11 business games to help develop your imagination and find new ideas

Innovation is critical to business success, as economic conditions and customer desires change all the time. In order to keep up with the competition, you need to constantly come up with new things. This is exactly what business games will help you, which will make you look at the goals of the company and the processes inside from an unexpected angle.

Original exercises suggested by Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller in the book “Imagination machine». The experience of these authors can be trusted: Reeves is the managing director of a large consulting company, and Fuller is a successful entrepreneur. Their work was published in Russian by the Prosveshchenie publishing house. With his permission, Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from the book.

---

1. "What do you think I expect to hear from you?"

If you want to finally consider the issue from a new angle, this game is for you. At the next important meeting, ask your team, “You know what I expect from you? Don't suggest it. Suggest something else. "

In other words, "Tell me something that I don't expect to hear and that will give us food for thought." Such a question will lead the conversation in a new scenario and, probably, will trigger the mechanism of the imagination.

2. "Bad customer"

Bad customer Is the worst anomaly in business and a major source of fear and anxiety. How often does your company learn from these clients? You can play the following game to inspire you with them.

Try to meet or connect with those customers who were dissatisfied with your products or services, or those who are totally unhappy with your business model. You can meet them in person, you can listen to their reviews on the hotline. Try to understand their needs and motivations. Ask yourself, "What should our business be like to meet the needs of these customers?"

In revising its business strategy, insurance and consulting firm Willis Towers Watson (WTW) decided to take a closer look at the insurance services with the greatest growth potential. Previously, the firm received a mostly positive response after conducting a survey on customer satisfaction with its current services.

Then it was decided to reformulate the question: “What, in principle, do you have economic problems and would you contact us with them? " The answers were no longer so pleasant, but they were useful. more. WTW discovered the need for new products and services for which there were no adequate solutions on the market at that time.

3. "Wrong meeting"

The Wrong Meeting game is a great way to come up with new ideas as you work on a project. We are talking about meetings at which you are not expected, or with which you are connected only indirectly. If you are a part of the project management, skip the next meeting of the project office and go to briefing technical team, participate in a marketing brainstorming session, or drop by a purchasing team.

As you inevitably encounter new mental models, you will see these chance encounters trigger your own imaginative machinery.

4. "Business upside down"

Consider your current business pattern and formulate the key assumptions that underlie it. For example, a car manufacturer's business model is based on three theses:

1. People want to buy cars.
2. Cars are manufactured in factories.
3. The main product of the company is cars and so on.

Now change these assumptions - for example, turn them upside down or radically transform them. Prepare a new business case for your company based on these inverted assumptions.

For example, you can assume that customers will exclusively rent cars (that is, the company will offer a service, and not a product) or the cars themselves or parts for them will be manufactured using 3D-printing and assembled according to the decentralized scheme assembly.

The point is, based on new assumptions, to more intensively generate new proposals and develop the most promising of them. And even if nothing of value comes to your mind at first, this “unfreezing” of the current business model will make it easier to further explore the prospects.

An idea that seems absurd at first glance may indeed turn out to be unviable, or it can only appear as such, because it is perceived through the prism of a familiar picture of the world. Open new, valuable, but seemingly difficult to implement possibilities will not work if you do not first consider alternative hypotheses.

This game solves two problems. First, be clear about the principles and assumptions on which your current business model is based. Secondly, to develop ideas for the “flipped company”, allowing to find new ways of development.

5. "We have a bigger problem."

First, determine in which particular area of ​​the consumer's life you want to take a place. For example, a company Amazon trying to "hack shopping". This online platform has identified for itself one area of ​​life for its clients with all the difficulties inherent in this area and is now trying to solve them.

For your company, if you are targeting the consumer segment, such an area could be describe as "transportation", "real estate", "organization", "emotional growth" or "recreation and entertainment". If the firm is focused on the corporate segment, you can distinguish "relationship management with counterparties", "servicing physical assets" or "ensuring employee engagement."

Second, forget about what you are currently developing and offering, and think about everything that relates to this area of ​​your client's life. Make a list of all the problems, troubles, difficulties, hopes, wishes and risks that they may have.

For example, if you are a bank manager, then your list should include all possible problems and needs that usually associated with money, such as “not being able to plan for finances”, “anxiety about lack of money”, “learning children financial literacy"," The attitude towards money as an end in itself (and the subsequent realization of the incorrectness of such an attitude) "," lack of understanding of what to save for in the first place. "

Third, imagine how you will solve these problems, even if no one has solved them before. For example, as a real estate agency, you may claim to be dealing with "housing issues." This implies that you are not only helping people buy and sell real estate.

Your services also include interior design, construction, financing, travel. You can come up with new services: help clients decide when it's time to move to a new location, or help them figure out what they really want at home, taking into account the current situation and life position.

Listen to every customer complaint or request and use it as a starting point for further transformation.

As a result of this game, the very mental model of your company should change: you will understand which area of ​​life you treat your customers, and define a list of the most promising ideas for creating new products and services.

6. "News Headlines"

The essence of this game is monomania or obsession with a new imaginary mental model. Pick an idea you've been thinking about recently. Then go to your favorite news site and try to see your idea in each news note on the home page. Ask yourself:

• How can you link this note? (Feel free to even the most absurd options.)
• What details of this news draw attention if you focus on my idea while reading?
• After this collision of idea with reality, see if you have new thoughts or ways to build, deepen, or change your hypothetical mental model. To explore the full potential of your idea in a variety of contexts, keep playing for a week.

7. "One hundred dollars"

Pick one idea that you would like to confront reality. Then come up with:

• What would you do if you had 100k? dollars and three months.
• What would you do if you had $ 10k? dollars and a month.
• What would you do if you had $ 100 and one week.

How easy, inexpensive, and possibly playful it is to try out your idea in the real world with the resources you currently have.

Now exchange ideas with colleagues: Listen to their thoughts and share yours. With regard to their suggestions, try to answer the same questions, discuss the recommendations that you gave each other. If you feel like it’s interesting, bring it to life by the end of the day.

8. "Chaos of the past"

Retiring leaders of successful companies sometimes, in their farewell speeches, either jokingly or seriously, notice that today they would not be hired by the same company. Usually the meaning of these words is self-irony: the company is already so developed that the old approaches are outdated. However, is it possible to understand this joke in the sense that the company no longer hires those specialists who are able to move it forward and make it grow?

The meaning of the game "Chaos of the Past" is to remember the state of chaos that was characteristic of your organization at the stage of its inception, and resurrect the approach that you used when the business itself was still hypothetical - that is, before you turned your now familiar ideas into reality.

Dig into the early history of your firm and its founders and see how the most important mental model of your business came to be and how it evolved. Focus on the mental aspect: what beliefs people had at the time and how the imagination generated a new idea, although many had completely different beliefs. Dates and individual facts are not important - you need to recreate the history of events from the point of view of people in as much detail as possible.

Once you understand what attitude to new beginnings prevailed in the company during that period, act out a conversation in which one the person will be a skeptical realist, and the other will play the role of the founder, sharing with him his creative mental model and ideas. Determine the types of blocks formed in the process and objections.

Then try to do the same with the main project of the future that you have today. Make note of which mental and social blocks are hindering the development of new ideas.

The value of this game is in remembering how your business started, and in borrowing something from the original approach and transferring it to your current leadership. This will open up a new chapter in the history of the company.

9. "Ideal company"

Imagine a business like yours, but one in which the client has nothing to complain about: he is offered an impeccable assortment, he does not bear the cost of finding the right product or service, he perfectly understands that you are to him offer; your product does not need to be brought to mind, but its quality is high; no delays in deliveries are foreseen, and any information is communicated in a timely manner and in full.

Now consider where your business is not following this ideal scenario. Consider the cost of ongoing troubleshooting. Then ask yourself what customers are most complaining about and what mistakes can be corrected or made less frequent.

If you have developed a scenario for expanding your business and implementing a new creative idea, consider it in the context of how it will help eliminate existing problems. And if the answer is “no way,” think about a scenario that will help reduce their number.

Of course, no business is devoid of costs, however, in order to have a viable and attractive offer, true leaders will certainly work to eliminate the root causes of problems that older players often take as due.

It is difficult to find the root cause, since the existing business processes have been developed for decades, and for many they look logical and uncontested. Your clientsPerhaps, at the moment, they are quite satisfied with your proposal, and competitors are faced with similar difficulties, and nevertheless.

For example, let's imagine the ideal insurance company. Comparing your current venture to this ideal, you might ask: is it necessary to insure so many risks? Do treaties have to be so confusing and obscure? Does the client have to work so hard to understand the risk portfolio? Should the adjustment of the insurance portfolio be so difficult, and is it really necessary to work through intermediaries that charge a significant commission for providing advice?

Finally, does it really take that long to resolve insurance claims? When you're writing a script to transform your company, try to fix these kinds of problems. Typically, this process allows you not only to find new solutions, but also to get rid of the complexity in existing scenarios.

10. "Codification"

Coming up and writing a script that describes a fundamentally new idea or concept so that others can imagine it is not an easy task. Build with details to try it out in miniature Lego some object, such as a castle. When you're done, don't show it to anyone. Instead, describe in words the object itself and how it can be recreated, that is, write a script of actions. The task of the rest is to build this thing from the same LEGO parts, based only on your instructions.

As you go to the next level, you can compete using different scripting approaches. Let one team describe each action in detail, while the other dwell on only the most basic principles. The third team can focus on describing the purpose or target outcome. The goal can also be changed: from accurate reproduction to reduced assembly time, from the most interesting model to the most interesting in terms of assembly, and so on.

There are lessons to be learned from how different scripting approaches and behavioral biases help or hinder turning an idea into reality. You can then apply what you have learned to rewrite part or all of your organization's scenario in the light of a promising new idea.

11. "Destroy your business"

You can maintain your imagination and stimulate rethinking of your company by imagining your organization collapsing as new players seek to disrupt your business.

Pick a line of business for your business and figure out how to disrupt it. List the major players who are obviously trying to exploit vulnerabilities in your own business model. For example, a real estate agency might designate several small startupswho are trying to rethink the idea of ​​buying and selling a home. Then narrow your search by grouping them into similar tactics. For example, some startups are betting on removing the real estate agent from the equation, others are offering some value-added services, and so on.

Now imagine that all these ideas and solutions worked. Attention: the point is not to assess the likelihood of success, but to understand what will happen and what the consequences will be if they work. In the case of real estate, you should pay attention to the revolutionary Redfin app, which allows you not to resort to the services of agents.

Imagine a future in which a small online platform Redfin becomes a multi-billion dollar company, all homes are bought and sold exclusively through its app. Analyze how the "underminer" managed to get around you? What strategic steps have they taken? What skills have they developed or acquired? How people's preferences have changed and technologies? And what flaws in your own business model have played against you?

In the 1990s, General Electric codified this approach by forming a dedicated DestroyYourBusiness.com saboteur team for each of its business units. Their only task wasDyb.com // Economist. 1999. September 16 coming up with potential internet solutions that could, in theory, completely revolutionize an existing business. An exercise like this allows you to identify the most vulnerable areas of your company and analyze the possible actions and success factors of “disrupters”. Once you've identified them, consider if any of these can help you rethink your own business.

The Imagination Machine is not only a selection of interesting business games, but also a detailed analysis of how the human imagination works. With the help of the book, you will learn how to control and develop this ability, which is useful both at work and at home.

Buy a book