Prototype

Recently, we threw a party trying to ask the question: “What if work was a party?” Could a bunch of people who are united for a short time produce something more than empty beer bottles? There were some pretty amazing insights, so here’s a look at the rules we set up and some of the observations and principles we can see in the results.

Our Approach:
Create zones for people to work on different parts of a process.
Give them methodologies to get them going.
Reward them for work with our own currency, which buys booze and money.

Get Buy in:
So first thing you do when you come in is sign a big giant contract with everybody else’s name on it, committing yourself to working for the evening under a set of friendly rules. This is important because it helps people understand it’s serious, and that other people are committed as well.

Now, as trainee, you see a map of how this work actually takes place, and a simple 3 step guide to their new “job”, as well as a “company org chart” showing all pieces and parts for details.

Establish Leadership & Contact point for help

Since nobody reads, we made sure that we had a hilarious “Office Manager” to greet you and show you around the different zones, and get you started with a few “The Movement” for a drink.

Incentive’s

Most important to keep everything moving forward, is the fake currency system. People do work and report to the Office Manager, get paid, and get a drink. You gotta keep working to keep drinking, so the cycle is complete. The “Office Cantine” hands the money back over to the Office Manager, and he pays more “employees” as they continue to drink and work!

So what is the actual work? We started the party by prompting a few problems that needed to be solved: Local produce being too expensive and our of reach, Political apathy & confusion, and too many messages bombarding us.

Give clear Actionable Tasks within a Context

We broke down the problem solving process into 5 parts. Research, Analysis, Synthesis, Explaining, and Spreading. Each part of the process was given a zone, or as we call it, a Department somewhere around the party for people to work on that part of the process. The zones are of course clearly labeled, and have their own instructions.

Then we broke down each step into a set of possible actions and put them on game-cards. (The game card set will become available in a future post.) People would pick up a card, do what it says, put their work back on the filing table, and it would be ready to be pushed to the next phase of the process.

Have fun Workin!

Ok, so about 100 people showed up and actually got to work. Can you believe it? Here’s some of them working when there was enough space to take pictures.

So what did we learn, & what can You use?

People will do what everyone else is doing if it looks fun. Here’s a few things that were critical to the success of the party as we could tell.

1. The office manager driving people to the work, and being very deadpan hilarious about the whole thing.
2. A small critical mass of people starting the work, so that as others arrive, the right course of action is clear. People seem to have no problem trying something new if it looks like other people are having a good time with it.
3. Incentives, its the beer and constant peer affirmation through joking about the money, joking about the drinks, and so on, that were able to drive some serious thinking and conversation.
4. Lots of easy starting points, that were challenging and open to interpretation, that have a high focus on individual opinion and values.
5. Good people.

Dont do…

Coffee break. We decided everybody needed a break a few hours in, and never got the momentum back. You can’t stop people from fraternizing once they start doing it on a mass scale, so be prepared to have your event slip from work mode to party mode at some point and just celebrate it rather than fight it.

Thanks to Eleni Alpous for photo-documenting the early parts of the evening, and check out her flickr for more shots. Open up the Google Doc if you’re interested in seeing some of the ideas and solutions in text-only format, of which our lovely intern Lauren painstakingly transcribed for us.

Good luck holding your own work party or collective action event, and just send an email over to us if you need any help or would like more details from ours.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Ideas, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.