One of the companies that I've always felt had the best grasp on gamification in the enterprise was a Canadian Startup called Rypple. And evidently I wasn't alone. Salesforce.com recently acquired the company. I set down with Daniel Debow who was the CEO of Rypple and is now the head of the division at Salesforce, to talk about how he sees some of the challenges that we've talked about in the class around applying gamification techniques within an organization. Hey Dan thanks so much for joining us. No problem, glad to be here Kevin. So why don't you first tell us a little bit about Rypple, your company. What Rypple really does is amplify behavior. And it focusses on goal-setting and coaching, so encouraging people to set goals as a team, as an individual, as a group. And get coaching from their managers and from their peers, to get recognized for doing great work. So a really simple easy way for people to say, hey, you did a great job, and help that become part of people's reputation. And an, an easy way for people to gather feedback. And that can be something really light, like, I, hey, I wanna learn how to What did I, what's one thing that could be better is, speaker after me now just went through, all the way up and into, something much more like a traditional performance process done every quarter, every six months, instead ways to manage that of scale. So, basically it's social performance management, and it's a modern approach to how people work better together. Mm-hm, so why gamification? So, why are these kinds of game mechanics valuable in the kind of context you're dealing with? So well I, you know I could be honest you know, one of the things that we never set out to do was to build a game. And even though I hired game designers and people who built large scale multi player alternate reality universes. The. We never really used the word gamification or making a game at all. I mean really what we were thinking about was just design, how do we design a grea t experie nce. And as we were designing it we were thinking about people, things that people engage in. Where they would have natural affinity to get rewarded, or not get rewarded, to compete, or not compete and very carefully, we started to add these elements in. It was only after the fact that people came to us and said, hey, you guys are gamifying this and we said, oh, sounds good, Okay. That, that's right. But we were always very careful and thoughtful. We were really careful. Interestingly, the game designers on my team were very careful of like, you know, let's not just be slapping leader boards, and badges, and game mechanics on everything. There has to be a good reason, and the very simple argument, and I think it's totally compelling, was that if all it took to make a compelling game was to slap game mechanics on it. Then every game would be successful and we know that to be not true. Many games, most games, fail. And it's because the underlying gameplay, the underlying thing that you're measuring, is not itself intrinsically rewarding. So the argument we made is that the gamification, to the extent we use the term, was really only for amplifying things that were already good, or already behaviors people wanted to get going on. So that's how we thought about it. And I can give you examples of where, where we did and did not do it. Yeah, well why don't you say a little bit more, first about how do you find those things that are intrinsic or rewarding. Because it sounds great, but I assume it's not obvious where that's the case. Yup. That's true. I mean. Well sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it's not. I mean I think the, two things we wouldn't say is look at the data and then also look at behavior. So data. So one of the first things Rypple allowed people to do is to ask for feedback. You'll have to go in and say what's something I can do and gather anonymous feedback. Some people engage in it. Lots of them but, you know, it's not a sustained behavior and not everybody will en gage cause frankly it's a little scary and we looked at the data around how people responded and it, you know, pretty obvious. People like to give feedback. They're very happy. So we sort of just ask the question. What if we could make, giving feedback the core of the solution? And then the question is well how do you design that, so that it doesn't become like you know, people giving, you know, negative things, and making people feel bad about the feedback they're getting? Later on, we, we want to manage that experience in different ways. And, and goes to the second point, which is just observed behaviors. And in the behavior we observed was that people would send emails to each other all the time saying hey great job Kevin. Let me copy your boss. When they would have a company meeting, or if you walked by people's desks, you would see that they would have physical tokens. They would have, basically, badges, of symbolic measures or metrics of their achievements. And the key thing for us that we figured out was. No one really cared about the badge or no one really cared about the thing. It's the meaning that they attached to it. That's what makes its intrinsically valuable. And in the case of recognition at work it was the fact that you were getting your peers to say what you did mattered. And what you did was important in a way that people understood. Others would understand the symbology of what that recognition was. So maybe an easier way to think about it is or the way we used to think about it was if I gave you a piece of purple ribbon and a piece of metal and said here ya go. You know most people would be like. Thanks. But if you told them that, that, was a representative of something, you only got that if you were wounded in action in defense of your country as the Purple Heart, people would treat this little ribbon with a piece of reverence all of a sudden. All that's changed is the meaning of that thing, not the thing itself. And so how we found those things is by looking for the, where d o people engage in these behaviors in real life? I think by the way. This is pretty c ommon amongst game designers, certainly in social software design. I mean, if you look at Facebook, the two core activities that started were in real life behaviors, like people writing on their dorm room walls, semi public information, and people looking at physical Facebooks and thinking there was, how can we be make that more efficient? So in our case, we saw people giving each other recognition, adding little symbols into it and you have the data about how they were using our feedback app and so we simply said, well what would happen. If we make that the first thing. You come in and you just give someone recognition, you can give'em a badge. And I think I guess maybe the third point to your how do you discover them, is you experiment. Right, so look at data, look at what people do and then try things. Because much of, much, many people spend a lot of time hypothesizing about how people will behave and, and you don't really know until you try. Hm, what's different fundamentally employing these kinds of mechanics and approaches in an enterprise situation inside a company, verses some of the more commercial customer engagement kinds of examples. I mean I think lots is different. You have to, you know lots of things similar, you have to experiment, you have to try things, but you have to conscious of the social construct that people exist in. So let me give you an example. You know rewards typically drive behavior, you know, if you give people rewards, and specifically, specifically money, that often drives increased behavior. So one of the most common gamified, rewards in spreading a product Drop Box kind of used, very familiar, very well. Paypal also, familiar, which is the double-sided incentive. Basically, go treat it as your friend. We'll give them $ ten, and you'll get $ ten, too. Bots will be used to track it. And so we wanted to do the same thing inside of an organization, because Rypple was a free app, any manager could come in, didn't have to come in through HR department. People could sign up, start u sing the product, we wanted them to spread it. And so we said the same thing. We'll give you $25 or something like that. In fact an even higher number be, than the $ ten, because we, a customer is so valuable and we'll give them $ 25 just to start using it. And, we ran a test of that behavior, right. That should make the thing spread like crazy. There already was a natural invite your friends. We wanted to just make it go more. Let's, let's add this reward, explicit reward to it. And what we found counter-intuitively, is it made people use it less. In, you know as we asked more, it was because people felt extremely uncomfortable inside their company endorsing any product for money. It almost, it completely tainted the thing. And they were just like, I'm not willing to do that. It has to be good in and of itself, for me to expend social capital, cuz that's what I'm really giving. It's not the money that I get. So that's maybe one example of understanding the context of how people use these tools. The second is you know, their, their willingness to engage in frivolous behaviour, or perty, seemingly frivolous behavior, is heavily dictated by the culture of the organization. So I was talking about this example of how people can use Rypple to create a meaningful badge, give their own iconography, their own meaning to it, and then send it to someone. You know, that behaviors getting to depend a lot on the corporate culture. What's interesting though is how people not only are, their willingness to spread but also their willingness to moderate their behavior. So what might work externally, might not work internally. One of the common examples is that people are concerned that they're going to get too many bad views, they're gonna go crazy. But what happens is, inside companies, people moderate their behavior because they're very aware of the fact that they're at work. Other people are wat ching. They're doing something publicly so they're much more calculating, I think, about their willingness to engage in behaviors th at might be seen as deviating from the norms of that culture. Mm-hm. Does that answer the, does that answer your question? Yeah, absolutely. You, you mentioned corporate culture a couple times, and, and you talked about how you have customers like Facebook, and so forth technology, start-upy type, types of companies. Do you think that these mechanisms, and gamification more broadly, can work in traditional, establishment companies as well? Yes, for two reasons. Well, for three reasons. First is, companies like Facebook and LinkedIn, while everyone saw the social network movie, having spent time with those folks. It's an extraordinarily driven, focused, business like company, right? It's 5,000 plus people filled with some of the top technical and business operations people from the Valley. It's moved out of the Harvard dorm. It's a real company like any other. It's not less different than people think, in some ways. Yeah, that's it, definitely it's not an industrial company from the mid west. But the second, to answer your question, the first. Correctness. And the second is, we have already lots of customers who have less famous names. That's why I don't mention them. But they're like Unionize, trade show companies or advertising agencies. They're, all have embraced Rypple and use it. And the third point is we are constantly getting inundated now from the most established, biggest companies in the world because they're interested. Because they also feel the pain of this problem. In our case, the performance management problem, the way people are managing account, and they desperately want to find solutions that will resonate more with the next work force that is coming in. So, I do think these things will work in more commonly in ... In corporate cultures. But I think the other point to make is that it's not like people don't play games at work already, right? So think about the examples. I mean, I worked at Goldman Sachs. A, you know, very focused on money company. And yet, if you walk through, every investment banker would have these little lucite Geo Toys is what they call them on their desks and people were very serious about them, they took them very seriously. They collected them, they showed them. What is that if not a status symbol of accomplishments overtime with an icon. That's basically what is it, a badge or think about things in the corporate culture like job titles. Roles, right? So I understand the value of the role but part of that role is just a status symbol. Where am I? What is? What level at I am? Or think about the symbolic leveling rewards you get for more status and power, like a corner office or a parking spot and then if you look at the literature, use the language of work. Right, you can see Ben Dattner is a psychologist at Columbia, has got this thing called the Blame Game. He's talking about how people assign and use games to place blame at work. Stephen Miles, who is one of the top executive recruiters to talk about the. I can't remember the name of his. The, the Work Game, I think is the name or the Career Game is how he describes thinking about using game theory to think about how you move your way through work. So, the, sort of, takeaway point for me is that the word game, you know, game theory, right? It refers to, sort of a strategic behaviors when there's scarcity, and, and competition. And that kinda describes the work culture. Like, I think people are playing games at work. They aren't using those words in the same way. And, and really, the trick for game design at work is to, how do you harness the behaviors and the sociology and psychology of people to take what has frankly, in many cases, become pretty perverse games, and just translate them into productive behaviors. So how, then, do you avoid the mechanics, just making things more competitive and more cutthroat in that environment? Good question. I think there's a few. Techniques. The first is to be empirical about things. You try them. You see what happens. You know, I, I meet with clients all the time and they're like well isn 't this gonna happen, isn't. I mean it's interesting how many people, we all have our own little theories about how people actually behave and it's, it's like deeply taught to us and in many cases sort of their empirically wrong about how people behave. I think, you know, the grow of behavioral economics is kind of, sort of a big meta story about that, that kinda thing. We have this model about how people behave but, when you empirical look at it they don't necessarily behave that way. And so, think about Paypal right? Almost everybody if you told the idea of Paypal to them at the beginning, they would say well people are thieves, their not gonna, you send your stereo to someone their not gonna send you the money that you met them on the internet. Turns out most people do behave with integrity, they'll be decent. By the way the reason why society works, we're not running around with clubs killing each other, is we actually all generally kind of follow the rules, so or we all generally get along. Now that might, that sounds like a hopelessly naive point of view. Not to say their aren't people who are you know, who will play the game. Who will be free riders and all that such. But you have to be empirical. You have to see what actually happens, that's the first lesson. The, the second one about you know kinda how do you do this and be careful at work is. I would say you get people who've actually designed games involved in the problem and that's not to say that everyone can't start using these tools but I think that, they are relatively sophisticated. You have to have some sort of context and grounding about what is the data and literature say about human behavior, why do people do things. You might want to have had some experience in designing actual, real games. I think if you simply take som eone who spent 25 years building process-centric business applications, and then say, okay, add badges to it, and it's gonna be awesome. I think you're destined to failure. I don't, I don't think that's gonna work. So I thi nk people with real context, real designers, lots of empirical, lots of little experiments to see what happens, lots of iterations to tweak the system to see how it works. And in the last part is, think about them as amplification tools. What is the thing you want to happen a lot more of? Be very careful about what that thing is, and that you chose right in, in. I'm going to give you a couple of examples of how that works so far. Great, Dan, thanks so much. No problem, my pleasure.
