Serious Play

Journal of Engineering Education, Apr 2005 by Rover, Diane T

Serious Play Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate By Michael Schrage Harvard Business School Press, Boston MA, 2000, 244 pages, ISBN 0-87584-814-1

On a recent interdisciplinary project involving about five faculty and twice as many students, both graduate and undergraduate, there was a sluggish startup phase during which it was difficult to exchange ideas. We would sit in a comfortable meeting space, discuss specific tasks, and draw a few diagrams on the whiteboard. But it was clear that group members from different areas of the project were not really connecting with one another. We began to make significant progress only after we developed our first prototype of the system. That prototype provided a means to explore the many dimensions of the project in a tangible way, bringing forward and bridging the wide-ranging expertise and perspectives within the group. We experienced first-hand the value of interactive visual or physical resources, such as a simulation or prototype, to enable interdisciplinary collaboration. Needless to say, when I came across Michael Schrage's book, Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate, it piqued my interest. It also led to related literature on learning, and the conclusion that serious play is not only about serious work, but also about serious learning.

What is serious play? Schrage describes it as follows:

"It is the essence of innovation....It means innovation requires improvisation. It means innovation isn't about rigorously following 'the rules of the game,' but about rigorously challenging and revising them. It means innovation is less the product of how innovators think than a by-product of how they behave. Serious play is about innovative behavior. When talented musicians improvise, you don't look inside their minds; you listen to what they play. When talented innovators innovate, you don't listen to the specs they quote. You look at the models they've created." [p. 1]

Modeling, prototyping, and simulation provide the tools, technologies, toys, and games for serious play. The book notes the similarities in the meanings of models, simulations, and prototypes, and uses the word prototype to convey how organizations use media to manage their innovation processes. An interesting contrast is made between observing the prototype itself versus observing its environment, that is, all the conversations, collaborations, debates, etc. that happen as the prototype develops into a product or process. The book emphasizes that it's not what the toys can do that is important, but rather how people and organizations behave while using them. As Schrage states, the tools for serious play are a "medium for gaining insight into the ethology of innovation." Prototypes change the nature of communication and collaboration. Changing the prototyping medium changes how people behave.

Something that we may take for granted today, the software spreadsheet, is an example of a serious play toy that transformed the financial business world. Schrage explains that the spreadsheet model serves as a "shared space" where ideas are created and debated. He comments on the concept of shared space in earlier work, pointing out that it takes shared space to create shared understanding, and that the results depend on the nature of the shared space [1]. For example, collaboration around the shared space of a whiteboard is different than around the shared space of a software prototype. The LEGO Group has created a shared space around LEGO bricks with LEGO Serious Play, an experiential process to enhance business performance using 3-D metaphors (www.seriousplay.com). Schrage uses a number of real-world examples from companies such as Boeing, Sony, and others to illustrate serious play practices.

The book consists of nine chapters, divided into three parts, followed by a user's guide:

Part I: Getting Real

1. The New Economics of Innovation

2. A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge

Part II: Model Behavior

3. Our Models, Ourselves

4. Productive Waste

5. Preparing for Surprise

6. Perils of Pathological Prototyping

Part III: Stimulating Innovation

7. Stimulating Interventions

8. Measuring Prototyping Paybacks

9. Going Meta: Evolution as a Business Practice

User's Guide

The User's Guide is a quick reference of the ten rules of serious play.

1. Ask, Who benefits?

2. Decide what the main paybacks should be and measure them. Rigorously.

3. Fail early and often.

4. Manage a diversified prototype portfolio.

5. Commit to a migration path. Honor that commitment.

6. A prototype should be an invitation to play.

7. Create markets around the prototypes.

8. Encourage role playing.

9. Determine the points of diminishing returns.

10. Record and review relentlessly and rigorously.

As rule 6 indicates, prototypes should draw participants into innovative games of "what-if?" In reference to rule 8, role playing, participants in the innovation process assume different roles. Schrage writes, "As cross-functional, cross-disciplinary teams become a dominant medium for managing innovation, prototypes and simulations can promote awareness between collaborators.... The goal should not be cross-functional fluency but cross-functional awareness." (p. 211) The last rule is specific to learning, in which participants and organizations review their process to assess what worked and what didn't.