“We need a change. We don’t know what it is. We’re stuck and we don’t know why. We’re tired and need to feel invigorated and excited about who we are. We’ve fallen out of love with our organization. We want to see our organization with fresh eyes. We’re bored. We want to thrive.” I’d like to spend a day with your employees playing the Renaissance game. We’re going to look at your organization as if for the first time, using the tools of the Renaissance to examine the Artifacts of the present. •RENAI-WHO? The Renaissance was a rebirth of curiosity, a time when artists, scientists and thinkers crossed boundaries freely. To thrive in an era of rapid disruption, we must transition our workplace from a rigid, siloed fiefdom into a vibrant, collaborative ecosystem that unlocks individual genius and drives collective innovation. •ARTI-WHAT? I’m talking about organizational artifacts: the documents, relics, symbols and systems every organization accumulates, such as your mission statement, branding materials and org charts. We will kickstart that transformation through a game. We will revisit these artifacts the way a Renaissance person would look at a blank canvas: with curiosity rather than compliance. What does it actually say? What is it not saying? What would happen if we combined it with something it has no business being next to? History shows that amazing things happen when we dissolve the boundaries between disciplines, when we explore the world through different senses, and when we combine things that don’t appear to belong together… AN ODD COUPLE: THE RENAISSANCE & BUSINESS Hey, did you know that the Renaissance and business have no business being together? I couldn’t help but set that one up. Seriously, though, it’s an arranged marriage I find hard to resist. To bring the Renaissance into your business, without the boring system-transformation methods, I designed a game that compresses a sweeping cultural movement into a tangible experience for any organization. In fact, it reduces the Renaissance to a board game you can play in a single day! HOW TO PLAY THE BOARD: A giant empty wall space. THE PIECES: Gather as many organizational artifacts as you can. Every organization has at least a dozen, if not several dozen. Get creative and go beyond the textbook examples: job descriptions, meeting agendas, performance review templates, office floor plans, even the logo on the coffee mug. THE PLAYERS: Divide people into small teams of two to four, so that everyone has a voice. Aim for at least three or four teams, so that the share-out at the end of the day surfaces a wealth of ideas and perspectives. THE TWIST: You’ve spent years with these documents, and they’ve become wallpaper, bureaucratic furniture, fossils. People forgot they existed. Each artifact tells a story about what felt right at one point in time, and you may be stuck in a story that was written years ago. It’s time to shake things up. At this point, I announce to the group that you have stepped into a new reality, one totally unrelated to the work and field you are in right now. It’s an absurd scenario, a jolt, and it’s fun. People have to radically reframe what they’re seeing. THE CHAOS: It’s time to reconcile the new reality with the current state of the artifacts. What needs to change? I provide a deck of cards with provocative questions and unusual images to open your imagination. The answers to these questions modify the artifacts. Teams start to arrange them on the wall. Let them play with art materials to add color and design. Let it get pretty. Or messy. The morphing exhibit puts people in motion with the artifacts as they respond with words, drawings or anything else. They deconstruct, decategorize, rearrange and build until they’re satisfied and ready to share what they’ve made. HOW THE GAME ENDS Each team picks one storyteller to describe their exhibit. Everyone then walks through all of the exhibits for an up-close look, chooses the ideas they like best, and reflects on how to implement them. For some, it’s about spotting corrections and improvements. For others, it’s simply a new angle on something they’ve viewed head-on for a long time. By the end of the day, you will see a wealth of ideas and perspectives you didn’t know existed. Your teams will have built something that is part archaeology, part art exhibition and part strategic provocation: a generator that keeps producing questions and observations long after the game ends, and a testament that your organization is a living, breathing, creative entity. Your organization already has everything it needs to create its own Renaissance time capsule. The artifacts are there. The people are there. The walls are there. And they all have a lot to say. DOES THE GAME REALLY END? It doesn’t have to. The game can be the spark that lights a flame that keeps burning long after the day is over. Keep the exhibit (or pieces of it) on permanent display. Or turn it into a book or a documentary. RESULTS TO EXPECT Here’s an honest note on results. You may have a wonderful time and create something that seems meaningless. Then, days or weeks later, someone has a eureka moment, and it traces back to a wall of strange juxtapositions. Or your team may simply need a moment to let loose and have fun, and that’s a result too. How does this actually work? The theory is that facing a problem or a stuck area head-on doesn’t always produce answers, and moving through challenges in a straight line isn’t the only way through. When you stop staring directly at what you’re trying to achieve and let your imagination run wild, new insights can surface from the side. That shift in perspective is where fresh, even groundbreaking ideas come from. The game is full of metaphors, and afterward we can work backward together to see what they mean for your organization on a practical level.