Infectious Play and Contagious Diseases

Want to save the human race from being wiped out by deadly diseases?

 Pandemic is a new multi-player cooperative board game that that lets up to five players test their kills at halting the global spread of fatal afflictions and absorb some science at the same time.  Play the Game, a story by Richard Grant in TheScientist.com  explains how it works. You start at a CDC research lab in Atlanta. Four deadly diseases are represented by 96 wooden cubes. Other pieces include 59 player cards, 48 infection cards, reference cards, a stack of city cards, and some special circumstance cards. An epidemic card—and there are six of them—can cause a chain reaction of disease outbreaks in cities all over the world.

 An interesting thing about this game is that the players all win or lose together, and they have to work really hard collaborate against the spread of disease.  If all the cities in this global game become infected, which can happen fast with adverse circumstances and inopportune timing and strategies, everyone loses. There are no dice, and players have to respond to random events created by shuffled decks of cards, and they have to consider the strengths and weaknesses of their colleagues. Players are assigned roles with differing abilities.  A medic, for instance, may be able to treat infected cities more effectively than other players, but the researcher can change cards with greater ease than other players. A dispatcher can mover other players around, an operations manager can build research labs in any city, and scientist needs only four cards of the same color to “cure” a disease. Other players need five. Several reviewers say it’s addicting for adults. Elaborate rules could make it frustrating for young children.   Watch a demonstration onYouTube,  Click here for the story and read reviews by game geeks and scroll down on the Amazon site to read reviews by other players.

  96 wooden cubes (for diseases)

•   5 pawns
•   6 wooden research stations
•   6 markers: 1 outbreak marker, 1 infection rate marker, and 4 cure markers
•   115 Cards
•   48 infection cards
•   59 player cards
•   4 role cards
•   4 quick reference cards

 Reviews – http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/531895/pandemic-a-board-game-odyssey-review

 http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/295883/whats-up-with-pandemic

 http://www.plexusinstitute.org/ontheedge/

Innovate and Enjoy with Liberating Structures

Can the most productive meeting  be one that starts without an agenda?

Can one minute of silent reflection change the outcome of a meeting?

Can the majority of people in an organization be willing and able to contribute something that will make a significant difference?

Can meetings be fun?

 With Liberating Structures, answers to all those questions can be an enthusiastic “Yes.”

 Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless tell how Liberating Structures work in their article in Performance, a quarterly business publication of the Global Business Thinktank of Ernst & Young.  Liberating Structures are a growing collection of processes and methods that make it quick and easy for a group of any size  to change how its members interact and collaborate. They are designed to tap into  collective intelligence,  liberate energy and stimulate creativity. You have probably heard of Open Space Technology, Conversation Cafes, and Storytelling.  There are many more, and some may surprise you. They interesting to learn, productive to use,  and engaging for participants who discover that their own ideas are significant, and that people in conversation together can produce solutions for all kinds of thorny issues.  

 In the experience of these authors, both Liberating Structure pioneers,  including and unleashing everyone brings  hope and trust to organizational life.  Henri Lipmanowicz is a founder of Plexus Institute and chairs its Board of Trustees. He retired in 1998 after a30 career at Merck, where he was president of  International Region and Japan division. Keith McCandless, a founding partner of the Social Invention Group, is a consultant with expertise in  strategis planning, leadership and organizational development.  Lipmanowicz and McCandless both served as coaches for healthcare organizations in in  the Positive Deviance MRSA  Prevention Partnership, an initiative  to halt the spread of  MRSA in healthcare.

 Read their article here and learn  how these innovative practices can bring about positive change in large and small organizations of all kinds.