Using Visual Language to Innovate

What’s the Latest Development? 

Business author Sunni Brown uses a visual communication system to shake up the workplace and get everybody on the same page. She calls her approach Gamestorming. “Gamestorming is a mashup of game principles, game mechanics and work. … It’s a structured way to help people solve any number of problems that you’re dealing with, but it’s not traditional so you get many different kinds of thinking. … Gamestorming is a way of depersonalizing and a way of systematizing innovation.  There’s no business that can’t use it.”

What’s the Big Idea?

Brown says she was inspired by Thomas Edison’s workshop to make her communication and innovation techniques simple enough to use effectively. “Western innovation was a bunch of people getting together, colliding ideas, playing with their hands and doing things that human beings do when they’re really trying to engage a topic or a challenge,” she says. But there is a modern element, as well. “Much of the work that we do is based on the latest cognitive research about how the brain works.”