Workplace games

A small set of card and board games I designed and ran inside the workplace at Booking — used to break silos, align teams to organisation-level KPIs, onboard new joiners, and make data-literacy practice work both in person and remotely.

Most instructional-design practice avoids tabletop. The reasons it shouldn’t: cards and boards make complex systems legible faster than slide decks, and they force the conversation an LMS cannot.

The set

Onboarding game — board with cards

A multi-team board game for new joiners. Players sequence the actual end-to-end of a product launch — who picks up first, who hands off when — across the functions that touch it. Each team holds a small deck of role cards that spell out what they own. The premise: launching a product is a sequencing problem disguised as a coordination problem, and you cannot break a silo you have never seen the inside of.

After the new-joiner cohort, an executive-level adaptation ran with the same mechanic but sharper decision pressure — the game traveled up the org instead of just down.

KPI alignment card game

A card-based session that mapped local team work to organisation-level KPIs. Each team formulated a data hypothesis from a deck of prompt cards, identified the relevant dashboards, and aligned the hypothesis to the wider KPI tree. Sparked new metric creation across teams and gave cross-team visibility into dashboards that had previously been invisible to non-data audiences.

Data Literacy online card game

A digital-cards adaptation built into the Data Literacy workshop series so delivery could scale to remote audiences. The scaffolding the in-person card games provided — discrete decision objects, social interaction, structured feedback — translated into a tool that worked over a video call without losing the play loop. The wider workshop programme posted 100% recommendation, 100% confidence in core skills at completion, and 83%+ behavioural adoption at 3-week follow-up.

Why I keep coming back to tabletop

Three reasons, in the order they tend to win the argument:

• Tabletop forces the actual conversation. A card on the table is a discrete decision object. Players have to defend it, swap it, or play it. An LMS quiz never produces the same fight, because the consequence is a percentage, not a teammate.
• Game design teaches systems thinking faster than diagrams. When you sequence a launch by playing it, the dependencies become embodied knowledge — not slides you nodded at.
• It scales sideways into culture. A game played by leadership the week before the rollout is the same game you then ship to the cohort. You build trust in the mechanic at the top of the org and ride that trust down.

A pattern, for anyone planning the same

• Start with the operational problem, not the genre. “Teams don’t know who owns what” is a sequencing-mechanic problem. “Teams can’t connect their work to KPIs” is a hand-management problem. Pick the mechanic from the problem; don’t force one.
• Run the leadership-friendly first session. Buy-in from the first cohort makes scaling trivial.
• Design the remote variant from day one if the org is distributed. The Data Literacy adaptation came after the in-person version was already proven; in retrospect, designing for both upfront would have saved a redesign pass.

Status

The set sits with their respective programme owners — the cards survive me. New ones come along when an operational problem looks like a mechanic.