in a trade show!

Collaboratory

Over time these ideas evolved, and in 2005, myself and some colleagues tried to present the BTG now called a “Collaboratory” as part of the first Enterprise 2.0 conference. We put a lot of work into room layout, and designing the in-room network, etc. However, time and technology have moved on, and now we are in the Web 2.0 age. When I had lunch with Ismael Ghalimi, the CEO of Intalio and conference chairman of Office 2.0, he too was excited by the idea and offered me a room to run Collaboratory as an experiment on September 3, (the day before the Office 2.0 Conference starts and they are having an Unconference).

What is interesting is that much of the collaboration technology has moved into SaaS-based tools, so they are “in the cloud” and really we only need everyone to have a connection to the cloud, access to the specific collaboration tools being used in the scenario, and me to facilitate the event. Because much of the infrastructure and applications are now cloud-based, I don’t have to worry about running servers or routers in the room. I just have to make sure that everyone has a laptop with WiFi connectivity (all paying attendees at Office 2.0 receive an HP 2133 mini-note sub notebook computer as the computing form factor for the conference.

I accepted his offer and am now working on writing the scenario, creating the roles and data, the workflow for the teams to follow in the game, etc. We are even going to let a few people attend virtually, to make sure this aspect works also. My goal (with the help of a media group) is to learn enough from this experiment to create a full day hands on collaboration conference in the Spring of 2009. An event that is different from any other out there, in that there are no trade show booths, no show floor, no pre-ordained conference sessions with wise men speaking from the pulpit, but rather an event that is created by those that attend and is participatory (following many of the principles of Web 2.0) to the extreme.

If you are interested in being a part of this Collaboratory experiment, please sign up for the Office 2.0 event in early September in San Francisco. I will also be speaking about the 10 biggest mistakes the enterprise makes with Collaboration 2.0.