If you want your colleagues to be more enthusiastic about innovation, Playing Lean might be the perfect tool. It’s difficult to make people read the same books as you, or take the same courses. Invite them to a Playing Lean game night instead, and watch your colleagues get worked up about innovation all by themselves.
Besides using the office after hours, and maybe a budget for pizzas, you don’t even have to ask anyone for approval. To make it even easier, we’re providing you with the simple recipe for setting up a game night with Playing Lean.
- Get the game at www.playinglean.com. We ship worldwide. You’ll have your copy within a week or two, so you can start planning the rest immediately.
- Set a date and invite your colleagues. We guess that you can’t make game night mandatory, so make sure to pitch it in a good way. Playing Lean really brings out the competitive spirit in the players, so you can shape your invite as a challenge. Who is the best innovator at the office? Make sure they understand that there’s also a learning outcome to appeal to their curiosity as well.
We recommend having up to 12 players per game. That’s 4 teams with 3 players. Playing Lean is most fun when played in teams.
- Learn the rules. With the invite sent, you should start learning the rules for yourself. Read through the rulebook and have a look at our gameplay video. If you want to be sure, it’s easy to play a few turns of the game by yourself. The rules are not complex, you’ll get the hang of it fast.
A pro tip is to share the gameplay video with the players as well. Even If just a few of them watch it, you’ll have some extra helpers to explain the rules.
- Set up the venue. Arrive some time before. If you haven’t done it already, make sure to set aside some extra time for punching out the cardboard pieces. Arrange all the pieces according to the rulebook and get properly set up before the other players arrive.
- Play with your colleagues! You have two options. The first is to be the game facilitator. You don’t play yourself, but you read the experiment cards out loud and make sure everything progresses nicely. The second option is to play along with your colleagues. That’s the most fun, of course! Just make sure to enforce some basic discipline, especially to require that all their experiment cards are read out loud. That way, everyone gets to share the learning.
- Iterate and improve. That’s it. Congratulate the winner, pack up and go home. When you get back to work, join the buzz and discuss how you can use the lessons learnt and make your workplace more innovative.
If you want to improve your game facilitation as well, you can consider joining the Playing Lean Facilitator Training online. You will get both the theory and practice you need to set up a great Playing Lean workshop to teach your clients or students about Lean Startup and innovation.