E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

How Playing Games at Work Will Help You Build Trust for Your Business

Yesterday I put together a blog post where I tried to share some further insights on how if today’s current corporate world would want to survive in the 21st century, it would probably need to start thinking about how to bring back again into the workplace the fun factor. Today’s knowledge workers surely are becoming more and more aware of the full amount of time they spend on “company time“, doing work, even more when the already thin line between work and personal lives is becoming blurrier than ever. To the point where a potential work / life integration may make it disappear altogether. So what happens when you introduce (serious) games at work? Would they work? What would their immediate effect be like? Would they help knowledge workers become more effective at what they do? Yes, of course, they would! It’s a matter of trust!

But not that kind of trust. At least, not initially. In the past, you would probably remember the article I put together under “Gamers – A New Breed of Knowledge Workers in the Making?“. In it I was referencing a recent TED Talk by Jane McGonigal where she takes us through the fascinating and exciting journey of encouraging us all to play even more games in order to solve today’s problems. If you haven’t had a chance to watch through it, I would suggest you take a few minutes off your current tasks and watch it. It will be worth your time. More than anything, because she brings in a very good point that I would want to share over here as well to help make the connection that playing (serious) games at work can only but efficiently help knowledge workers become more productive at what they do.

In that TED Talk Jane comes to point out one of the main key characteristics from incredibly successful gamers: their ability to trust their peers blindly in order to succeed in their mission, whatever that may well be. But in order to trust fully their fellow gamers they need to keep building on that social fabric. They need to keep finding that common ground that would allow them to make that connection work and successfully establish an everlasting and trustworthy relationship. You know, it’s, after all, a matter of survival! Can you imagine playing WoW without trusting your fellow virtual peers, wherever they may well be? Yes, I know! Almost impossible!

That’s why trust, for gamers, is so crucial and critical at the same time! Their own virtual lives depend on that trust, for that matter. So what happens when you bring forward that spirit into the workplace and you help facilitate your knowledge workers to play (serious) games at work with their peers. Would that work? I mean, do you think that playing games like that would help your knowledge workers build lasting, trustworthy relationships that would help them improve the way they collaborate and share knowledge across at the moment? After all, don’t we all like, and perhaps demand, to work with those people who we trust the most? Think about it… What emails do you open up first thing in the morning? The ones from the people who you know very well or those emails from total strangers?

At the heart of the matter, trust is essential for any business activity. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to conduct business the way we do. I mean, can you imagine buying that expensive product from someone who you don’t trust nor know enough about? Can you imagine building your company’s strategy and long term vision on a group of people who you don’t trust much as a stakeholder? Probably not, right? So it looks like playing games may well have a good chance of surviving in the current workplace environment. Not only from what they provide as potential learning experiences (I know of a couple of companies who train their leaders on WOW to see what their leadership and virtual team skills are like!), but also from the huge potential they offer in helping build longer and more trustworthy personal business relationships amongst knowledge workers and their peers. Because, after all, don’t you think they would go the extra mile to help out those folks who they trust and who may be in some serious need for help? I think they would!

More than anything else because I’m seeing it myself as well! Happening with me every single day! As most of you know already by now, a few weeks back I, finally, managed to purchase an iPad, an absolutely stunning device that will surely transform your mobile experience. I get to do plenty of things with it, both on a personal level, as well as part of my work, specially when being away from the Mac. But there is also something that I do on the iPad that I didn’t do as much often as I should have with other devices: playing games.

One of those games, one of my all time favourites, actually, is Words with Friends HD. It’s like Scrabble, except that you play it with friends over the Internet. And I do! I have got my account there (The usual handle, if you are interested) and over the last few weeks I have been playing a number of games with people outside of work, but also with people INSIDE work. And amazingly enough Words with Friends has allowed me to achieve something that I never expected it happening, specially, by playing games. And that is, learn about my colleagues, trust them by knowing more about them, and creating new, stronger and much more meaningful bonds with them because on our interactions by playing and exchanging messages that may have got to do with the game at play or with whatever else (Even work related items!).

Here is the thing that I find mind-blowing and which relates very much to Jane’s TED Talk. Because of those games, of interacting with those colleagues, of getting to know them better, of learning how to trust them, of treasuring our relationships, AND friendships!, I have reached the point that if they would want to have my help, because they may well be in need for it, I’m going to go the extra mile to help them out! Why? Well, who would not want to help out those they trust who may be in need? It’s not even part of our human and social nature, is it? I mean, if we didn’t know well those fellow knowledge workers, we could probably do it and get away with it, but since we do, since we seemed to be emotionally connected I would feel pretty bad if they would need my help and I wouldn’t give it out because I didn’t want to. It just doesn’t happen!

That’s why nurturing that social fabric will become so important in today’s business world, where trust seems to be playing such a critical and paramount role as social networking tools become more and more pervasive within the corporate environment, as well as outside of the firewall. So if you are thinking about increasing the trust levels of your employees, as well as those of your fellow co-workers, you may not need to look very far to realise that bringing in (serious) games is probably all you need. And if you think on the wider context of learning, where we apparently seem to learn plenty more from playing games than not to, it looks like we have got a winner!

Playing (serious) games at work finally makes perfect sense! It will need to be embedded into your company’s DNA. ”Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships” anyone?

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Communities, Connections, Conversations, Enterprise 2.0, Fun, Fun at Work, Getting Things Done, Hippie 2.0, IBM, iPad, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Workers, Leadership, Learning, Life, Personal Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKM, PKS, Productivity, Serious Games, Social Capital, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Trust, Web 2.0, Gamers, Games, Social Fabric, Jane McGonigal, Words With Friends, Scrabble, TED, TED Talk

A World Without Email — Year 3, Weeks 24 to 28 (Email Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die – The Presentation)

It has been a while now since the last progress report I have shared over here around the topic of living “A World Without Email“, that experiment that has been going on for over 2.5 years now, where one day I decided to give up on corporate email altogether and, instead, make heavier use of social networking tools to collaborate and share knowledge with other fellow knowledge workers. So I thought I would drop by today over here and share with you folks an update of how things are going, specially now that there seems to be a growing interest in demonstrating how social software tools are consistently not only helping reduce the amount of emails we receive on a daily basis, but at the same time we are starting to witness the changing role of email itself, transitioning successfully into becoming that messaging / notification system that was designed for over 40 years ago versus remaining that content repository where everything goes. Even your knowledge!

Matt Forcey put together a rather insightful blog post not long ago under the heading “Email Usage Drops 28% in Past 12 Months!” where he quotes a recent study by Nielsen “focused on how Americans spend their time online, [and] unexpectedly found that email usage has dropped by 28% over the last year“. Worth while a read, for sure! Just as much as Ethan Yarbrough‘s Email’s Role in an Enterprise 2.0 Environment: Signal Not Source where he is sharing a terrific story of how his own team is progressively changing the role of email in a business environment, moving away from that content repository format where conversations used to happen, to only serve as a notification and messaging system for content that’s stored elsewhere, in this case, social software tools.

If you remember, and if you have been reading this blog for a while now, that’s exactly what I am trying to advocate with “A World Without Email“. Yes, I do realise and acknowledge that email is not going away any time soon. And that’s probably a good thing! What we are seeing though is how email is being re-purposed into no longer becoming the bottleneck of how work gets done. How it is now part of the flow of conversations happening all over the place and, perhaps, in much better, and suitable, social spaces, so that both information and knowledge flow faster and, as a result of that, knowledge workers become more efficient and effective at what they do, which, I am sure, is what really matters at the end of the day… So how have I been doing over the last few weeks, since my last progress report, on moving away, successfully, those various email driven conversations, you may be wondering, right?

Well, things still are going really good! Actually, better than ever! Here is a snapshot of the last five weeks of incoming emails I have received:

As you would be able to see, except for last week I have been consistently getting less and less email by the week, and, even more exciting, way below the 20 emails per week mark!, which surely is making a good progress from when I started 2.5 years ago. Remember, at the beginning, before starting this experiment, I used to receive 30 to 40 emails per day! And now, 2.5 years later, it’s just 17 emails per week! Yes, indeed, you are reading it right! I’m now averaging 17 emails received per week, while the majority of my online interactions are now happening through social software tools.

So, to me, it is not just a drop of 28% in the past 12 months, but way over 90% of the email I used to get! And, not sure what you would think, but that’s *huge!* Yes! Being able to state how email is no longer the only game in town for me, quite the opposite!, actually, is a good thing. It proves it can be done! It proves I am not the only one who can make it happen. And this is when it gets really exciting! When you see other folks increasingly paying more and more attention as to how they interact with their email Inboxes and how they effectively start looking for ways of reducing such email clutter.

Very exciting, indeed! Even more when you notice it’s folks around you who are starting to ask you how you can help them eliminate most of their incoming emails and instead progress towards a much more receptive adoption of social software tools for business. That’s why I’m pretty jazzed up about seeing a whole bunch of fellow co-workers who are continuing to make efforts to reduce their email workload. To the point where entire teams are figuring out strategies to make it work for them and over the last couple of weeks I have been working with a couple of them where there is plenty of promise ahead! Yay!

But it gets better! Because over the last few weeks as well I’m starting to notice how even customers want to figure out ways on how they themselves can get rid of, or reduce substantially, their incoming email. And they seem to keep finding me out there as they search how it can be done (Double yay for #lawwe), which is really good news, because I have been invited a couple of times already to go and present to them how they themselves could live “A World Without Email“.

One of those presentations was eventually one I did last week in Germany for that one customer where they wanted to know what it was like making the transition from using email as a collaboration tool into that messaging & notification system. Thus they wanted me to speak to them for about one hour on what it would be like. Of course, I couldn’t say “No!” to it, right? I didn’t.

And the end result is this mindmap I have put together under MindMeister (One of my preferred online mindmapping tools available out there!) and which tries to explain that 2.5 year long journey of having given up on corporate email and, instead, use social software tools using four different entry points of discussion:

• Why did you do it?
• How did you do it?
• How has it changed the way we work?
• Tips on reducing email – where do you start?

Now, the great thing about MindMeister is that rather you can go to the Web site to see the mindmap itself, or, instead, you can just go through it in the embedded version attached below, which I think is a really cool way of delivering presentations. In fact, for none of these did I use any kind of slideware and it surely was a new, and quite refreshing!, way of delivering a presentation. I should do it more often! Here it is:

I think at this point in time you may be wondering whether there would also be a recording of this presentation so that you could listen to the flow of going from one node to another and learn some more about what that journey has been like in the last couple of years, right? Well, great then!, because I do have a recording of the presentation, although not the one from last week’s customer visit, but from another customer presentation I did remotely through an emeeting (Using LotusLive) and which I’m pretty excited to be sharing it across with you folks over here, in this blog.

It’s a 45MB download you can grab from here and the recording itself includes both the audio and the video, with a short introduction, so you could be able to follow the flow of the mindmap and how the various pieces fit together. It lasts for a little bit over one hour, so you may want to go and grab a cup of coffee, or tea, sit back, hit PLAY and let the show begin. And if you are looking for a one pager of the mindmap itself, I have also gone ahead and uploaded it into my Slideshare space and can be accessed through here.

Hope you enjoyed it just as much as I did putting together the mindmap, reflecting some more on what that experiment has been, and the couple of customer events I have done in the recent weeks. Somehow, I sense we are just starting to have some good fun!

(Ok, here is the thing though, after going through the various Tips on Reducing Email – Where Do You Start?, will you now be capable of Living A World Without Email …? What do you think?)

Technorati Tags: Change The World, Collaboration, Communities, Connections, Conversations, Education, Enterprise 2.0, Getting Things Done, IBM, Innovation, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Workers, Learning, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Productivity, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Web 2.0, Email, No-email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, World Without Email, Matt Forcey, Ethan Yarbrough, MindMeister, Mindmapping, Mindmaps, Slideshare, Recordings, #lawwe