Playcamp Panama: Different and the Same

Since we launched the Playcamp initative early last year, we've seen Playcamps spread around the globe, with events in London, Paris, Vienna, Santiago, Panama City and San Francisco, with more on the horizon in Madrid, Seville, Vienna (again!) and the Bay Area. It was our hope to start a global series of events, where the local organizers could customize the event to best suit their communities, while providing a forum for exploring new and innovative ways to collaborate. And I must say, we've been thrilled and delighted to see the variety of topics, speakers and formats that the local organizing committees and participants have brought to each event. 

The team at ValueInnova has organized several Playcamps in the Americas, and CEO Masa Maeda recently shared the format and results from the most recent Playcamp in Panama City, Panama. Playcamp organizers take note:

Event Structure
Playcamp Panama was co-located with Lean Agile Panama, and had more than 60 participants from 25 companies, and was held on the first day of the conference. 

Rather than focusing on keynotes and open space sessions, the Panama Playcamp organizers decided to create an agenda heavily focused on participation, dividing the day into 3 sections:

1. Hands-On Game Exploration: Strategic, Tactical & Operational Games
2. Review of the most popular serious games and collaboration frameworks from the previous Playcamp
3. Civic Engagement: Games for tacking a local governmental issue.​

Hands-On Collaboration

"The first half day was organized in three tracks: strategic games, tactical games and operational games." reports ValueInnova CEO Masa Maeda. "And each track consisted of four games -- a combination of Innovation Games and other collaboration frameworks such as Empathy Map. After a welcome address and brief introduction to serious games, including a primer on the purpose of each collaborative framework featured, the participants selected which track they wanted to focus on for the morning."

Collaboration Game Design Spotlight

Our community is replete with talented "game/collaboration framework" designers, including Playcamp Panama's organizer Masa Maeda. Here's a fe of Masa's custom game creations played at Playcamp Panama: 

• Moi Map: The collaboration framework produces an actionable snapshot of a person's contributions and inability to contribute. It's very useful for helping individuals progress and identify patterns of impediments in a team or organization
• Lighthouse: This frameworks reveals the state of a team, project or organization in a categorized way that allows participants to indentify patterns and generate strategy to improve. It can also be used to map quality and risk.
• Tug of War. A Lean game to visualize what affects and what benefits a value chain has at each of its stages.
• Authors Game. Allows you to understand the economic and psychological benefits of organizing teams to work based on value instead of function.
• K2. A game for rapid requirements generation.

As a practical note to other Playcamp organizers, the Playcamp Panama team posted a schedule on the wall, outlining the tracks and game names in sequence, with spaces for individuals to post their names. The number of slots for names were determined by the number of people per table, in this case, eight. All games were played on two or three tables, and the team dedicated 45 minutes per game and 5 minutess for transitions (that is, people moving to their next game table and along with staff cleaning up). 

​"Each participant got a chance to play 4 of the total 12 games," Masa continues, "and the selection was highly effective. In less than five minutes we had 60 participants decide which games they wanted to play." 

Popular Games & Civic Engagement​

"In the afternoon," Masa reported,  "we repeated some of the most popular games we identified at the previous playcamp and through our work with customers. This gave more people the opportunity to play them."

The team also included two very powerful instructional games:

1. The Authors Game, which is Masa Maeda's most recently designed collaboration framework. It's designed to show players the economic and psychological benefits of working by value instead of by function.
   
2. The Multitasking Name Game, designed by Henrick Knieberg.

Finally, Playcamp Panama closed In the spirit of the Every Voice Engaged Foundation. All the attendees gathered to play two games to discover the pros and cons of a new government project called Ciclovias in Panama, related to cyclist-driver shared lanes and dedicated areas for cyclists on weekends. "This project has been the subject of much controversy," Masa reports. " And we think we can help in the decision making."