Late Night Wordleing
29 January 2022Most nights I’d say I’m usually asleep by about 11.30pm, staying up, probably later than I should, to ensure that I enjoy those delicious few hours of grownup television and uninterrupted, guilt free, social media surfing. Lately however, I have been going to sleep at approximately 00.05am. Why you might ask? Well it’s all to do with those pesky bricks that have been littering twitter feeds and have even surfaced on facebook too… (rare.. not many things seem to crossover between the two platforms these days.. hardly any of my facebook friends seem to be that troubled by #leavingpartygate #birthdaycakegate #makethemostofthesunshinegate …. ) illustrating the coloured square’s popularity.
Wordle. You’re probably as hooked as me, or if you’re not, you’re about to be if you visit this website – https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ If you do, please read the rules and don’t (like me) race into your first wordle not really understanding what the different colours meant because your first fail will haunt your cumulative statistics FOREVER.
Here are the rules anyway and of course, its genius is in its ELEGANT SIMPLICITY TM.
Added bonus, its creator is Welsh! Here’s yesterday’s Wordle (Wordle players know that you must never share the word on the day that its been released!)
Anyway, it’s intriguing to me that it’s affecting my sleep pattern because I’ve never been someone who is into games (particularly ones played by those you are in a relationship with 😁). Some couples and families seem really into them and genuinely have fun getting together to play them … I just don’t get it. Saying that, in Lockdown 1 when I was genuinely on the edge, I panic bought MANY different board games (it would seem that Boris didn’t) to attempt to pass the time including Mouse Trap – a game that I had desired AS MUCH as I had desired a kitten when I was younger. Within 2 minutes of opening said game and discovering the amount of parts and construction involved, I suddenly appreciated why my parents had never bought it for me.
They were wrong about the kitten though.
Whilst my soul might sigh when my daughter asks to play a game of Junior Cluedo, or even worse, Monopoly *SHUDDERS* I am very aware about how powerful combining tasks with a sprinkling of gaming fun is to business (or to use the proper term ‘gamification’).
The website www.gamify.com explains gamification really nicely (and there’s lots of nice examples there too):
They add “What’s interesting is that gamification is not a new concept. While the term may have been coined in more recent times, the concept has existed in many areas of life for as long as civilisation has existed. If you remember watching Mary Poppins, she sums up gamification quite nicely with the quote “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and SNAP! the job’s a game.”
Duolingo – the BRILLIANT app that helps you learn languages was a master at gamification, using points, badges and leaderboards to help you to progress through the language levels whilst also, staying loyal and tuned to the app. It is so good at giving you little pokes to get you to play, sending notifications of crying owls, sad that you haven’t played for 4 days, that it gave birth to this tweet by Lauren Scharf.
So much of online learning incorporates gamification now that I really do think that Universities should be more proactively incorporating gamification into their offer (some already do I know) and whilst we need our students to apply more brain activity than a mere 5 minutes daily at midnight, we, and many other services, can learn a lot from Wordle’s success. And wouldn’t you know it, a lot of the learning points are …. you’ve guessed it…. LEAN!
- Brilliant use of visual management. The simple use of three colours to help you progress down the stack, reflected in the colours of the keyboard, which help you to cycle through the different five letter words cluttering your brain. There isn’t nearly enough visual management in the world for my liking (appreciate that this is a problem for visually impaired people – there can also be far more auditory cues as well).
- Daily management routine – there is something about the fact that a new word is released at the same time every day, its habit forming and comforting in its repetition (like Love Island is every night at 9pm). It builds discipline and enhances progress.
- Measures what’s important. It’s so easy to see how well you did each time. YES! I got it in 3. OMG I got it in 2 (luck) .. too many 6s in a row .. think more carefully about your first word Sarah! Which is of course, in itself …
- A relentless focus on lead time reduction. (Kind of).
p.s. this article suggests that the reason Wordle has been so successful is partly due to its inbuilt marketing tool, encouraging you to share how well you did on social media whilst protecting the daily wordle word, via the cryptic shadow of coloured squares. The driving force for this success being that human beings like having the opportunity to show off how clever they are.
Let’s just focus on the lean points shall we 😁.
- Double Meanings
- Ticketing Masterplans
- When will it all end …
- Lifetime Loyalty and Taylor Swift
- Looking at Things Differently
- Networking Noodles
- Addicted to Truth
- Designs on Service Design
- The Multiple Joys of Universal Design
- Hungry Cultures
- Event Lean
- The Traffic Analogy
- Moving on Up
- Rosé Cava Revolution?
- Powerpoint Sneaky Lean
- Writing about Writing
- ChatGPT Response: Exploring the Art of Expression: Unveiling the Magic of Writing in the Style of Sarah Lethbridge
- Help to Grow Coldplay Style
- Caring IS Everything!
- Institutional Flapping
- “Just Do the Next Right Thing”
- Trust Thermoclines
- Organisational Tempo
- The Inaugural Lethbridge Customer Service Awards
- Vaccine Lean – The Dawn of the Water Spider
- The Queen and Lean
- Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
- Peaceful Protest
- Tesla Tales
- Back to Reality!
- Carrots, Sticks and Buckets of Time Tricks
- The Great Pandemic Pause
- Organisational Therapy
- Late Night Wordleing
- Vaccine Lean
- Chief Letters of Complaint Officer
- AMBAZING Accreditation!
- My Big Lean Head
- [Let us] Help [you] to Grow: Management
- The Love Island Blog
- October 2024 (1)
- September 2024 (1)
- July 2024 (2)
- June 2024 (1)
- May 2024 (1)
- March 2024 (1)
- February 2024 (2)
- December 2023 (2)
- October 2023 (2)
- September 2023 (1)
- July 2023 (3)
- June 2023 (1)
- May 2023 (1)
- April 2023 (1)
- March 2023 (1)
- February 2023 (1)
- January 2023 (1)
- November 2022 (1)
- October 2022 (2)
- August 2022 (2)
- July 2022 (1)
- May 2022 (2)
- April 2022 (1)
- February 2022 (1)
- January 2022 (1)
- December 2021 (2)
- November 2021 (1)
- October 2021 (1)
- September 2021 (1)
- August 2021 (1)
- July 2021 (1)
- May 2021 (2)
- April 2021 (1)
- March 2021 (1)
- January 2021 (1)
- December 2020 (1)
- October 2020 (3)
- August 2020 (1)
- June 2020 (2)
- April 2020 (1)
- March 2020 (1)
- February 2020 (1)
- December 2019 (2)
- October 2019 (1)
- September 2019 (1)
- August 2019 (1)
- July 2019 (1)
- June 2019 (1)
- February 2019 (3)
- October 2018 (1)
- September 2018 (1)
- March 2018 (10)
- April 2016 (1)
- January 2015 (3)
- July 2014 (9)
- September 2013 (1)