JP on Gamification, Lipstick and Pigs

And here is another fantastic talk by JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist Salesforce.com (twitter @jobsworth) on the gamification of companies and why this can’t be something superficial like putting lipstick on a pig.

Was looking for a transcript, did not find it, so decided to do it myself. Below a summary of JP’s talk. Hope I captured the essential, and you appreciate my style of curating/highlighting.

Have asked JP to deliver something similar at Innotribe at Sibos 2011 in Toronto when we will discuss Corporate Cultures. Hope he will accept the invitation.

 

http://cdn.livestream.com/embed/readwriteweb?layout=4&clip=pla_07224833-fd06-42c0-b38f-fc03955fb5a9&autoplay=false

Watch live streaming video from readwriteweb at livestream.com

 

Some highlights:

• We have always tried to take a material shift of paradigm by attaching some labels of the past
• The inflection point is about significant changes in work, rather than significant changes in technology
• This is not about putting something superficial on tasks that your really don’t want to do
• Extrinsic rewards have significant risks,
• Referring to the works of Kathy Sierra.

 

Have a look at Kathy Sierra’s latest guest-post on Hugh McLeod’s blog about “Pixie Dust & The Mountain of Mediocrity”

• Find rewards inside yourselves
• “badges” of excellence should be about reaching levels of mastery

 

I have no intent or wish

to put

the lipstick of gamification

on the pig of work

 

• The control paradigms of the past are being challenged
• Some assumptions on why the firm exists: Firms exist primarily in order to reduce transaction costs
• As a result of vertical integration, a number of things used to be possible: easier access to capital,
• Today, most people in this room have a better credit rating that the bank they use
• Global reach and scope
• That with the digital world is again available to everybody in this room
• The firm was designed against the background of the industrial revolution
• Knowledge work is in essence “lumpy”

We have such fear

if at work it is not possible to doing nothing,

we take the gaps at work,

and we fill this

with this 20st century mechanism,

called “meetings”

• If you could fill your days with meetings, then you look busy
• For real work, you have to stay late, as you filled your white-space
• You have used up your time for cognitive surplus that Clay Shirky talks about
• The kind of choices we have today are fundamentally different from the past
• Everything on the assembly line was predicated by the division of labour

Having 1 person doing

the same thing 16,000 times a day

was felt to be acceptable in those days,

to me it feels inhuman

• The most expensive thing was the equipment, the switching cost of equipment was very high and the collateral damage done to workers was trivial
• Now the most expensive asset are the people in this room
• Because we are able to switch, we are capable of doing non-linear work

 

It not about an inability to concentrate,

its about the inability

to hold a tension

on the garbage

that is being spewed at them

• You never have a steady stream of work as a knowledge worker
• The principles of the assembly line are deeply in our ethos, our very being, we get conditioned to that from our schooling system onwards
• An ability to switch away from that is not trivial
• The first thing that you notice about Heroku offices is that there are no desks

–> now think about

what it means

to have

a “desktop” computer

 

• That’s change is possible because choice of the edge devices is with the individuals
• Processes are king only where there are repeatable tasks and the repetition is of value
• Part of the big shift from the static to the flow is we start spending more time dealing with the exceptions rather than with the core flow
• The choices today are far to vast to believe in a linear progression
• Much richer knowledge worker environment in which we must be able to recognize patterns
• Given enough eye-balls, all bugs are shallow
• The value of inspection when something is shared in a large group comes to the foreground
• Wikipedia exists because of cognitive surplus: people are prepared to donate or contribute their time, and their brain, and their knowledge and their effort in order to collaborate for some common good

It strikes me

when I am typing this,

that this is exactly

what I am doing right now:

investing my cognitive surplus

for the common good

• This truth is a valid in enterprises as it is at home
• The use of gamification is to help generation that are already at work, because the generations coming in know this already
• This is the generation born since 1982
• But we live in a hybrid world
• Genres are values
• Hearts, Spades, Clubs and Diamonds
• Hearts are people that like bonding and teamwork
• Spades are people who really like to go to the bottom of things and complete their analysis
• Diamonds are people who after surprises, wealth, aggregation and collection
• Clubs are people who like beating up on others
• It is a metaphor for serious thinking on what motivates people in the book “Driven” by Nitin Nohria (Amazon Affiliates link)

 

The 4 drivers of motivation:

the drive to acquire,

the drive to defend,

the drive to bond,

and the drive to learn

 

• When you are looking for a company to work for, then you have to do this sort of “genre matching”
• The genre of games is in fact the values and ethics of companies
• When you join, they put you through some form of induction, and the induction is what in a gaming context you would call a sandbox, because you want to minimize damage to the person and environment, while you teach people and allow people to learn more effectively on how the firm operates
• The discovery process of “how to”, the discovery of how the game works, in a safe sandbox environment
• We have to think about induction in a deeper way and say “it is a sandbox”

Work has morphed

over the last hundred years,

from hierarchies of products and customers,

to

businesses becoming

networks of capabilities and relationships

 

• There is a lot of work to be done on how to value this, how do you value relationships
• Things like Klout,, influence, reputation, capability to create and maintain a group of followers, a weighted understanding of the value of your network
• A whole new science of beginning to genuinely measuring relationships
• Let’s put all this now in context of team selection, and missions and quests
• Hierarchies existed because the cost of coordination was very high

In today’s world

those coordination costs are trivial,

we are moving from a world

where everybody has to go

through an MBTI or similar

and then somebody

decides about team composition,

to

a world

where the team selection

is carried out

by the individual

 

• The tools have to be in place to discover who you would like to work with and what you would like to work on
• A certificate or badge indicating that that person has the skills and the mastery to perform that task
• Mastery at work gets meaningful
• Most video games don’t allow you to go to level-X unless you have acquires the skills for level X-1
• The reason to keep you at that lower level is to get you to that master level
• Next: a reasonable understanding of where you are at
• The idea of “save and replay” when at work

I always wanted to live

in a zero-blame culture

 

• And work never has been such a zero-blame culture because of these structural weaknesses
• Now I can get to the point where I can say “I have not failed, I have found 10,000 ways that do not work”
• You save that which has not worked, together with the conditions within it did not work, and you can analyze and replay and deeper understand
• Because – when the conditions change – what did not work may work this time
• So never say “we won’t do that, we tried it before and it did not work”
• The value of being able to aggregate any life-stream partially lies in the ability to inspect and make analysis of it
• Conserving seeds so that they do NOT get naturally selected out
• What did not work today may work in different conditions tomorrow
• Somebody smart did not throw away that code of that stupid idea
• Gamification of the enterprise is not a fad
• It is not about providing extrinsic rewards for crap work
• If work is crap, let’s fix that problem

 

From hierarchical,

linear,

top-down work

to

non-linear,

networked,

personally selected teams,

tasks

and outcomes

 

• We are nearly there, but this change is going to require use to learn a lot of new things,
• And what games can teach us is a smarter way of being able to extract those learning and bring them into the enterprise
• Thank you