The now-established IABC Rápido session format (5 min presentations) promotes three important things:

• storytelling
• concision – the art and craft of being concise
• design thinking

Design thinking is about applying problem-solving skills, typically associated with the design process to other areas, particularly in a business environment. Probably the least well-known term in communications circles and despite a relatively short and somewhat checkered existence, is now taking off by virtue of being hitched to another buzz-wagon: gamification.

David Kelley, founder of the innovations company IDEO, began to use the term design thinking in the early 1990s to describe what IDEO did. In 2008, current IDEO CEO Tim Brown made the case for design thinking in a well-received Harvard Business Review blog post, and its influence seems to have been growing since then.

Now it seems to have found a soul-mate in the shape of gamification, the much-touted introduction of game elements into business processes from recruitment and onboarding to sales training and various flavours of employee engagement programmes.

Gamification guru, Mario Herger wrote recently about How Gamification Design Thinking Helps Your Business – without creating an even more hideous neologism like ‘gamidesignifying’ (sorry) and in doing so sets out some simple steps that you might use as a way of framing an issue or challenge you’re facing at work.

After all, the core idea of gamification is simply to provide a different and more engaging take on an existing business process or need.

Herger says “I believe that design thinking has much to offer a business world in which most management ideas and best practices are freely available to be copied and exploited. Leaders now look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage; they would do well to incorporate design thinking into all phases of the process”.

Herger’s article which suggest as a process to 1) define the problem, 2) observe the users and 3) iterate on ideas for responses
strikes me as a useful heuristic that can easily be applied in any number of situations. He advises a player-centric approach to constantly remind us that  design must satisfy the play instinct in the target audience, otherwise they just won’t join in.

He acknowledges that in a business context this kind of language might sound trivial but the reality it’s quite the opposite.

Only by focusing seriously on our innate desire for play, and its manifestation as an organized activity in games, can we hope to capture the kind of engagement that will see your HR or sales process become the next Angry Birds.

Whether you then go on to build a multi-level, immersive game experience that drives columnar geo-spatial data warehousing – well, that’s up to you.

Ezri Carlebach is a consultant, writer and lecturer with a background in senior communication roles for public, private and nonprofit organizations. He consults on communication and stakeholder engagement and writes for The Guardian, simply-communicate.com, and other publications. He is a visiting lecturer of contemporary issues in public relations practice at the University of Greenwich, and has recently led sessions at communication conferences in Slovenia, Canada, Italy and the U.K.

Carlebach is a director at large for the IABC Europe, Middle East and North Africa region, and is a Fellow of both the Institute of Internal Communication and the Royal Society of Arts.

Twitter: @ezriel
Blog: www.ezricarlebach.com

See Ezri in action during the European Training Foundation, Communication Week initiative.