• Title: Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers
• Author: Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo
• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media; 1 edition (July 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596804172
• ISBN-13: 978-0596804176

If you’re often running meetings, trying to get people to help make decisions, think out-of-the-box, consider options, then this is a book for you.

The premise of the book is pretty simple: when we play games we let loose and can come up with more/better ideas and options.  If you’ve run a brainstorming session you know this, as brainstorming is a kind of game. There are three parts to a well organized session:

• Opening
• Exploring
• Closing

Sometimes there are multiple occurrences of each depending on the number of things to work on and the way the team works together.

The bulk of this book is a set of meeting ‘games,’ for example “Context Map.” Each ‘game’ has:

• Object of play
• Number of players
• How to Play
• Strategy

There are too many games to count easily.

I’m glad I have this book – the next time I need to get people together to work on strategy I’ll grab this book and consider ways to get everyone involved.

Related articles

• Gamestorming, How To Turn Your Next Meeting into a Creative Problem-Solving Getup (chrisdrinkut.wordpress.com)