Eleven exercises for more efficient, productive, and creative meetings.
In 2010 we published Gamestorming, a human-centered design toolkit that’s kind of like a recipe book for teams who want to increase their productive and creative outputs. The book has been a huge hit, selling over 100,000 copies and translated into more than a dozen languages.
There are 87 exercises in the book (and more on the website), but there are a few that we use all the time. I think of these as “core games” for better meeting design. I’m listing them here in a typical order: Setting goals, generating and sorting ideas, expanding and exploring them, making decisions, and getting feedback.
Set goals.
Plan your meeting with the 7 P’s Framework.
Identify stakeholders and clarify goals with WHODO.
Build empathy for stakeholders with the Empathy Map.
Generate and sort ideas.
Generate ideas with Post-Up.
Sort ideas into high-level categories by Affinity-Mapping them.
Create meaningful categories and information architecture with a Card Sort.
