Experimentation

Experimentation with ideas allows you to think ahead towards the future rather than battling business as usual

One of the most beneficial aspects of playing games at work is the opportunity to fail in a safe environment; to test ideas, plans and policies to the point of destruction before exposing them to the real world and real risk of hopes and expectations diverging from reality. Through an experience in which some of your team are actively trying to frustrate and disrupt, experiments allow organisations to get past assumptions and the human tendency towards groupthink.

WHat are the benefits of using a game designed for your business?

Explore Ideas

Experiment with Reality

Change Perspective

Find Problems

Experimentation is a crucial element in innovation. Coming up with new and creative solutions is a good start, but an innovative culture requires those ideas to be run out and tested quickly. Some problems and solutions can be run out, modelled and tested using algorithms in computer simulations, but when it comes to human behaviours and interactions there is no substitute for running through a scenario with real people, both taking part and making observations on what they see.

In the very early stages of innovation, games can be used as a part of “design exploration”, playing through quick and dirty scenarios to really understand the problem set and prototype solutions.

One of the key challenges to innovation is making it an inclusive process. If an organisation tries to be innovative without including the full range of diverse perspectives and expertise from all departments and specialisms, it is not really trying. Games offer an ideal way to get the maximum range of people involved and thinking about a problem and about solutions, and offer leaders an opportunity to demonstrate their genuine commitment to building an innovative culture and to empower their teams to come up with ideas and engage.

What type of experimentation games do Evocatus organise?

At Evocatus, we make a real effort to be agile and to maintain a focus on what we are good at – designing, planning and executing games and exercises. We can apply this skill set to a very broad range of topics and requirements; we’ve covered issues as diverse as cyber security and early life nutrition, and are always up for broadening our experience with a new topic!

We are comfortable working at a range of scales, from very simple tabletop exercises through to live events ranging over wide areas of real estate and with support from roleplayers, film content, simulated media feeds and even simulated casualties. Bigger games cost more, but can cater for more players and can explore issues in greater depth and complexity and with better facilities to help both organisation and individuals learn from the experience. Depending on the ideas an organisation would like to test, we can create a game that will allow for experimentation within a scenario. We can include an element of red teaming to deliberately frustrate and disrupt players, pushing them to think around problems to find solutions.

The Evocatus bespoke Experimentation game building service

Everything we deliver at Evocatus is bespoke. While we have tools and methods that we fall back on again and again, the first thing we do is to really understand what it is the customer wants to achieve. In the case of experimentation and exploration of new ideas we can create a game with an end goal in mind and build in different hurdles that the team might need to overcome to achieve the desired outcome.