In short: we used Octalysis to gamify the three-day Annual Management Meeting of Vinda, with 13 senior executives who had no gamification experience. Secret codes, an app with anonymous voting and a darts finale led one participant to call it the best meeting they had ever attended.
Imagine a client asks you to gamify the Annual Management Meeting of a large Chinese multinational.
The target group:
- 13 older executives (55 to 65 years old)
- IT exposure: minimal
- Previous gamification exposure: none
- Opinion about games: “for children and losers”
We have all heard that gamification is not for older people and not for the boardroom. Can it even be done?
Yes, it can. Here is how.
The challenge: gamifying the Vinda Annual Management Meeting
Our client was the Director of Marketing at Vinda Ltd, a large-scale tissue paper maker. She attended a workshop with Yu-kai Chou and got excited about Octalysis. She wanted to bring Octalysis into her company, but she needed help making sure top management felt the same way. So we started by gamifying the Annual Management Meeting (AMM) together.
Annual meetings (AMMs or AGMs) are rarely exciting. They are often used to tick off decisions already taken in the run-up to the meeting, and most attendees only care about getting the budget items for their own business channel approved. Supply Chain pays attention during Supply Chain, and Marketing only during Marketing. These meetings often end up as dull affairs with little interaction and few joint outcomes.
Could we get people genuinely interested in the AMM, and get participants to share and be creative across business channels? That is where The Octalysis Group came in.
The set-up: designing around the 4 phases of the user experience
An experience mostly consists of 4 phases: Discovery, Onboarding, Scaffolding and Endgame. The AMM was a short event (three days), so the Endgame is less pronounced and we focused on the first three phases.
Because of the age and IT exposure of the group, we kept the IT components to a minimum. All of the executives owned a smartphone, though, so we knew an app would not be a step too far.
Discovery: pulling the executives in with secret codes
Annual meetings are prepared well in advance, so participants know what is coming and there is little curiosity pushing them to act (Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity). This year we kept the meeting place and the program completely secret.
Participants were sent secret codes that unlocked the location and the agenda. To enter the code they had to download an app, which was the vehicle for the experience. So we used Core Drive 7 to drive the desired action: download and open the app.
Once in the app, users received email messages asking them to leave the questions and issues they wanted discussed. It was made clear that the Chairwoman of the company was already in the app and had left issues of her own to be debated. This triggered a strong fear of missing out (Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance), and all participants listed many topics they wanted to discuss. Here we used Black Hat design to motivate action.
Onboarding: a cooking club and a first game mechanic
We grouped the executives into teams with colleagues from different business channels. Their first assignment was to cook dinner together the night before the AMM in a cooking club. For many of the managers it was the first real chance to cooperate with colleagues from other areas. At this stage people are new to the experience, so social interaction should be light and non-confrontational. Hence the cooking setting.
The next day the AMM opened and the group objectives were laid out. We used a game mechanic called Message in a Bottle from the SelfDRVN app. Bottles float in a sea on the screen, and when you tap one you can read the message inside and leave a vote.
The goal was for each group to post and reply to as many questions and ideas as possible. Each group of three only had three posts per session, so they had to discuss and decide which topics to post and which to answer.
Scaffolding: levels, anonymous voting and darts
The strategizing was highly motivating (Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback) and led to a lot of communication across business units about each other’s interests.
All posts were anonymous, and only the most upvoted ideas were published on a big board with the submitter’s name. This removed the fear of posting a “bad” idea (we deliberately reduced Core Drive 8 pressure here) while still rewarding great ideas in public.
The group with the most upvoted ideas would level up fastest (there were 4 levels). At the end of the meeting each group received darts according to the level it had reached: 6 darts for Level 4, and only 1 for Level 1. The winner of the AMM was the group with the highest total score after throwing all its darts at a dartboard.
In theory, even a Level 2 group could still win with a few very good throws. Deciding who in the group would throw created even more social interaction, as did the dart game itself.
The reward was also designed to generate Core Drive 5 (Social Influence & Relatedness) motivation. The winning group won a dinner out, to which they had to invite all AMM attendees. The losers could share in the win-state of the winners. Only the winners got the champagne, though.
Our approach was designed to make sure that:
- people stay focused until the end of the meeting
- they communicate far more, across business channels
- they start to care about each other’s issues
- the AMM is seen as a fun moment where new ideas and cooperation are born
The result: was the meeting gamification successful?
This is what participants told us:
“I have attended many MLT meetings in my life and this is the best meeting I have ever attended.”
“It was so engaging and memorable.”
“It was very disruptive and it opened our minds.”
More meeting and employee gamification ideas
The same design thinking applies to many other settings. See our articles on corporate gamification and employee engagement and gamification for more engaging corporate training, or visit our employee engagement page.
If you want us to create short- and long-term engagement in your company, contact us.
