Playful Inquiry: An Interview with Ross Smith

What Is Playful Inquiry?

Inquiry
Inquiry is the science, art and spirit of imagination. We naturally associate Inquiry with the logical mind’s intent to satisfy curiosity, solve problems, and explore ideas. Inquiry helps us connect our prior understanding to new experiences, modify and accommodate our previously held beliefs and conceptual models, and construct new knowledge.

Antonyms found in the dictionary: Answer, reply

Playful

Playful describes a state of surrender. It involves being open, letting go, and embracing unexpected direction or results. Being playful has positive effects on the body and the brain. Problem solving ability increases after a person has spent some time laughing. This works because laughter turns off the posterior hypothalamus and allows the cerebral cortex to focus on a given task.

Antonyms found in the dictionary: Earnest, serious-minded, sober, humorless, serious, working

8/19/12

An Interview with Ross Smith

Taking Play Seriously with Truly Amazing People:

An Interview with Ross Smith

This week Ross will be presenting at the Serious Play Conference near Seattle, Washington, with a talk titled "The Future of Work is Play"

Interview Team: Lori Sortino and Emily Swift

This is one in a series of interviews being conducted on the topic of Serious Play, Serious Gaming -- using games, simulation and virtual worlds to help stimulate learning in innovative new ways and find real world solutions.

Ross Smith really enjoys getting a paycheck to "play" with software for over 25 years now, over 20 at Microsoft. Most of his career has been in testing and QA roles - including Test Architect. He has contributed to almost every version of Windows and Office since 1992. He is one of the authors of "The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention" and holds five patents. 42projects has aspired to promote cultural change; "bring buzz and laughter to the hallways".

Q: How can gaming or simulations transform the workplace?

A: Games and simulations – and I’ll extend a bit to include play and fun – can transform the workplace across several different dimensions. First, our world of work has evolved - from an Industrial Society to a Knowledge Society. Knowledge work can benefit from the mental break that games and play provide. Second, the “gamer generation” is entering the workforce. In 2008, Pew Research did a study that showed 97% of 12-17 year olds play computer, web, portable, or console games – 99% of boys, 94% of girls. These folks are entering the workforce, and the workplace needs to adapt to better engage this new type of worker. Third, games to get real work done – productivity games as we call them – can help better motivate crowdsourcing efforts.

Q: Where do you see the most potential in gaming as part of the future of work?

A: Games designed and built around knowledge work. For us in software testing, there’s a huge benefit if we can get feedback from a marketing manager on how he or she might use our software. However, they don’t have time to do work for us, so a well-designed game can help motivate and encourage them to take some extra time and help us.

Q: What are “Productivity Games” and how are they used?

A: Productivity games are games or game mechanics that get “real work” done. We have learned that adding a game on to someone’s “day job” backfires. It simply doesn’t work when points, leaderboards, levels, or prizes are competing with the human resource systems and paycheck that are already in place. Games work great to attract core skills (those that most people have – ie: ability to type, make a phone call, speak a language, etc.) to work on “organizational citizenship behaviors” – those things that make the organization, the company, and/or the product better – but are not necessarily the sole responsibility of anyone in the organization. The “clean out the coffee pot at the end of the day” game works much better than the “do Ross’s job” game.

Q: Do you have any experience using productivity games for collaborative purposes?

A: We’ve been experimenting for almost 10 years. Just as with games for entertainment, players can be motivated by different techniques. Some respond to the glory and shame of the leaderboard, some to beating their own high score, and some by puzzles. Some play for the camaraderie of team play. One of the best examples in using games to collaborate was in the Windows Security team with an Olympic themed game, where we had “runners” and “coaches” together on a team. For one week, the coaches maintained a level of performance in their own day job, as well as in that of the runners. The runners went off and did something brand new - sometimes wild and crazy – to innovate in an area that would help the organization. Each Olympic team was judged only as a team – both on how well they maintained the regular work, and how much they could innovate. In the Language Quality Game, we also saw native language speakers collaborate and work together to “compete” against other languages.

Q: Can you give some examples?

A: The Netflix prize, Re-Captcha, Google Image Labeler, Top Coder, and our Language Quality Game are great examples. Tongal.com has done a great job building contests for both aspiring and professional videographers and producers to compete for video business from real companies.

Q: Where do you see pockets of expertise, and in what aspect of serious games, worldwide?

A: I think there are some interesting cultural shifts in the explosion of mobile and social games. As a new generation of business leaders starts to take their seat at the head of the table, I think we’ll see a shift. More than 70% of the worlds’ population plays games. There are well over 300 million online gamers in China. As workforce demographics shift, and with the rise in emerging economies, globalization of our world economy benefits tremendously when workers from disparate cultures build trust and teamwork skills through game play. I think mobile gaming expertise in China, Japan, Korea, and other eastern countries will be a huge factor in shaping our future world. Gamers and game development expertise continues to flourish in India. There are great game studios in the UK and Europe. In South America, Brazil gaming industry is growing at ~30% a year. The Russian video game market is projected to double over the next 3 years. My belief is that growth in gaming opportunities is correlated to population trends.

Q: What are the challenges to the industry right now?

A: I’ll narrow my answer to productivity games – games in the workplace – as I’m more familiar there than the gaming industry as a whole. In the workplace, there’s still a bit of a negative connotation to the word “game”. Some (generally old school) folks think “games are gimmicky” – or “we don’t play around here, we work hard” - and that play and fun are indicative of lower productivity. My belief is that as our world of work shifts to knowledge work, that play, games, mirth, and fun actually improve productivity by making people more creative, more innovative, and more relaxed as they apply their minds to their tasks.

TrulyAmazingPeople.com is an organization devoted to helping individuals, families and communities seeking meaningful work, whole system change, and talent integration ecosystems. TrulyAmazingPeople.com would like to thank the Serious Games Association, The Bohle Company, and the Future Working Together community for their assistance with our research.

Lori Sortino, Lyn Wiltse, and Emily Swift are Truly Amazing People. Lori and Lyn are Creative Solutions Consultants who host Playful Inquiry events. Emily Swift is a technical writer with a BS in Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies.

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Inquiring About Serious Play

In spring, 2012, Lori began to inquire about the application of game design in helping whole communities and cultures shift to their desired vision for their community or organization. This inquiry looks at the structural aspects, which include purpose, rules, protocols, expectations, member/participant behavior, environment, roles, controls, types of feedback and how feedback influences choice and outcomes; basically systems based views. Gamers are very open about their behavior; they don’t waste time hiding the fact that they may be using cheat codes. They’re more concerned with doing whatever it takes to reach their goal. They dedicate full resources to their mission and work under intolerable conditions; focusing on task often for hours and hours without breaking for anything beyond essential physical biological needs. Compare this to the secret life of organizations in corporate culture (a phrase borrowed from Dr. Ariane David), where people spend more time and energy hiding their true motivations, avoiding authenticity, and unintentionally misunderstanding almost everyone around them. Lori found herself becoming more and more vocal, saying essentially, “Most will acknowledge that organizations are dysfunctional, but can we please move beyond creating comic strips, embrace our intelligence, and accept responsibility for our collective experience?”

Lori quickly found the Serious Play Conference, scheduled in August 2012, and realized this would be a superb environment for immersion. This sparked the desire to interview the conference presenters, and those interviews are being shared here on the Playful Inquiry site. Whole fields and disciplines are merging in some of the work and research being done; it's fascinating. While the sectors of education, public health and public defense are certainly engaged in the Serious Games and Serious Play dialog, Lori is keenly interested in the conversation on behalf of the collections of individuals that are coming together looking to collaborate on co-creating better communities and a better world. How can we improve connecting talented individuals with the work they are good at and love to do? How can we support the individual and independent people who want to contribute and are looking for a place to plug in and “play” in real life? How do we more effectively allow the innate desire in people to make the world a better place to be realized? How? By realizing why.

"We've seen what the Gaming Guilds are capable of in terms of their ability to form teams based on strengths as well as their completely organic models for shared leadership," says Norma Owen, who, along with Lori Sortino, is holding regular conversations about the applications for the Future of Work and Nurturing the Essence of Community. Lori claims "If we watch what's going on in the gaming community, and ask ourselves what it would take to bring those conditions into the world of work and community, we will accelerate the shift to our collective desired reality. If we can become a talented orchestra with the structure of music composition, the playbook of sheet music, and the discipline of practice, then we can borrow the process and play with games and simulation until we practice ourselves into better ways of working and being."

The momentum behind this inquiry for Lori includes her work with Lyn facilitating Playful Inquiry, and also her work with the Future Working Together Guild, which is a Network of consultants, teachers, coaches, and other professionals who are bringing new models of working together to the world of work, offering conferences that border on simulation and are the bridge to introducing new creative models to existing communities and organizations. In addition, the systems thinking background that Lyn and Lori share provides a structure for studying systems in the process of inquiring about how to change any aspect of our life experience; work, relationships, education, our health, etc.

Lori’s work with facilitating community groups, designing events, and connecting groups and individuals for collaboration has placed her in countless intimate conversations; a sort of un-reportable yet very real research that results in a knowing about what’s deeply important to people; what they’re yearning for and where our collective hope resides. Our experience with any aspect of life is somewhere on a continuum. Playful Inquiry is the invitation to look at our own individual approach, our unique experience, our current challenges; the things we are trying to change or bring into our life, and the level of importance.

What does it mean to be serious? What does it mean to play? Serious Play, in essence, points to an emotional connection with an outcome. It indicates that people are concerned about how things turn out. Why? Because they believe the outcome matters. They have identified a need and have connected to a calling to meet that need somehow, and this creates a focus and an intention. We view focus and intention as serious rather than playful.

The art, though, is noticing when the focus and intention becomes attached to the "how". Playful Inquiry invites us to let go of the how in order to reconnect with the why. Why do gamers spend hours and hours on line playing games? What are the very real needs that get met with this activity? Grab an open mind and take a look: community, recreation, immersion, strategy, problem solving, competency, belonging, accomplishment, autonomy, self-reliance, collaboration, completion, respect, opportunity to lead, celebration, creativity, exploration, and more.

These are real life basic needs that everyone has to some degree and so many of these needs are met in reality via on line gaming and are largely NOT being met in mainstream educational and work environments and cultures. Part of the shift in consciousness being explored by hundreds of groups is acknowledging the power and importance of these basic human needs and harnessing that awareness in the designing and nurturing of community going forward.

To play, or not to play. Observe or participate. It’s your life. If you’re not happy with recent outcomes, do some research for yourself and play it a little differently.

Biographies

Lyn Wiltse (left) and Lori Steed Sortino (right) are passionate about helping individuals and teams ask the right questions to achieve their goals. They will no doubt tell stories about their trip to Brazil and want for you similar experiences in life: The opportunity to immerse yourselves in a different culture, language, and political reality, the ability to recognize the truth of who you are, and the realization of how you can best contribute to the world.

Lyn Wiltse is the founder and president of PDSA Consulting, Inc. She is a graduate of Willamette University and holds a Master’s degree in Educational Policy and Management from the University of Oregon. She has over 25 years of experience facilitating process improvement and interest-based collaborative initiatives. She demonstrates empathetic listening which creates a trusting environment for relationship-building and consideration of new ideas, especially regarding the potential impact each person has on surrounding systems.

Lori Steed Sortino facilitates groups and mentors leaders with an emphasis on individual growth and transformation that supports and encourages our capacity for embodying authenticity. Key themes in her work are transparency, awareness, aligning with core beliefs and core values, and integrating what we do well and what we most love to do. Her diverse background includes corporate management and training, continuous improvement, project management, and solution discovery. She's a starter, innovator, designer and photographer with a focus on celebrating life.

Quotes

Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

Steve Jobs

In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones, we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.

Sam Keen

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.

Tuli Kupferberg

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

Henry Miller

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.

Japanese Proverb

On with the dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto, whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

Mark Twain

Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will insert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safer, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Cecil Beaton

Viola Spolin:

Play is democratic! Anyone can play! Everyone can learn through playing! Play touches and stimulates vitality, awakening the whole person – mind and body, intelligence and creativity, spontaneity and intuition, when all are attentive to the moment.

Intuition bypasses the intellect, the mind, the memory, the known. Using intuition cannot be taught. One must be tripped into it.

There is, clearly, a strong resemblance between improvisation in the theater and jazz. Art Farmer, the jazz flugelhorn player, says, “You can never force what you’re doing. The harder you try, the less happens. At the best time, it’s as if you had been taken over by some other power. This power plays you and you become the instrument.”

The heart of improvisation is transformation.

Creativity is not rearranging; it’s transformation.

The Spolin theater games are artifices against artificiality, structures designed to almost fool spontaneity into being – or perhaps a frame carefully built to keep out interferences in which the player waits. Important in the game is the “ball” – the Focus, a technical problem, sometimes a double technical problem which keeps the mind (a sensoring device) so busy rubbing its stomach and its head in opposite directions, so to speak, that genius (spontaneity), unguarded, happens.” Film Quarterly.

When we are conditioned to look to others before we can respond, a time-lag is established, a space, a gap, between query and response, which allows the approval / disapproval syndrome to show itself. There is no integrity, no honesty in the reaction of someone debating, “Should I or shouldn’t I?”

Play experience can prepare the student for purposefulness in non-play activities, for true play creates the incentive to use one’s best ability.

Neva Boyd

Excitement and enthusiasm are a precondition to breakthrough.

Schiller taught us long ago that we are fully human when we are at play.

Eric Bentley

What Is Playful Inquiry?

8/19/12

An Interview with Ross Smith

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