Terms To Establish the Context of The Assignment:
Greenhousing
In innovation, greenhousing is all about nurturing ideas, and letting them grow, even if it sounds crazy, before starting to judge them.
Elephant is our greenhousing symbol—a mother elephant and a baby elephant—because elephants take care of their young 10 years longer than any other mammal, except for humans. Mother elephants protect baby elephants before they let them out in the wild, so they can survive. That’s really what greenhousing is about: protecting your idea until it’s ready to be judged.
Signaling
Expansive thinking is where possibilities are explored and ideas get bigger. Reductive thinking is where options are assessed and decisions are made. Both types of thinking are critical for innovation and experimentation; but like oil and water, they don’t mix. Signaling helps you avoid creative collisions. Signaling helps you communicate to people whether you want them to be expansive or reductive so that they know whether you want them to help you build an insight or idea or narrow it down and make decisions.
How does it work? Physical Signaling involves using visuals, props, or cues in the environment to let others know what type of thinking and behaviors to use. Verbal Signaling involves using words to clearly communicate what you need from others. Verbal signaling can be informal but effective.
Social Collaboration:
Social technology adoption is occurring at revolutionary speed fundamentally transforming the way we interact. Social collaboration refers to processes that help multiple people or groups interact and share information to achieve common goals. For this project social collaboration refers specifically to collaboration happening online.
Gamification: Engaging people on an emotional level and motivating them to achieve their goals. Gamification is all about motivation.
Gamification hypothesis: Unlocking employee engagement & productivity can be achieved thru social interactions can provide speed, scale and access to information. Gamification engagement and motivates people to participate. Human interaction replaced with digital connections and vast access to information. What’s needed is motivation.
AARP Social Collaboration Innovation Project
Case summary:
AARP human resources is sponsoring an innovative project to verify/validate the hypothesis that social collaboration and gamification can change employee behavior positively, drive innovation, and/or develop skills. Through a series of design experiments leveraging social collaboration and gamification tools, this project will test if social collaboration and gamification are effective mediums to:
1. Change employee behavior
2. Drive innovation
The experiments will hopefully indicate whether social collaboration in the workplace will: inculcate open information sharing (vs hoarding); encourage innovation behaviors such as greenhousing, expansive and reductive thinking, or signaling; facilitate new mediums for employee learning; give real time opportunities to recognize individuals, teams, efforts, failures, etc; define quantifiable metrics to measure user engagement irrespective of technology platform; evaluate the impact of user experience.
The project will provide a social collaboration tool (or set of tools) that introduces gamification elements (rewards, points, achievement badges, virtual currency or points, etc.) to test the gamification hypothesis with AARP employees. Data from the experiments may drive or influence organizational thinking and expectations around collaboration.
Status and Next Steps:
Currently, the social platform Yammer is the official cross-organizational social platform approved and promoted for use by AARP. However, adoption rate is low with limited sharing of ideas, posting updates etc. Yammer also lacks governance, ownership and business relevant content. The social collaboration team will test posting badging/points into Yammer with the vendors Xocial, Badgeville and Redcritter. Two beta test groups will be created to collaborate in a sandbox environment for each vendor – meaning six parallel tests will run. Ideally, sandbox groups will be no larger than 10 users. Each beta group will be part of an existing team at AARP that focuses on specific projects or areas already – such as Work/Jobs or Disrupt Aging.
Communications Needs for Potential Beta Participants:
Selected sandbox beta users shall be communicated via email /in person meeting about goals/objectives of social collaboration tool sandbox testing. Important points to communicate to potential users to encourage participation include:
? Better communicate and share ideas for their project;
? Could increase productivity and efficiency;
? Spur innovative ideas;
? Showcase/reward positive behaviors such as sharing and greenhousing.
After reading and considering the above case, respond to the following prompts below:
1.) SMMR: Label and briefly describe each of the eight elements of the S/M/M/R model, defining and relating them to the AARP Collaboration Social Innovation Project (one page).
2.) Promo: Create a 1-2 PowerPoint slides OR a flyer (no larger than 8.5” x 11”) “selling” the benefit of being a part of a team; you can utilize any medium you wish, whether it be computer graphics, freehand artwork, and other appropriate tools. (one-two pages)
3.) Email: Referencing the models found in Chapter 14, draft a compelling email inviting AARP teams to be a part of your Social Collaboration experiment (one page).
4.) Message Strategy: Create 5-point message strategy and 3 message samples persuading AARP employees to engage in the platform. Platform is Facebook for companies (assume only AARP employees have access). Tips: Consider how often would you create messages. When will they be released? What behavior employees should change? Must show at least 3 sample messages using the tweet criteria of 140 characters.