Do you remember how to play?

Jakob Wolman

Workshop: 90 minutes

Summary

The days when bearded men solved problems and came up with new innovations by thinking really hard individually have passed. The best creative ideas come from teams of people working together. This type of cross-functional collaboration requires new skills among team members and leaders. How do we catch the ideas and spark the fire of creativity? By doing as we have always done: playing and having fun.

In this session I will tell you about how I put games to work in our organisation. We use collaboration games for everything from coming up with new concepts together with customers to inspecting and adapting processes. In this session I will show pictures and tell stories from gamestorming workshops. You will see real examples of how games have brought people together and helped teams define a path to reaching their goals.

I will also give you the tools you need to get started with your own play sessions. I will explain how I put together workshops using the 7P’s (Purpose, People, Process, Product, Prep, Practical, Pitfalls). I will give you examples of core games that can be used in any context. Hopefully I will wake up the child in you that wants nothing more than starting to play.

Download Slides – Handout version

Short Bio

Jakob Wolman (prev Klamra) is an agile advocate and gamestorming facilitator, wishing to inspire others and to boost team productivity. He developed his passion for agile and collaboration games while working as a Java consultant, realizing that his team could be more successful if they just changed the way they worked and interacted. Since then Jakob has been supporting and leading teams with the aim to perform small miracles. He is a highly appreciated consultant with several successful teams and a few fast failures on his resumé. Jakob was on the program committee for Øredev 2012. He currently works as a team leader and occasional coder at Jayway. Jakob is a passionate long distance runner who doesn’t believe in conventional running shoes.