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Game of Motivations. Part 1

I want to express my gratitude for the help in creating the game to the person who invented and drew the design of the cards for the game. Thank you Natashananov94!

Have you been given tests at work or school? Did you pass them only in order to get through as quickly as possible and, without reading the questions, answered quickly and at random? Has it ever happened that you tried to pass the test in such a way as to embellish yourself a little?

Studying at one business school, I came across different tests to determine employee motivation. This topic has long interested me. The business school was advised to give tests to people and look at the results.

Test questions were compiled on paper, and test results could be obtained by calculating points on the tablets. To facilitate the process, I moved the questions to Google spreadsheets, entered the calculation formulas and added a graph that is built according to the test results.

During the tests, I came across such questions on which I wanted to get clarification, direction, however, feedback can be received only once, and even then at the very end. Then I had the idea of ​​adding interactivity to passing the tests, and the game was born ...

What kind of game is this?


To participate in the game you need two people. One of them is a participant, a player , a person whose motivation we determine. We will call the second leader , he can be either the leader of a person or a person from the side who knows how to play the game.

The deck for the game consists of 11 cards, which are placed on the table face down. Examples of cards we will consider below.

The host takes the top 2 cards and invites the player to share his thoughts on what these cards can mean for him. Participantreads the description of each card out loud and talks about how he understands it. First you need to talk about each card individually, and then compare their significance for yourself. That card, which means more to a person, is put to the left of the second card on the table. Thus, a series is obtained that currently consists of only two cards.

In this case, the leader should not be a passive observer, he needs to be actively involved in the process and help the player. The facilitator asks leading questions on each card, as well as when comparing multiple cards. For this, you can give specific examples of “what if hr offered you ...”, “what if your manager told you”, etc.

Next partytakes the third card and describes his thoughts about it. In this case, the facilitator helps the player with leading questions. Then the participant decides the degree of importance of this card relative to those already in the row and can put it on the left, right or even in the middle. At this time, leading questions from the host are more relevant than ever, because Thanks to them, the participant can change their original decision.

It is very important here for the presenter not to impose any will on the participant , but to help him make the decision that most suits him, for example, suggest scenarios that the participant had not thought about before.

The next steps do not differ from the previous one by pulling out the third card, however, with each new card, it becomes increasingly difficult for the player to understand the importance of the drawn card relative to the chain that is already built on the table. That is why the initial arrangement of cards can affect the “complexity” of the game.

As a result, we get a person’s motivational chain, which is similar to the result that is usually obtained from the test. However, based on the experience of the game, the important result is not just a chain, but also the thoughts that the participant shared during the game, and the conclusions made by the hostbased on these thoughts. That is, with the same motivational chain of players, the leader can draw completely different conclusions!

Thus, a lot depends on the leader , especially on how much he can help the player open up .

Game Example


Let's say the leader pulled out the first cards - Earnings and Team .

Earning


In the description of the Earnings card, it is said that a player can donate any subsequent card in order to increase their salary by 20% . This figure is taken as a good increase, which in most cases is higher than the usual premium, although much depends on the company. On the other hand, this increase is not so huge that for it one could easily sacrifice something important.

When a person puts this card in a row and the host understands that the salary is important enough for the person or vice versa is not important, you can play with the numbers and ask what would happen if 20% were 10% or 50% in place? Where in this case the map would move and why.

According to my observations, very often this card in the final row is located in the middle or close to it. Sometimes it is very high and may even take first place. In this case, you can talk about why it happened. Answers can be very different.
Someone will answer that he has a mortgage, and as soon as he pays it, the card will move much lower. Another may say that his main goal at work is to earn money, and the rest is not important. In this case, you can ask tricky questions “what if”, for example, if for the sake of raising salaries, he will have to work in a team similar to the “wolf pack” or with an uninteresting stack.

, , , , , 20% .


Description of the card The team contains an indication that the player can sacrifice any subsequent card in order to work in a good team . The neutral word “good” was intentionally taken to describe the team , as for different people it can be very different. The player needs to clarify which team he considers good.

According to my observations, this card is often above the middle, but sometimes there are cases when it is lower. However, the importance of this card is not only to understand how much a person values ​​a good team, but also to understand what a good team means to a person.
At the same time, for some people this may be an opportunity to work in a strong team, from which you can learn a lot, for others the most important point is that the team has a good relationship. Sometimes people start to list a lot of things, and in such cases, you can ask to highlight a few of the most important points or sort them.

Understanding what a good team means to a person and how important it is to him, many conclusions can be drawn. For example, does the person’s current team correspond to his understanding of a good team, and after conducting game sessions with other team members, conclusions can be drawn on the situation in the team in general.

Suppose in our case the player decided that Earnings are more important for him now and made up a series of two cards from left to right:Earnings , Team . After that, the player draws a third card and continues the game until all cards are moved from the deck to the chain.

Conclusion


The result of the game is a person’s motivational chain, which the presenter shares with the player at the end of the game, as well as conclusions drawn from the results of the game. The conclusions can be very different, often it can depend on what is interesting to the host , as well as on what issues the player may lead to .

As a result of the game, when it is conducted correctly, you can find out not only what is interesting to a person and what drives him, but, for example, how satisfied he is with what he has now: a project, a team, a salary. The correct conduct of the game is the ability to conduct the game interactively, asking questions sequentially and based on what the player has already told at the moment, and not according to a pre-planned script.

In addition, I assume that the motivational chain may change over time, so the results of playing the game over time can be very different from those obtained now.

In this article, I talked about two cards. The remaining 9 are called: Contribution, Expert Opinion, Leadership, Challenge, Lifestyle, Status, Communication, Feedback, Creativity .

The game has evolved over time, as people shared feedback. There were 11 cards all this time, but their values ​​changed a little.

If you have any comments or suggestions about the game, be sure to write, but for now I’ll be preparing the second part of the article, where I’ll talk about other cards ...

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