Last week I ran a workshop at the Games and Learning SIG Conference. The main prong to the session was to discover what causes Gamification projects to succeed or fail, with a particular look to see if there were any differences between corporate and academic worlds that we could learn from.
The second part of the workshop was to have fun finding a memorable way to remember the keys to project success that we’d learnt. This did turn out to be the most fun part of the session. I took the attendees through an exercise using the very useful SUCCESs technique from Chip and Dan Heath’s book ‘Made to Stick‘. In their book they analysed the most memorable stories, particularly urban myths, to find out what made them memorable. They then boiled it down to these 6 tips:
Simplicity – Not dumbing down, but getting to the core message.
Unexpected – Get attention. Violate a schema. Use curiosity.
Concrete – Paint a mental picture such as to ‘Put a man on the moon’ or film pitching technique.
Credible – Quote authorities or stats. Give more details to make it more believable (technique for good lies). Ask a question.
Emotive – People care about people. Ask, what’s in it for me? How would this make you feel?
Story – stories make it believable and memorable. Showing the what and why of an idea.
I recommend using this SUCCESs strategy for storytelling whenever you need to pitch a gamification project.