IN 1807, THE GRIMM BROTHERS BEGAN COLLECTING FOLK TALES that had, up until that point, never been written down. In 1812, they published a collection of 86 tales under the title Children's and Household Stories. By the seventh edition, the last published in their lifetime, the collection had grown to 211 tales. If not for the work of the brothers Grimm, we might never have heard such stories as Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Frog Prince.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were motivated by a few things: as philologists, they wanted to understand the linguistic elements of the stories and their sources; as historians, they wanted to record the stories as they were told in households; as storytellers, they wanted to entertain, and as Germans (there was no single German state at the time) they were interested in understanding and developing a sense of common identity among German-speaking peoples.
A few years ago, the co-authors of this book embarked on a similar project: our goal was to identify a set of emerging methods and approaches to work that have been germinating since the 1970s and are deeply intertwined with the burgeoning Information Age.
Since the invention of the computer chip, we have been moving from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, where the nature of work is changing. In an industrial society, workers are expected to fit standardized job descriptions and perform their duties according to clear policies, procedures, and prescriptions. Knowledge work is fundamentally different: workers are expected not so much to perform standard roles but to generate creative, innovative results that surprise and delight customers and colleagues. They are expected not only to perform a function but to design new and better products and services, and even to provide dramatic, breakthrough results.
Creativity and invention have long been seen as a "black box." As businesspeople, we don't typically try to understand this process. We fully expect that when designers, inventors, and other creative people go into a room with a goal, they will come out with more or less creative discoveries and results. Although when we watch them at work, we can observe some combination of sketching, animated conversations, messy desks, and drinking, the fundamental nature of what happens in that room remains mostly a mystery.
It's easy to leave creativity to the creative types, and say to yourself, "I'm just not a creative person." The fact is that in a complex, dynamic, competitive knowledge economy, it's no longer acceptable to take this position. If you are a knowledge worker, you must become, to some degree, creative.
That may sound a bit scary, but the fact is that successful creative people tend to employ simple strategies and practices to get where they want to go. It's not so much that they employ a consistent, repeatable process that leads to consistent creative results. It's more like a workshop with a set of tools and strategies for examining things deeply, for exploring new ideas, and for performing experiments and testing hypotheses, to generate new and surprising insights and results.
So my co-authors and I set out, much like the brothers Grimm, to collect the best of these practices wherever we could find them, with a special focus on Silicon Valley, innovative companies, and the information revolution.
Many of these practices emerged from a kind of "Silicon soup"—the deeply interconnected network of Silicon Valley, where ideas and people cross-pollinate like bees in a single massive hive. The practices live in a mostly oral culture, passed along from person to person by word of mouth. For example, a consultant uses an approach with a client, and the client begins to employ that approach internally. Over time, as more people employ a method, it evolves into something quite different, and over time the source of the original idea or approach may be lost. Sometimes methods are written down and sometimes, like folk tales, they exist in many different versions in many places.
We chose to call the book Gamestorming because it seemed to come closer to describing the phenomenon than anything else we could think of. In the front section, we've done our best to provide a sense of the underlying mechanics or architecture of the games we describe, as well as some design principles that may be helpful as you begin to try out the practices for yourself.
It is our hope to create a volume that will be of use to the novice and the experienced practitioner alike. If you're a novice, we hope you'll find a whole new world of ideas for how to approach various challenges in your work. For the experienced practitioner, we hope you'll find some good ideas and a few things that are "new to you."
Our goal with this collection was to find the best of these tools and practices and bring them together into a single volume.
One of our biggest challenges has been establishing the provenance of each game and sourcing it appropriately. At times, it can be very difficult to determine who first designed a tool or where it was first used. We have done our best to determine the source of each game and have made notes where possible, while at the same time doing our best not to distract from the primary content. Often it seemed that we found ourselves looking at a series of Russian dolls—whenever we identified the source of a game, it seemed that it may have been derived from another, earlier source, and it always seemed that there might be a previous claimant lurking in the wings.
When we use the term "based on," the description is based on some kind of written material where we have identified a source. When we use the term "inspired by," we have identified the premise, idea, or core concept, but the game itself was based on oral histories or our own design. If we were unable to identify a source reliably, we have marked the game source as unknown. If you have ideas about the origins of these games, please share them with us.
In fact, we fully expect that as we engage with a larger community around this project, we will add more games, refine the overall collection, and improve our understanding of the rich history of these games in future editions. We have set up an online forum at www.gogamestorm.com, where we'd like to enlist your help. It is our hope that you will contribute games based on your personal knowledge and experience, that you will help us clarify the history of the ideas and practices, and that through your comments you can help us all better understand the complex and fascinating history of games at play in creative work.
—Dave Gray
Saint Louis
June 2010