Time flies. 21 November 2014 is gälliwashere Oy's birthday, and this year it whizzed past under the feet of daily work. We have come a long way from the days when we sipped excellent alcohol-free Lapin Kulta at the now-defunct Protomo in Jyväskylä and brainstormed a "3-star brand fairy adventure game".
That brand fairy (who had dark sunglasses, stubble and a cigarette hanging from its lip) evolved into a pirate board game for business development called Topaasia. The board game takes 4 hours and is always a game session led by a facilitator. So it was, and is, a service product.
Out of this board game, shaped by customers' thoughts, wishes and numerous experiments, emerged a shorter and more compact game for working on brand. Thus was born Topaasia, the marketing card game. With the game you could work through marketing in an hour, but the rules were so complicated that in practice it required a guided game session or training before you could use it. We set out to develop it in a direction where the customer could simply order the game from our online store and everything would work nicely without much instruction.
The first Topaasia card games were packed into VHS boxes fetched from a second-hand video shop. We sprayed perfume inside, aiming for a "WOW" effect. Since then we have learned that this alone is not enough to create a holistic customer experience; you need a bit more, for example easy onboarding.
We started simplifying the rules, assembling support material, that is, better instructions, articulating the value proposition, producing material online and making games for different themes. After the marketing deck (Marketing Health Check) we made Sales (Sales Aid Kit), followed by the Leading Together and Customer Experience versions.
And this happened, so to speak, with a backpack on and wearing out the soles of our sales shoes. Those shoes are still wearing out.
That was the first 2 years. What happened over the next two?
Now there are Topaasia® games for many different topics. It is an easy way to enable self-run development sessions for a team and an absolute must-have tool in the coach-facilitator's toolkit. To rhyme with the letter T, it is a one-hour tool for effective teamwork. The games are also available in English (and soon in Swedish), and they have been sold abroad too. Exports, no less! All the decks can be found in our online store. Most often the ways the games are used relate to working on the following themes:- developing business/marketing/customer experience/sales
- streamlining operations
- improving internal collaboration
- project success
- learning and continuous development
Topaasia games are in use in over 200 Finnish organisations. Our customers are smart and give good feedback, and to our delight corrective feedback too. Some use the games internally among teams at different stages of projects, some organise continuous improvement workshops, and some run team development discussions and monthly meetings with them. Some use them with their own customers in various collaboration meetings and coaching sessions.
We have tried and tested different ways of gathering data and different systems to boost team learning and the learning organisation in connection with Topaasia games. None of these has taken off, but they have taught us lessons for what we do next. We have also experimented a lot with different ways to crystallise the discussion session that Topaasia generates so that it flows as smoothly as possible.
Our company has brought on board serious expertise and investors to accelerate, fund and spar with the challenges of a growing company.
What is coming?
A digital facilitation tool, Topaasia style! With it you can run a retro, a workshop, a development session or a project meeting for teams in different locations in a guided, gamified and smooth way, ending in concrete actions, just like with the physical Topaasia cards. New decks are also coming soon, such as experiments and business development. More English-language Topaasia® packages, as well as the first Swedish-language Topaasia deck.What have we learned?
We have learned all sorts of things, but to list a few general points:- Continuous upkeep and review of the basics. What is sales? What does the cash flow say? These are worth following closely together every week so that no false impressions or expectations arise. .
- People problems are fairly similar regardless of industry and team. That is why Topaasia works in such different contexts. At work, people want to:
-be heard -be able to influence their own work -vent or process bad feelings -see progress and make decisions on how to move forward together with colleagues. -have clarity about what is coming or what the situation is. -have some kind of clear ground rules for how their own team or group operates. -know "why" things are done. -hear others and learn from their experiences. -be treated as equals
- The old wisdom "everything comes down to leadership, and leadership comes down to communication" is fairly true. Although Slack and other nice tools make communication faster than ever, in our experience it also makes thinking lazier and more reactive. We have noticed a phenomenon where both of us have had to admit "what a mistake it was to open Slack in the evening". A rant or a problem in Slack takes over your cognitive space, and the time that should be spent in the evening on relaxing and family goes to work matters instead. .
- Related to the above, keeping your own head together is important for entrepreneurs, but surely for all knowledge workers too. What is your life like in general? Are the big picture and good habits in order? Can you handle stress? Does your day go by in a social media storm and a to-do-list pinball machine, or in focused work? Can you relax in moments of recovery so you can hit the gas in moments of action? .
- Reading books is a pretty good thing.