In one of my work experience, I understood that the mission of my team – in connection with international markets – was clearly misunderstood in the company I was working in. There were even very few awareness of the existence of my team while our goals needed a transversal collaboration along the entire company. Ok, let’s play! With some colleagues, we decided to organize a game.

preparing the game

We started to think about organizing the game and diffuse it in the internal social media of the company. The idea was a trading game: let’s imagine a simple situation typical of what the company may encounter, with an exposition to a commodity market. The goal would be to take the best decision which could protect the value of the portfolio. We would provide the necessary elements to play, and provide an adequate set of rules, with a nice video to explain, an excel sheet, and provide real market data on a regular basis to make it as close as possible of a real situation.

Each decision would be recorded in the shared group made in the internal social media. This could generate fun and dynamic conversations, links between people from the entire organization, and obviously interest for our activities, which was the initial purpose of the initiative!

After some reunions, the game was ready and we had to launch it.

Lesson learned from a failure

We did it in the internal social media, with a list of people interesting, to get some feedbacks of the playability. We actively posted to entertain the groups. Some players started to post their trades…

But it never started really, some weeks afters, we observed very few activities from the players, unless our efforts to entertain.

Game is a nice way to create link between people from different entities.

Managing a community is an entire job which need time: actively posting, providing interesting contents…

But it may rise interesting questions, shedding light on the roles and responsabilities of some part of the organization.

The context may not be propice. It could not be the right moment.