Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Learning”

12 Aug 2008

Psychology of Game Playing: thoughts from the blogosphere

Building on my initial post on this weeks topic of the Psychology of Game Playing. My challenge is how and why playfulness and games both help deliver personal change and also enable creativity and problem solving.

Joel Gruber writes a great post on how playing games enables you to try out a new ‘skin’; to learn a new way of feeling and thinking by dropping your old rules and trying out some new rules for the game you’re about to play. I immediately started thinking about the use of modelling in NLP and how game playing allows us to creatively explore new potential models. So game playing as a great way of accessing ‘what-if’.

The great takeaway for me is: ‘You build worlds that allow you to tap into your unconscious mind and expose creative and problem-solving abilities’. So this gives one answer to my challenge about games enabling creativity and problem solving.

But I wonder also whether it can help towards ‘games delivering personal change’? Does the building of new worlds or trialling new skins; the ‘what if’ modelling enable us to make a leap from our old bad habits to experience a new set of possibilities? Does it enable us to feel how a new good routine or habit would make us feel?

It’s a nice thought, but for me the game playing that succeeds is far more simple. It feels more like we trick ourselves rather than aid ourselves.

Marelisa’s post on A Guide for Creating new Habits is an excellent analysis, and one that I want to look at in more detail later in the week in terms of how her ‘profile’ of a new habit appears to have a lot of parallels with game playing

Posted in Change, Creativity, Game Playing, Habits and Routines, Learning, NLP and tagged Creativity, Game Playing, Good Habits, Modelling, NLP, Problem solving, Psychology

07 Aug 2008

The Social and Information Web Drug III

An observation from Slate.com that adds item 12. to my splurge on the above topic (see these posts from

Money Symbols Abstract 4 - svilen001

earlier in the week on the Social and Information Web Drug):

12. Social media is the new provider of social currency

Defining social currency as ‘The phrase, which comes from sociology, is often used to describe the information we acquire and then trade—or give away—to start, maintain, and nurture relationships with our fellow humans’

Christopher Carfi has a great post on social currency that expands further

So, particularly the tools of social media that aggregate/ channel/ filter and weight information are providing multiple opportunities to socially interact by trading ever more pertinent, timely and (to the individual hoping to interact) valuable information.

Those face to face ‘watercooler moments’ are being replaced by snipping content, feeding, streaming and adding to comments…..

Posted in Communication, Learning, Social Networks, Writing and tagged Communication, FriendFeed, Learning, Life streaming, Social Media | Leave a comment

06 Aug 2008

The Personality of Change

Blue Planet by Dez Pain

The Anatomy or Structure of Change. How does change happen? How does it last? Whether for you as an individual, or for a team of individuals in a company.

I struggled with the title because the drivers of a successful change seem to come from many different areas. The structural shift. The psychological shift. The habits and routine shifts. etc.

First, a definition. I see successful change as being the thing that happens to make you move from one state to another state; that state then remains and becomes the norm.

I redrafted from my initial attempt at this post where I had considered that successful change was pre-planned to achieve a desired/ better state. I believe that as much can be learnt from change happening for the worst. So that the new state of affairs is less desirable than pre-change.

As an initial brainstorm of the various aspects or elements of the personality of change:

The theory: mentally I start considering the process of change in a systematic, paper-based way. It can be planned and structured and implemented.
The quick win: there are immediate rewards in the case of change to a desired state. Immediate benefits are seen by those involved to motivate into starting routine and repetition.
The buy-in: reality is that the mental acceptance and then physical behaviours of those impacted have to align with the new future state for it to be considered successful.
The language: language shifts. The new state is articulated as a ‘done deal’. The new language associated is used (stiltedly at first) by those involved, but more confidently as time goes on. This seems to have a viral effect.

To be continued.