Buildie is a fast-growing company from the Tampere region that builds software for documentation and quality management in infrastructure construction. Buildie's executive team has played Topaasia particularly from the perspective of developing company culture.
The company's founder and CEO Taneli Ristmeri describes the results and insights that playing Topaasia has produced.
Background
By way of background, Buildie's medium-term goal is to double its headcount. That succeeded between autumn 2019 and spring 2020, so now we aim to double the headcount again by the end of the year. In other words, quadrupling the personnel in 15 months.
We have found that the key thing in getting the right people into the company is company culture. That is why, for the Topaasia session played with the executive team, we chose developing company culture as the topic.
The game experience
At the start of the game we noticed right away that people's views were contradictory and they could not articulate the cards they played. One of us played the card "Meaning" and we had to google what company culture even means. So the executive team did not, as a whole, understand what company culture means. Only when this "Meaning" card came onto the table did we start to grasp what company culture means to us.
From there we began building a direction and a shared understanding of what company culture is really about and what we as a company are trying to achieve. It has led to our executive team now being genuinely committed to developing the company culture, when previously it was not.
At Buildie we are committed to dealing even with challenging matters. Topaasia is a capable option for that. There was resistance to playing at the start, but by the time the end result came around, everyone's heads had certainly been turned.
What I think is best about Topaasia:- It forces people to articulate their views, which reveals what a view is based on. This makes visible how things are understood and experienced, after which the executive team can make the necessary changes.
- It is a way of dealing with difficult matters in a gamified form so that they actually get dealt with.