Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "We shape our models, and then our models shape us..." (more)
Key Phrases: prototyping culture, prototyping media, prototype portfolios, Sun Oil, Royal Dutch, General Motors (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Recall the old saying about all work and no play making Jack a dull boy? World-class companies today need play--serious play--if they want to make truly innovative products, argues Michael Schrage, an MIT Media Lab fellow and Fortune magazine columnist. In Serious Play he writes, "When talented innovators innovate, you don't listen to the specs they quote. You look at the models they've created." Whether it's a spreadsheet that tests a new financial model or a foam prototype of a calculator, what interests Schrage is not the model itself, but the behavior that play--be it modeling, prototyping, or simulation--inspires.

Schrage examines the approaches to successful prototyping at companies such as AT&T, Boeing, Microsoft, and DaimlerChrysler and describes the kind of culture that's needed for encouraging innovation. In the last chapter, he lays out the 10 rules of serious play, including: Be willing to fail early and often; know when the costs outweigh the benefits; know who wins and who loses from an innovation; build a prototype that engages customers, vendors, and colleagues; create markets around prototypes; and simulate the customer experience. Well-written and inspiring, Serious Play, is a first-rate user's guide for managers, project leaders, and other innovators. --Dan Ring

From Booklist

At such firms as Walt Disney, Microsoft, 3M, Sony, and Hewlitt-Packard, serious play is serious work. Schrage, a research associate at MIT Media Lab and columnist for Fortune, sets out to explore "serious play," which he defines as creative improvisation in corporations. Serious play is taking place worldwide, and it uses such "toys" as models, simulations, and prototypes. With the development of sophisticated technology, the distinction among these three toys has blurred, and they all are used as an effort to recreate some aspect of reality that matters; their real value is the insight they provide an organization. The irony of innovation in any field, especially the most competitive, is that you can't be a serious innovator unless you are willing to play--which means seriously investing in the challenge of confronting the uncertainties that future markets will bring by rigorously questioning and revising the rules. This is a "must read" book. Mary Whaley

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 244 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Press; 1 edition (December 10, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875848141
• ISBN-13: 978-0875848143
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #56,875 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who Moved Our Prototype?, March 2, 2000

By	Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

There is more significance to the title than one may initially assume. Some "play" can be taken much too seriously as when overzealous parents scream at their children as they begin to compete in organized sports; other "play" is not treated seriously enough as when a corporation discourages (perhaps even punishes) innovative thinking unless it has an immediate and favorable impact on the bottom line. Many executives, thus abused, may then vent their frustrations by behaving boorishly at a Little League game.

In the Foreword, Tom Peters quotes Schrage's assertion that "Innovative prototypes generate innovative teams. Not vice versa." Peters then observes that, in Serious Play, the "big idea" is that "the prototyping process becomes the scaffolding" for an enterprise's approach to innovation. As Schrage explains, "I have always enjoyed rehearsals more than performances." I suggest that you keep that statement clearly in mind as you proceed through the book. It reveals much about Schrage's perspective on the correlations between prototypes and innovation.

Here is how the book is organized: Part I: Getting Real, Part II: Model Behavior, and Part III: S(t)imulating Innovation. Schrage then provides a User's Guide and Bibliography. Throughout the book, he shares a wealth of real-world experience which explains what innovation is, and, what it can help to accomplish, not only with the design of a new product or service but also with the formulation of new and better ways for people to work together. The key is simulation; moreover, "not just playing with representations of ideas" (lots of ideas, the more the better) but "playing with the various versions of representations of ideas."

Near the end of the final chapter, Schrage poses a number of critically important questions, suggesting that the "best hope for answering these questions, or coping with their implications, is to build or grow models and play with them seriously." The world's best companies simulate to innovate. For example: American Airlines, Boeing, DaimlerChrysler, General Electric, IBM, IDEO, Walt Disney, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, and Royal Dutch Shell. Schrage believes that the creative tensions between innovators who design and innovators who evolve "will likely result in breakthroughs in products, services, and their yet-to-be-anticipated hybrids." So, why not prototype how to prototype? Why not play simulation games which reveal new and better ways to simulate?

Tom Peters describes Serious Play as "simply the best book on innovation I've ever read." I agree. Perhaps you will, also.

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book changed how I think about simulation, November 18, 1999

By	Michael P. Bean "Hippolyte" (San Francisco, California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is one of the best books on simulation that I've read. Through many intriguing examples, Serious Play shows how simulation can accelerate and improve decision-making. The book explains how simulation can be a critical tool for strategic planning. Schrage frames simulation as an inclusive, primary business activity, instead of something exclusive, performed by experts in a back office.

I especially liked Schrage's recognition of spreadsheets as a simulation tool. In discussions on simulation, spreadsheets are usually ignored because they are seen as unsophisticated. Schrage shows how spreadsheet simulations made many of the financial innovations of the 80s and early 90s possible.

In addition to convincing readers that simulations are valuable, Schrage does a good job of introducing readers to how simulations can be implemented in business. The chapters near the end of the book on measuring the ROI of simulations and his brief user's guide provide some useful tools for those interested in using simulations and prototypes to improve decision-making.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simulation Enlarges Shared Space, Thinking, and Results!, September 17, 2000

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

:'Serious play is not an oxymoron; it is the essence of innovation.'

Serious Play is one of those rare books that will change the paradigms that many companies and other organizations have, enable them to learn faster and more effectively, and then make better decisions.

In the foreword, Tom Peters connects the concepts in this book to one that Bob Waterman and he wrote about in In Search of Excellence: Ready, Fire, Aim! The idea is that we can learn a lot by trying things out before they are finalized. In the process, our aim improves. This is an elegant description of some of the advantages of simulation.

The book is rich in examples of how companies use simulation. These examples are clustered around financial models (both spreadsheets and more advanced computer models) for transaction decisions, creating three-dimensional models of new products for development and testing (Boeing's 777 and DaimlerChrysler's new cars), improving choices around environmental changes (Royal Dutch/Shell's planning process), and examining business model alternatives (demand and scheduling simulations for airlines and hotels, and combining better cost information from activity-based costing to identify strategic alternatives). Each of these clusters is examined in some detail, with lots of lessons of what works and what does not.

Here are the book's organizational structure and key ideas:

Part I: Getting Real

1. The New Economics of Innovation (it's usually cheaper to spend time and money on simulations than to make mistakes in the marketplace)

2. A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge (spreadsheets allow companies to look at more alternatives and explain them better, but there are dangers in relying on faulty ones)

Part II: Model Behavior

3. Our Models, Ourselves (models reflect how we think about innovation and our assumptions more than the real world)

4. Productive Waste (the more we waste in thinking through alternatives, the better the final result and eventual economic returns are as long as we are focused on speed to implementation)

5. Preparing for Surprise (the most valuable benefits come from surprises we don't expect -- be sure to keep your eyes open and follow up)

6. Perils of Pathological Prototyping (ways to make simulations worthless or harmful -- lessons of what to avoid doing)

Part III: S(t)imulating Innovation

7. S(t)imulating Interventions (creating shared space and information flows allows more types of stakeholders to participate including suppliers, other internal functions, and customers)

8. Measuring Prototyping Paybacks (understanding how you generate the most value from your project can improve your process)

9. Going Meta: Evolution as a Business Practice (future steps for simulation improvements)

User's Guide (10 key lessons):

(1) Ask who benefits? This may create bias. Eliminate or reduce the bias.

(2) Decide what the main paybacks should be and measure them. Rigorously. Without this focus, your process can miss the most important elements of the activity for you.

(3) Fail early and often. Iterations are more important than making the most progress with each prototype.

(4) Manage a diversified prototype portfolio. Each way you prototype will have biases and errors in it. By duplication of prototypes in different forms, you can avoid those mistakes.

(5) Commit to a migration path. Honor that commitment. This means that you integrate simulations into a business process.

(6) Prototypes should encourage play. Otherwise, finished models simply cast ideas in concrete (clay models of cars often had this effect)

(7) Create markets around the prototype. This means getting customers involved through methods such as beta testing.

(8) Encourage role playing. This is an effective way to create empathy and a shared view of the problem.

(9) Determining the points of diminishing return. This means to spend your time and efforts in those areas that are most productive, and to manage your total time to implementation against the cost of errors you can eliminate.

(10) Record and review relentlessly and rigorously. This is the idea of how to improve your overall simulation process.

What, then, are the limitations of this book? As someone who has worked with simulations and studied them for over 25 years, I believe the author missed some important points:

A- Simulations are even more valuable for choosing what technologies to pursue than they are for any of the applications described here. By combining factors like the expected rate of cost decline, effectiveness enhancement, inherent demand for the technology, price elasticities, and functionality, one can estimate likely paths for one technology to dominate others. Then you can plan your development path to take advantage of those paths.

B- All public companies can benefit from simulations involving polling of current and potential shareholders, but most limit themselves to financial models and spreadsheets which produce misleading results.

C- A major advantage of simulations for looking at external scenarios outside your control is that those using the scenarios begin to think of strategies that will outperform under all these circumstances (Arie de Geus taught me this from his experience at Royal Dutch/Shell, but it was not reported in this book).

D- Simulations are also very useful for generating new technology concepts. I often use these in my consulting practice to help R & D organizations to locate new technologies that are worth developing.

E- Simulations work best because the play has no immediate 'real world' consequences. In several places, the author seems to suggest that people be evaluated for how well they perform in simulations (the military does this). Those real world consequences will harm the value of the simulation for creativity purposes. See Creativity in Context. As a result, I find the title a little off target. I think a better one would have been Seriously Improving Results from Playful Play.

F- Simulations do not have to be numbers, model, or prototype based. Some of the most useful ones I have seen are based on having people create their own stories and story boards. Although story boards are described here as a method, they are not explored nearly enough.

G- The author isn't careful enough about his use of terms. As a result (although he warns us to be careful), it isn't always clear what he means by a 'model' or a 'prototype.' I was surprised by this weakness in an otherwise well-done book.

H- Simulations using analogies are among the most powerful. I did not see any of these described here. You can read the Synectics literature to get ideas for how to do this.

Despite these limitations, I strongly urge you to read and apply this book. Simulation is a major step forward in improving innovation and communications. Those who fail to master simulation methods are doomed to be overcome by them.

After you have finished reading the book, think about the 5 areas where an improved result would be most valuable to your company. Then think about how you could use simulations to help you create those improvements. Be sure to set high goals (like 2,000 percent solutions)! Then get started today! You'll be amazed at what you can learn!