Warning: This is a pitch.
This post is designed to intrigue you into considering a novel learning experience. Be warned: you have entered the cone of persuasion.
When I first began hearing about gamification, frankly, I thought translating the features that motivate players in video games into non-game settings (e.g., the practice of law) was a bit silly. Images of Candy Crush, Farmville, and my teenagers’ Portal and Assassin’s Creed games flashed through my mind. Then I remembered Tetris and got nostalgic; but, I digress. Naively I thought gamification was all about playing games.
Like law, gamification appeared to be based on competitive principles, but seemed to be all about awarding points and badges. My reaction was dismissive: surely no lawyer is going to be seriously motivated by earning points and badges, right?
Familiarity Breeds Respect
That’s what I thought until I actually decided to experience gamification in action. In the process of implementing gamification for one of our Knowledge Management (KM) applications at my firm, Fish & Richardson, and later through working with gamification experts while planning the upcoming ILTA Imagine Gaming the Lawyers session (This is a non-subliminal prompt: KM track, Tuesday 8/19/2014 at 11:00, #ILTA14, #KMPG5), I learned that gamification not only is a lot more nuanced and complex, but also can be a powerful tool for motivating change.
Let’s Just Go with the Status Quo
Most people are at best uncomfortable with any kind of change – personal, social, operational, or vocational. Many deeply fear or actively hate it. As creatures of habit, we value stability and security more than novelty and innovation. We prefer the devil we know to the one we don’t. Accordingly, the changes sweeping through the legal profession have left many lawyers ashen-faced, defensive, and very resistant to novel approaches and technologies, let alone major paradigm shifts. Is there a way to loosen this rigidity?
Fun? Seriously?
Imagine if, instead of dreading and resisting any new approach, people could be motivated to try it. What if they could be the leader in their community, the first to change, the one who contributes most, the one recognized for their knowledge that others look up to and admire?
This is what gamification can bring to the table, even a table surrounded by lawyers. By learning about and implementing game mechanics concepts, you really can motivate people to try that new application you just spent months building or installing. As a bonus, they might even become more engaged in their work and actually have fun while trying the new application.
Gamification 101
To gamify any activity, you first need to decide on the object of the “game.” Is your goal to get people to switch from using system A to system B? Is it to get users to contribute content? Or, is it to get people to consistently enter their time daily?
Whatever your goal, once you know the desired outcome you can start thinking about the behaviors you want to reward. Yes, you can reward the desired behaviors with points. And, yes, maybe a certain number of points earns a badge. But, the key is in the social component – others seeing the badge just earned.
If you think these competitive incentives sound trivial, just watch them in action. Maybe the person sitting next door to you noticed that you just earned the “Awesome” badge, and is now trying to do whatever you did because they want to prove that they are more awesome than you. Before you know it, you might have a whole group of people competing to be the most awesome. Imagine the change you could generate – the resistance you could beat — if you could make this happen. You might just end up the most awesome person in your organization.
Advanced Gamification
Let’s be clear: gamification is much more than points and badges. It focuses on engaging people on an emotional level to motivate them. This is quite different from merely playing games, which is primarily for entertainment. It also goes beyond rewards programs (all those points and badges) that engage people on a transactional level primarily to compensate them (remember the old coffee shop punch cards?). For more on this, see Why Gamification’s Not a Game.
Gamification is already used in education to engage and motivate students to learn (see Fantasy Geopolitics) and by corporations to engage their employees or customers. For example, after building a gamified experience for their customers, New Belgium Brews saw an 8x increase in new user registrations in just one day and a 5x growth in daily logins. Imagine if KM could show these types of metrics.
The bottom line: If our job as Knowledge Managers is to engage people to participate in our programs and help them to adjust to change, gamification can be a powerful tool indeed.
Here’s the Pitch, Folks
Want to learn some practical techniques for becoming awesome? Want to get a handle on the ABCs of Gamification? Come to our ILTA Imagine Conference session on Tuesday after the keynote, Gaming the Lawyers: Driving Adoption, Contribution, and Change. You will learn a lot more about gamification from our panel of experts:
Scott Reid, Director of KM Innovation at Littler Mendelson and former CKO at the US Army JAG Corps. Scott will share his experience motivating JAG lawyers to participate in their enterprise social network through gamification.
Pam Woldow, Partner and General Counsel of global legal consulting firm Edge International. Pam has worked with law firm and law department clients who use gamification in their business and has written compelling posts on the benefits of gamification in the legal industry.
Raul Taveras, Manager of IT Application Projects at Fish & Richardson. Raul is an avid Foursquare gamer and self-professed hashtag king. He will share his experience in gamifying KM and training efforts at Fish.
Rubsun Ho, partner and co-founder of Cognition LLP. Rubsun will explain how Cognition motivates lawyers to provide outstanding client value and service with a gamification process that earns them redeemable points.