• imagine it’s your job to facilitate a meeting. the stakes are to solve global warming. you only have a day. you have the people in the room. what do you do?
• options
• the boredom of business as usual
• agenda 9am 10am 11am
• slides being projected
• boring as hell
• people are checking their email
• the smart people get an important phone call and have to leave
• chaos of creativity
• post it notes
• everyone talks over each other
• it’s wild and crazy
• they feel kinda good, they generated a million ideas
• but at the end of the day you have a million post it notes, and that’s it.
• nothingness <——> chaos
• how would you like to be the meeting jedi?
• everything starts with energy
• it’s true of people, cars, and meetings
• camp fire vs forest fire
• one is out of control, and one is in control
• one will kill you, and one will keep you warm
• require a spark + fuel to keep going
• a campfire has a structure you design in.
• business at usual = no fire, chaos meeting = forest fire
• energy will follow the path of least resistance
• traffic will flow through streets
• water through channels
• ball down hill
• you can structure where the energy goes in a meeting
• What kind of result do you want?
• new ideas, agreement, tough decisions, problem-solving, unraveling complexity
• Monopoly
• board world
• pieces: players
• objects: properties, houses
• making flow: rules, flow around board
• breaking flow: dice, chance
• Gamestorming
• Players
• objects: sticky notes, index cards
• whiteboard = world
• making flow: rules, flow
• breaking flow: shuffling
• Tools on the Table
• Firestarting
• Sketching
• Improvisation
• Meaningful
• Firestarting
• you should never go into a meeting with no idea of how to ignite conversation
• strategically have a provocative question that gets people engaged and dictates where the conversation will go
• fill in the blank: I want my appliances to start telling me ________________
• Sketching
• is visual language
• is just as important or more important than text based language
• having a meeting with just text is like having the meeting with one hand tied behind your back
• you don’t have to be divinci 
• Improvisation
• it creates possibilities
• if you are in a meeting, and are only comfortable with not being surprised, you’ll only get predictable stuff
• being comfortable with the possibility of something going terrible wrong
• Meaningful space
• we think an idea is a lightning bolt or isolated incident
• it’s a bunch of neurons firing in sync at the same time in a new way
• you need a space which is going to stimulate neurons to fire
• an ordinary space is not going to generate new neuron patterns
• always try something new, keep it fresh
• MEME MACHINE game
• treat the room as a giant computer
• lots of parallel processing
• AWESOMENESS app
• Phase 1:
• pick your favorite software app and your favorite physical product
• think of a new business idea using attributes of both
• on a card, create a “pitch slide” to sell your idea
• Phase 2:
• Move awesome ideas to the front
• move lame ideas to the back
• Move serious ideas to the left
• move funny ideas to the right
• ideas migrate: you have to sell people on the direction you think it should go.
• it’s a series of pair-wise trades
• Bringing it back to work
• 3 personalities you are likely to meet
• the ghost
• we never follow through
• we get lots of good ideas, and we never do anything with it.
• good ideas die on the vine
• solution
• write things down. create artifacts.
• the ghost thrives in the dark.
• a challenge with distributed teams is that we have no tangible artifacts. 
• paper is great technology.
• put the paper on the wall.
• the bad apple
• not while i’m here
• the person who shows up late, question the process, shits on someone’s idea, and then leaves early
• challenge the notion of this prototype
• “creative bad apple”: i’m too creative for this
• “busy bad apple”: i am too busy for this, i have to attend 3 or 4 meetings at the same time.
• solution
• if you have to engage with them, give them something to do. give them a job, a role in the meeting.
• you are going to be the scribe
• plenty of good techniques (p.61 in the book) to insure people don’t dominate the meeting
• make it voluntary: if they don’t want to be there, give them the option to leave.
• the kid
• i wanna play. play fair!
• you’re going to have people who just want to share their point of view.
• solutions
• kids are showing up to this playground, and your job is to ensure they can play well together.
• Try this:
• 4-5 people
• small room, no desks. compress the space – physically intimate
• provocative question
• open it and close it – 90 minutes
• The book: 
• Gamestorming a playbook for innovators, rulebreakers, and changemakers
• O’Reilly book
• Want to try it out with a friendly community?
• VizThink has local communities all over the world, and they are doing gamestorming.