Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hello everyone. Welcome to the 5 Minutes Podcast. Recently I started studying and trying to refine and polish my Spanish. You know, I'm Brazilian, so I speak Portuguese as my mother tongue, and Portuguese is, I would say, quite similar to Spanish, but quite different too. So I started doing that, and you may ask me, but am I the right episode of this podcast? Because Ricardo was supposed to talk about gamification, and Ricardo is talking about learning Spanish. So let me tell you what happened when I said this to my daughters. One of them came to me and said, Dad, why you don't use Duolingo? And first, just as a disclaimer, Duolingo is not sponsoring this episode, okay? I'm just a client. And I said, No, what is that? Oh, you should try. And then I downloaded it on my phone, and I started learning Spanish. But it's a different way of learning. It's fun because it says, Ricardo, if you finish this lesson today, you will win five crystals. You already got 100 crystals. Accept this, and you will become a Titan level. And I said, What? This is fun because I was learning and polishing my Spanish and at the same time collecting rewards, going up on the leaderboard of the winners of the Silver Group, because I'm already at the Silver Group and I said, This is amazing, and this can be applied naturally also to the way we manage projects. It's not just for children, it's for people aiming to boost productivity, to increase morale, to improve the quality, and to improve the excitement.
This is exactly what gamification brings to your project. And you may ask me, okay, but Ricardo, how do I do that? Okay, I'm managing, you know, a serious project. How do I create this concept of gamification? We can see gamification everywhere. When you get a credential, you receive a badge, and you start collecting badges. This is a gamification mindset when, for example, you go to a chat, and you say super user, and you create this kind of ranking on those who respond, or you collect a badge newbie, you collect a second badge. For example, Titan. This is gamification, for example, for those in the project management field. If you go to project management.com is the PMI, I would say in some sort of knowledge-sharing area, you see users, and the users; have their badges, and these will create incentives for them to play and to be interactive and to support that community. And this is the use of gamification. How do you do that? First, you need to set up challenges. So let me take a serious example. Now you have a Kanban, you have a Kanban board, and you can create challenges on that. Kanban, I would say you need to move these two up to the end of the sprint. Who moves more will be on the top. So you create a challenge, but a challenge that is tangible. You cannot create a challenge that it's impossible because it's like a game.
If you create a game that is impossible to be played or impossible for you to get win, you just don't play because you want to have the feeling of winning. But also, at the same time, it cannot be very easy. It needs to have the challenge that will deliver the excitement. The second thing, it's when you deliver, you get a reward. And I love the concept of micro rewards. I am part of the advisory board of an Estonian startup called ERA, and ERA is a company that is specialized in the concept of these micro rewards. And what is the idea behind this? It's you collect points by doing things that will improve the project in a gamification style, and you collect, for example, 40 points, and then you can go to a reward system, and you can exchange these points for dinner for a movie concert ticket. I'm not talking about the bonus you will receive for the success of your project, but I'm talking about micro rewards that almost every week, almost every other week, you receive this kind of perk. And the perk does not need to be financial. A perk can be a badge. A perk can be a recognition. A perk can be your name on a leaderboard saying. This was the winner of the month on our squad or our Kanban team. And this will create healthy competition. Healthy. It's not something that we are trying to replace all the controls and the systems, but we are trying to create excitement, boost morale and increase productivity because then people will be able to give the extra mile to deliver on their objectives of the project.
So this is a very interesting topic for you to think about. You don't need software. You can do this on a wall. You can do this. Remember when you were a child at school when you did something good, and your teacher gives you a star, and you went proud back home and said, Look, I collected three stars this week because I did good things. This is the stimulation. And this is clearly gamification. You can do this, for example, on a construction site. You can put this on the wall. You can do this online using tools for your Kanban or using tools like Trello or JIRA to help you to create this concept of a game where I want to move this to this because if I move this to this, I will receive, for example,, from this column to this column on my Kanban board, I will receive X amount of points and these points I can exchange, I can go up on the leaderboard, or I can receive a badge. Think about that because this does not look serious, but this is one of the best ways of improving the results of your project. Think about that, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
