collaboration

Leaderboards: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

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Leaderboard Leaderboards The Good The Bad and The Ugly

Leaderboards have been a staple of gaming and gamification for as long as both have existed. From Space Invaders, to baseball, to your gamified CRM system – all have had leaderboards in there somewhere.

The reasoning goes “if you are the top, you feel special and if you are at the bottom, you don’t want to be there so are motivated to improve”.

It sounds great, doesn’t it? Instant engagement. DO well, feel special. Do badly, be motivated to do better. In some cases, this is can be the case. In sports, it is a way of knowing where a team is in the league and how many points they need to improve by. In space invaders it was a way to create a more social or even personal challenge in the game, helping to create that “one more go” feeling. If I have one more go, I know I can be better than AAA or myself.

Both of those examples have one thing in common – competition.

People often cite the reason to use leaderboards in gamification is the example of sales teams. Sales teams have used leaderboards for decades to create a level of competition. In an environment where every sale goes towards you being financially better off, this does make some sense. You need to know how many sales you need to beat the guy who is going to get the bonus if you don’t! There is no need for collaboration, ever man for himself is the rule.

It’s a Long Way Down

But not all environments are competitive. Take, for example, a company that wants to increase its social media usage. They could create a leaderboard that tracks the activity of each individual. This is then shown to all employees each week, highlighting those doing best against those doing not so well. If that is all you have, what happens is that you create a “them and us” split. Those who are doing well and those who are not.

If people in the “are not” category are particularly competitive – this may spur them on. However, that will not be the majority in most companies. In reality, many of those who are at the bottom or outside of the top ten will just disengage. The thought of “how can I ever achieve that, I may as well just give up” will overrule any competitive nature. This is especially true if the rules are too opaque.

Some of this can be alleviated by using the leaderboard as a way for people to learn. If everyone understands the rules, then everyone has an equal chance of winning. If you utilise the top players as instructors for the rest, then you can also drive people. It is no longer us and them, it is a collaboration to bring everyone up – but there can still only be one winner.

It’s Lonely at the Top

But what if you are at the top? Surely that must be awesome. Well… not so much.

I have spent a lot of time at the top of the Gamification Gurus Power 100 leaderboard. At firs, it was awesome. It was a great social tool as it got me industry and peer recognition. People could find me if they needed questions answering about a topic I loved. More importantly, I could see who was in the industry and was able to expand my network. But things started to turn when I realised just how hard it is to stay at the top and the pressure there is to maintain it. What was a fun background activity, became an ever-present need to stay at the top. I knew most of the rules, so knew what I had to do to maintain my position. Even when the rules changed, I discovered what had happened and could adjust accordingly. However, this came at a price. I was creating a huge quantity of social activity, but the quality was dropping constantly. One of the key metrics became SlideShare views and downloads. I didn’t use SlideShare that much, so had to start. I uploaded anything I had in powerpoint – just to get views. I tweeted random things that related to gamification just to get the hashtag usage up.

More insidiously, I would not share other experts content on twitter – for fear of them getting points instead of me!

It was no longer fun. If I dropped out of the top 5, I began to panic. This was made worse by the fact that the industry award from Gamification World Congress had always been linked to the Guru Leaderboard. You had to be in a good spot for a long period of time to get nominated – before the voting even began.

As of today, I currently sit around 8th place on the board. I decided to take a break. I had won the award for Industry Contribution. It was no longer linked to the leaderboard, so taking the pressure off myself seemed sensible.

One of the big problems with this type of leaderboard, is how long it has been running. Years. Not weeks or months, but years. That may not be a bad thing when it comes to league tables, but when it creates one on one competition where collaboration might be better, it is destructive.

Tips if you are Using a Leaderboard

If you are going to use leaderboards, here are a few tips

  • Make the rules as transparent as possible. People have to know how to win and be able to learn what went right or wrong.
  • Don’t run it for any longer than you need.
  • Don’t use one if you are looking for collaboration.
  • Decide on a sensible length of time between updates. it doesn’t need to be real-time always. Sometimes that just becomes an unnecessary distraction.

Target Gamification – My Top 9 Gamification Elements

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There are some questions I am asked more than others. Today I want to give a slightly longer answer to one of them than usual! The question? “What is your favourite gamification element?”

My usual answer fluctuates between feedback (which covers anything from verbal to full online economies) or progress, which I have written about in the past. Recently though I realised that this was just not enough of an answer anymore.

The truth is, I have no one favourite element, every solution requires something a little bit different. However, there is a sort of process that I go through when designing a solution or strategy. It starts with my core or target (see – it ties in with the title!!). Then I have a few things that help to support that core, then finally something that embraces it all. Let’s start with an image.

Target Gamification

The Target

At the centre of all my solutions, I try to make sure there are three things.

  1. Some form of feedback (often linked to progress)
  2. A way to measure and display progress
  3. A challenge

When linked with a system to measure and display progress, feedback becomes core to any gamified system. Without it, how does anyone know what is going on?? I remember talking to a dev team who were building a gamified platform. They couldn’t understand how a leaderboard, points, badges and a progress bar were “fun”.  I explained that what they were building was not meant to be fun, it was the foundation for everything else that would be created going forward.

I also include challenge at this stage. Roman Racktwitz once said, “if I’ ain’t learning, it ain’t fun.” I couldn’t agree more. For me, the core of learning is having a challenge to overcome. It may be “reduce waste” or “learn about the bribery code”, but it is still a challenge and I still have to learn something to be able to complete it – or at least I should have too. After all, if I don’t have to learn anything, why should I spend time doing it – I already know it!

(User Types: Player, Achiever)

Competition and Collaboration

Once the core is defined and solid, I look to integrating elements of competition and collaboration. I have seen good results from team-based competition between departments for instance.  This creates a nice balance of collaboration (the teammates work together to succeed) and a little bit of well-meaning competition. I to never, ever, set individuals against each other – this can be so detrimental to the system and the company!

Another key to the this is to make sure that even though there is some level of competition when the event is over, anything developed in the teams is shared with everyone. This way you still break down any potential silos that the competition may have created.

(User Types: Player, Socialiser, Achiever, Philanthropist)

Rewards and Exploration

Used responsibly, virtual and physical rewards can help to motivate certain behaviours, especially early on in the onboarding phase. As I have said hundreds of times before, rewards need to be meaningful! If a user does not feel they have worked to earn them, they will have no meaning to them at all.

Exploration is something that I try to include for those less interested in the rewards a system can give them, but rather the surprises or freedom it can offer them. Rather than linear tracks, offer branching choices. Include little easter eggs for the adventurous players and hidden bonuses.

(User Types: Player, Free Spirit, Achiever)

Narrative and Theme

Once all the other layers are handled, I like to try and wrap it all up in some form of theme and if possible a narrative or story. Creating a theme and a narrative can be tough, as it is easy to create something that is patronising or childish. You have to work with the client to build something that is complementary to their culture. I find it just holds all the other layers together nicely and elevates a simple system into something much more engaging.

Conclusion

The image I have used is not meant to show a priority or some sort of order to how you use the elements or concepts. It is more about building layers that support the core of the system, all of which complement each other.

I hope some of you find that useful, writing it down has certainly helped me a little!

Dynamic teams: Learning from the kids

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The other day, I had the joy of taking my eldest daughter to a theme park (Chessington World of Adventures). We had an amazing time, finished off with a visit to what I thought was a sort of soft play area.

It turns out it was way more awesome than that. It was a steam punk themed ball shooting arena called Temple of Mayhem.

The arena was 2 floors high, with walkways laid out in a horseshoe around the edges. Each of the walkways had a bank of guns, whilst the ground floor had 2 large cannons.

The guns and the cannons fired tennis ball sized foam balls (as many as you could get in them). Also dotted around were various mechanisms to get the foam balls from the ground floor up to the first and second levels.

The basic idea was to grab a gun and start shooting across the arena at other people.

That is what the parents did anyway! The kids had other ideas. They started to fall into distinct roles.

Some started to make sure that the balls in the arena were being fed up to the people manning the guns. Others made sure that gunners had the balls once they got there. A few also get the cannons fed, raining down balls on people trying to keep the enemy well stocked.  A few also manned the guns with the parents.

What amazed me was that none of them knew each other, but they all started to work as a team. What’s more, as the realised who was good at what – they changed roles as and when needed.  If a new person came in who was a great shot, a lesser gunner would drop out and start supplying them with balls.

The lesson for me was that teams need to stay dynamic. People are good at different things as situations change and a team structure needs to be able to adapt on the fly.

Competitive Silos or Collaborative Success

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One of the most popular uses of enterprise gamification is to create competition. I don’t mean in the form of marketing campaigns, I am talking about internal competitions between employees. Sales leader-boards, fitness competitions, who is best at social etc.

The idea is to drive employees to want to be better than the others. Being at the bottom of the leader-board should motivate me to want to work my way to the top – I should want to win.

Whilst this is true in certain environments, it can be rather limiting in others.

Take an imaginary scenario.  You have decided that to improve the performance and time keeping of your bus drivers, you have put them into a competitive leader-board. Due to traffic delays, the 512 has ended up with two buses running in convey. The bus that is running a little late does not want to have their score affected, so keeps trying to overtake the other bus. Because the other bus does not want to lose position on the leader-board, they don’t allow it. Instead the compete for position on the road, for passengers and cause problems for other road users.

Had there been no competition and instead a more collaborative or even just cooperative approach, they would have just allowed each other to get on with their business, with the driver who was on time having no reason to stop the late driver from passing him.

In business you could see similar issues. If you are giving people points and position for sales, they will want to hog all the sales they can – even if they may not be the best person for that particular sale. They want to win, so will risk losing business over losing position or status. If you had a more collaborative environment, the sales people could work together and build stronger sales cases and potentially win more business.

  • Pitting people against each other does not always drive the best results. It can stifle ideas that may be good, but are being suggested by the quieter voices.
  • People at the bottom of competitive leader-boards are rarely motivated by it – they are very often put off and demoralised totally. Most leader-boards are competitions between the top 10 or 20 people at best. User them with care.
  • Don’t look at success in business as individual wins or losses, look at how your people work best and encourage that – don’t force them to compete.
  • Short competitions can be fun and create great ideas and even a bit of team spirit.
  • Long term competition creates silos, knowledge dies in silos. Sharing keeps knowledge alive and allows others to benefit for the expertise that may otherwise be hidden.

In the spirit of collaboration, check out this great post from Yu-Kai Chou on this topic! http://www.yukaichou.com/workplace-gamification/gamified-competition-enterprise-workplace

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