Nonna's Feast: Using Game Design Practice for Knowledge Transmission in Small Teams

Knowledge transmission within organizations is a challenging problem, particularly for tacit knowledge. Existing approaches to knowledge transmission often require substantial overhead, which makes them difficult for small teams. As a small team ourselves, we identified budgeting processes as an area where knowledge transmission was needed, and we developed an analog game which models these processes as a lightweight way of “making to understand.” Our goal was to build a shared mental model both through the design process itself and through the resulting gameplay. We found that the design process was highly effective for eliciting and synthesizing our collective understanding of budgeting, both for members of the design team and for teammates who did not participate in game design. In contrast, an external colleague was able to describe game mechanics but not articulate the shared mental model. We consider this evidence that our process successfully leveraged shared organizational context to transmit tacit knowledge about how our team interacts internally and interfaces with the larger university.