An emergent property!

Over the past few weeks - through my various meanderings on Twitter and LinkedIn - something that I have been seeking has emerged! 

A topic that I came across on a Tweet by one of my GURU's (that's Grandwizz Useful Research Unit) was taken and re-entered into one of the company 'thought leadership' groups on LinkedIn. Nothing Earth shattering in that process, however, it has been fascinating seeing how this topic has sparked interest among a 'self-organising' group of people. No need to send emails around the various operating units around the globe to canvas for support - usually resulting in getting someone nominated who is not fully engaged - the Diamond Dogs have formed. 

Comprising, me plus;

• Ben
• Cam
• Eric
• Ian
• Marcelo
• Paul
• Tom - who set the challenge!

Many thanks to all - you know who you are - for the input so far by-the-way.

The topic we are thinking through is around the use of 'gamification' to help support and grow staff development -  which sounds pretty boring when you say it like that. Essentially the use of game and token incentives - like collecting game point to show your 'power' to others. Or possibly hotel points in my case given the number of scheme's I seem to be enrolled in! Given that this was completely new to me a couple of weeks ago I am now seeing these sorts of things everywhere, LinkedIn 'profile % complete', 'endorsements', Twitter followers' etc..

The challenge has resulted from Tom's use of FourSquare (I'd not used that either - just to let you know how far behind the drag curve I am on these things) where 'badges' can be gained for visiting certain places. Badge collection resulting in gamification of travel. I'm still struggling with FS if truth be told but I can understand the concept of incentives for visiting places - still feels a bit boy scout-ish to me though. The concept of using badges for training and development purposes is well established - few sites listed below for those interested - and widely used in the education field. Our challenge was could we not apply these concepts to our internal activities? Seems like a very reasonable task - how to use non-monetary public recognition awards within the business to help raise staff engagement. 

Some of the key requirements - given the topics of previous posts I had to put a few of these down ;)

1. must be easy for staff to 'sign-up' to the scheme
2. must be accessible to all staff - no inner-circles
3. must be recognised across the business
4. must be easy to implement
5. must be publicly viewable
6. must be linked to tangible benefits (e.g. enhanced peer recognition)
7. must be cheap (if not free)!

See how we get on in future post's ;)  .....



Badge collection site links

A few links if you want to explore further:

http://gamifyforthewin.com/2012/10/big-news-the-book-is-out/

http://duolingo.com/

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/

http://www.newsgator.com/products/social-sites/spotlight.aspx

http://www.openbadges.org/en-US/ which provides some basic open-source tools to accomplish intrinsic badge reward set-ups.