This post was written by Erik van Mechelen and takes the lens of Octalysis, a human-focused design framework built by Yu-kai Chou.
From first principles
Management is meant to facilitate the best use of people and their skills/talents toward productivity in pursuit of an organization’s objectives. This is what management is (in my words).
Management fits into a larger structural system, which could be flat or hierarchical or hybrid. (Big misconception: Holacracy = Flat…it doesn’t.)
I previously wrote about the Holacracy experiment at Zappos led by Tony Hsieh, which took about 2.5 years to get up and running for a 1,000-employee company. As I learn more about Holacracy itself and do more thinking about leadership and management and productivity, I can’t help thinking about why some systems work for some companies and not for others.
What distinguishes a framework that works in one instance but not another?
In this article, I’ll take a think through some possibilities in the context of Zappos’s continued experiment with Holacracy and Medium’s decision to abort it.
This post was written by contributing writer Erik van Mechelen based on the Octalysis framework designed by Yu-kai Chou.
Entering the Audible Scaffolding phase
Getting beyond Discovery and Onboarding is impressive. But products and experiences really need to shine during the Scaffolding phase if they want to get Players to the Endgame.
Scaffolding starts once a player has learned the basic tools and rules to play the game and has achieved the “First Major Win-State.”
Regarding the scaffolding phase, one thing to note is that more often than not, it requires the exact same (or very similar) actions on a regular/daily basis, and the Gamification designer must answer the question, “why would my users come back over and over again for the same actions?”
Once you understand the intrinsic and extrinsic trigger/action/reward loops, you can deliver them via the experience.
Keep note that usually extrinsic rewards are better at attracting people to participate in the first place (Discovery and Onboarding), but towards the Scaffolding and EndGame, you want to transition to intrinsic motivation as much as possible.
Sometimes, I wonder if scarcity can change its face and blink into the White Hat region. I want to be considered the best fantasy writer in the decade from 2020 to 2030. There can only be one best writer, so this position is scarce indeed. However, in Octalysis, this is positioned more so under Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment than in scarcity. However, like my mom used to tell me when girlfriends would dump me: “Sometimes it’s what you can’t have that drives you, Erik.” This dual feeling of knowing it’s really unlikely to happen but believing I can get there, to me, blends scarcity with accomplishment.
What if someone knows scarcity is a thing and doesn’t like that you use it? What response might they have?
This article was written by contributing writer Erik van Mechelen.
Using White Hat and Intrinsic Core Drives in Company Culture
In November 1998 Tony Hsieh sold his company to Microsoft because it had a losing culture. What seemed like a success actually wasn’t one in his view.
What started as an exciting sleeping-under-your-desk startup in 1996 quickly grew to a 100-person company with a culture that had taken a turn for the worse. He even dreaded waking up in the morning and wondered if his employees thought the same.
Bad culture was Hsieh’s explanation for selling.
“We hired all the right people with the right skills and experience, but they weren’t culture fits.”
Tony Hsieh took what he learned at LinkExchange and approached Zappos differently. While other companies talk about work-life balance, Tony Hsieh focuses much more on work-life integration.
“With Zappos we wanted to make sure we didn’t make that same mistake again…so pretty much from the beginning paid attention to company culture.”
We know from Octalysis that the White Hat Core Drives are important for long-term engagement in work settings. Traditional hierarchical structures tend to layer bureaucracy and slow decision-making, removing creativity and meaningful choices from employees who might otherwise make great contributions.
In these settings, situations can develop where employees are motivated by loss and avoidance, scarcity, and money.
Smaller companies usually have the upper hand, more naturally fulfilling epic meaning, creativity and empowerment, and collaboration.
Hsieh understood the difficulties of larger companies, as evidence by a few of Zappos’s core values, which included:
embrace and drive change
adventurous, creative, and open-minded
do more with less
Tony Hsieh Gets Rid of Managers
This was the headline in 2013 when Hsieh rolled out his flat management structure. But Holocracy is a little different than removing management from a command and control system. Managers were out, but there were still lead links and circles and structure.
When Hsieh started to explain the how behind the system, people were forced to look more closely at how Holacracy, the patented model he’s using, actually works.
It turns out Holacracy is a little different than removing management from a command and control system.
Background
This is from Holocracy.org (the system Tony Hsieh is using).
Holacracy is a complete, packaged system for self-management in organizations. Holacracy replaces the traditional management hierarchy with a new peer-to-peer “operating system” that increases transparency, accountability, and organizational agility.
This is easy to understand. Holocracy provides an alternative to command and control systems. Lead links still ensure progress within ‘circles’, essentially productivity units.
Through a transparent rule set and a tested meeting process, Holacracy allows businesses to distribute authority, empowering all employees to take a leadership role and make meaningful decisions.
A lot of people got excited about it, even Ev Williams of Twitter, who tried it with his newer company, Medium, in the early days.
“In Holacracy, one of the principles is to make the implicit explicit — tons of it is about creating clarity: who is in charge of what, who is taking what kind of decision — and there is also a system for defining that, and changing that, so it’s very flexible at the same time.”
Tony is confident that despite growing pains the model has enough benefits to play out favorably in the long run. If cities get more efficient as population levels increase, why don’t companies?
Perhaps this quote best explains Tony’s confidence:
“There is a quote that is often attributed to Darwin (whether Darwin actually said it is up for debate, but I believe the general principle to be true): ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.’ I believe the same is true for companies, and especially for entrepreneurs.”
Tony wants the type of people that are culture fits, and culture fits within Holocracy, to be with Zappos for the long term.
How Zappos is Using Holocracy (and a Timeline)
In 2013, Tony Hsieh decided to implement Holacracy with a pilot program.
Then he decided to implement across the organization, but the company missed its goal of integration by Jan 2015.
Hsieh later regretted not moving more quickly with the decision to roll this out to the entire company. He ended up making employees ‘the Offer’ to either stay or take a severance package in late 2015. About 18% of employees (260 people) took the deal, while 82% stayed. Hsieh mentioned he thought more would leave.
This decision was interesting. In Hsieh’s view, the transition to Holacracy had already taken too long. This ultimatum was a CD8 technique. Some employees did end up taking the severance package and leaving.
A Mirror of Hsieh’s Personal Leadership Style
For me, Hsieh’s decision to implement the Holacracy experiment for the whole company is in line with his motivations to try new things (and echoes his city planning and development ambitions for the northern section of Las Vegas).
It also seems to mimic his own preferred management and leadership style, which is hands-off and empowering of his team.
What’s interesting is how against the grain the empowerment and authority structures seem.
On one hand, the model seems to empower employees and let them develop outside of their conventional skill sets. (A lot of the people who left would have lost their titles or worked on something completely different to their work at the time.)
On the other hand, while the model suggests added flexibility and agility, there are still inherent structures through the Lead Links and Circle system. It will be interesting to see if Zappos’s quirkiness and fun (from its 10 core values) meshes with the new system, even after three years.
A quick look at the Zappos culture site demonstrates the rigor preparing for such a model as Holacracy takes. It’s something different, and it just might be a powerful way to empower employees in the long term.
Whether it succeeds or fails will make critics reconsider or add fuel to the arguments against the model.
What models do you prefer in management and company structure? What is your startup using? I’ll see you in the comments.
This article was written by Contributing Writer Erik van Mechelen with content provided by Yu-kai Chou.
Synergetic Motivation
This article is for experienced designers already familiar with Beginner Octalysis and some Intermediate Octalysis who are looking to up their game on designing experiences. We are making the jump from identifying the 8 Core Drives of motivation to using them to build experiences.
‘Synergy’ always makes me think of business school applications (I’ve helped a few friends edit theirs). But it is a real thing.
Google defines synergy like this:
The interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.
For Octalysis, synergetic motivation simply means any time multiple motivations–any of the 8 Core Drives–are at work at the same time.
As you build your own projects and products, or dissect what isn’t working on the same, we will want to pay attention to potential for synergies and drawbacks of them, like situations where our Player might have multiple motivations but we’re only catering to one of them in the design and thus failing to reach the Desired Action.
As always, we’ll use the 8 Core Drives in this analysis.
This article was written by Contributing Writer Erik van Mechelen
Onboarding gamification
We recently asked you why you were part of the Octalysis Explorers Facebook group or joined the Kickstarter for Octalysis Prime. The largest segment of responses fell into this category:
“I want to implement gamification in my workplace.”
Whether you’re a leader, team manager, experience designer, product developer, or hustler might change to what extent your proposals and ability to onboard are successful. But don’t let your position in your organization hinder you. And don’t assume that if you’re the CEO everyone will immediately jump on the train.
From here, instead of prescribing the details of how to proceed, I’ve made a list of actions and situations to avoid. Proceed with a balance of enthusiasm and strategy!
7 things to avoid when implementing gamification at work
Starting without buy-in from your boss
Forgetting about motivation (the core Drives)
Not understanding player types
Going too fast
Embarking without allies
Not being ready for different speed/adoption by players (super users, etc)
Not being committed (when you start something, show up every day)
1. Starting without buy-in from your boss
If you’re an employee, your boss or manager will be a key ally, from motivation to operational requirements through to funding. Make sure he or she is on your side! (Here’s my previous article, Part 1: Getting Buy-in from your Boss).
The Strategy Dashboard can be a very valuable conversation starters. Tools like Sketch can help you create mockups once you reach that stage (and if you have a software-focused gamification design).
Also, if you haven’t, check out more about the Discovery phase, since implementation requires your organization already be aware of the power of gamification. And YOU are going to help them discover this exciting news (if you haven’t already).
2. Forgetting about motivation (the 8 Core Drives)
Gamification is so much more than badges, points, and leaderboards. You need to have a baseline understanding of all of the 8 Core Drives (even if you don’t always remember the numbers for them).
You can, however, use the Octalysis tool as consistent visual artifacts to give your design backbone.
If I was proposing 20% at my office, I might begin with the following exercise, envision a shared place to share projects with a community facilitator sharing news and giving feedback on interesting projects.
3. Not understanding player types
What are the people in your organization motivated by? Do these motivations vary from person to person? What about from season to season? Are certain times of the year more or less stressful?
These questions can help you understand how to design and implement your changes.
For several years, my brother Mark has contemplated leaving work as a risk manager and crude analyst for an energy commodities trading firm to follow his passion of creating and producing music. When asked why he won’t, he cites losing progress toward a prestigious and lucrative role as an energy commodities trader, among other things. His Desired Action (to live a life making music) is fueled by Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, but that Core Drive is first dampened and then repeatedly defeated by its Anti Core Drive. In this case, the Anti Core Drive is Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment.
Knowing these personal stories can help you adapt your design even after you’ve implemented (or learned from customer surveys or experiments with early designs).
4. Going too fast and flying blind
Make your onboarding actions easy and looped to give people confidence as they get into the system.
If you’re not using metrics to monitor early users, you’re flying blind. Define at least one primary metric and collect feedback, even if that feedback must by design be qualitative (hopefully you have some way of a quantitative feedback).
5. Embarking without allies
If I was implementing 20% Time at my organization and using a forum-based sharing and collaboration space, I would definitely give someone the role of Community Facilitator. This person will be involved in making sure everyone has a great time, stays motivated, and ultimately adds value to each others’ experience. (If your employees don’t add value during 20% Time, then your company won’t reach its Win States).
Remember, early adopters or users of your gamification implementation can help mobilize and help others. You probably already know who those people will be. Ally and align with them.
6. Not being ready for varying speeds
If you’re not ready for growth you might miss an opportunity to make your gamification implementation a great success.
Think: “This may not happen, but if it does we will do this and this and we’ll be ready for the growth.”
Once again, your allies can be called to your aid if your gamification implementation goes better than expected early on.
7. Not being committed
Remember why you wanted to do this and why your boss was bought in. Be consistent with what you say you will do and deliver.
If you don’t know what your boss is motivated by, you need to do some detective work. If you have regular meetings with your boss, you can simply ask: “What’s most important to you in the next 6 months, 12 months, 18 months?” Or “What are you most concerned about in regard to the business in the next 12 months?” These are just starting points that could get a conversation going.
Yu-kai’s note: through the influence of many of the books mentioned in this article and through my own 20+ year of research, I decided to publish a Gamification Book that is now the de facto education material about Gamification in classrooms around the world.
With non-fiction, I usually read quickly (scan), apply what I’ve learned, then come back later as needed to refresh. I prefer to learn by doing. This is the case for my education in gamification, too (I built an iPhone app instead of reading too much about it.)
For me, books are just a great way to see how others have done it and test against your own approach.
I borrowed my brother’s copy of The Lord of the Rings from his bookshelf. I was nine years old. Ever since, reading has been my favorite way to consume content. With a book in hand or on screen, I can read as fast or as slow as I want, mark the pages, save comments for later, and return to the book when needed. (I still think reading is one of the biggest level-ups any parent can give their child. And I believe that many of us can improve our reading ability and critical thinking well into adulthood.)
An introduction to games and gaming
Like a lot of you, I came up playing a lot of video games. Solo, with friends, against friends. It was our education and our entertainment. I remember sneaking into my mom and dad’s bedroom to play MathBlaster. They were only mildly annoyed I’d woken them up. I was learning, after all.
I also wrote about games. Here’s some notes from my journal when I was 10.
Later, my first real article to hit 50,000 reads was about Super Smash Brothers 64. I was 19 when I wrote that, but had written and discussed and analyzed games ever since I started playing them.
Later, I naturally came to gamification and design through a love of understanding and mastering systems. Even though I was in the “real world” now, I still drew lessons from developing strategies to battle my brothers in Starcraft or in terraforming Venus in SimEarth (tip, use a lot of ice meteors).
Starting 5
If I had to pick a starting five for games, behavior, and psychology, I’d pick the following.
Note: These are books I’ve read. There could be objectively better ones out there. One thing I love about reading is discovering great new texts and stories, so share in the comments what you’ve read that was amazing or helpful.
1. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
John von Neumann was a beast of an intellect. So is this book. Co-authored with Oskar Morgenstern, it provides the gammut of intellectual thought and theory about games and economic behavior available when they wrote it.
2. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals
Zimmerman and Salen do a fine (and playful) job of first defining, then exploring the building blocks of game design. I’d class it with Jesse Schell’s book on the same topic.
I had a chance to meet Katie Salen in person and she was pleased to know I’d delved into the work. She was giving a talk at Target in 2013 about cultural transitions. She offered some decent ideas about workplace gamification and designing environments that motivated the players to move to win states. Sound familiar?
One interesting point here was that this text was written in 2003. At that time, there wasn’t a theoretical framework for games within design. I thought Katie and Eric did a fine job (688 pages worth) of detailing this work.
I recommend this book to people who want a readable yet textbook-esque book to start their journey of understanding games and game design.
Particularly interesting is the following:
Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like “play,” “design,” and “interactivity.” They look at games through a series of eighteen “game design schemas,” or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance.
Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is equal parts a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.
3. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World–Jane McGonigal
I met Jane McGonigal in 2012 at a digital marketing conference in Minneapolis, MN, USA. She was very personable and asked me about my iPhone game. A good quick conversation before she went on stage for her keynote ahead of Guy Kawasaki. With a name like McGonigal, for a moment she almost made me feel like Harry entering wizard school (it definitely motivated me to complete the iPhone project).
Her book approaches a discussion of games from the premise that games can do good for the world. Especially if we design them appropriately.
I got the sense that McGonigal’s title, “Reality is Broken” was more of a headline hook than an actual representation of the book’s content. I instead found it to be a treatise for how games and play can improve individual health all the way to changing the way people interact and improve the world.
(As a side note, I also read McGonigal’s 500-page master’s thesis, entitled ‘Ubiquitious Play and Performance at the Turn of the 21st Century.)
Jane won’t give you too many direct examples to apply to your business unless you’re paying attention and applying the concepts to your everyday life.
4. The Art of Game Design–Jesse Schell
Jesse Schell’s book, by contrast to McGonigal’s, goes into depth about the totality of the experience. I liken his book to Norman’s Design of Everyday Things in that it describes the designer as a communicator through the game to the user. But also–and this is important for Octalysis apprentices–he hones in on the Experience of the game. In other words, he understands how experience motivates actions, mechanics, and decision-making within the game space.
5. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
When I slip into writing and two hours have gone by like two seconds, I know I’ve probably done some good work. What’s more, the experience of immersion, though fleeting in memory, is satisfying to accomplish. It also, it seems to me, to help my long-term productivity.
Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi wrote about unleashing creativity and investigated the satisfying feeling of complete immersion in an activity.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s illuminated “optimal experience”, a state of experience or consciousness he called Flow.
During flow, we typically experience a deep sense of enjoyment, creativity, and an involvement above normal experience. The idea is to reliably create the environment that will induce these states and remain in them for extended periods.
While his ideas have been controversial under scientific study, my own experience has suggested at minimum there is a level of focus and productivity that can be reached when distractions are removed.
Csikszentmihalyi discusses how to order the information entering our consciousness and we can discover true happiness and improve the quality of our lives.
This goes a little far in my view. True happiness is as of yet not measurable beyond self report, but I do know my general quality of life appreciates when I accomplish tasks, especially creative ones.
I recommend this book for anyone serious about understanding the creation of optimal experience in work and play.
Future reading
Over the years, I’ve done a lot of reading, from blogs to books and everything in between.
If you’d like to see me review a specific book, I will do that. Please leave a recommendation in the comments! I love doing mini-book clubs with friends and community members. 🙂
