Measure & Mobilize!

Games can be a powerful way to build experience for social impact professionals. For social impact organizations, it can be challenging to build the capacity of every staff member globally through traditional information formats and channels. iDE has found that translation of strategic programming models into physical and digital board/card games, especially those focused on building resilience amongst SGB ecosystems, can be a powerful means to build knowledge and confidence for anyone through experiential learning within safe, iterative, and low-risk simulations.

To that end, iDE developed the "Measure & Mobilize!" board game to enable staff to engage with their core entrepreneurship/resilience model. iDE found that translating their iDE Infinite human-centered entrepreneurship model and the fostering of resilient market ecosystems through their Market Systems Resilience Index (MSRI) methodology into a strategy board game called Measure & Mobilize! aims to enable their 1,300 staff across 10 country programs to "play out" program lifecycles in which tradeoffs between improving entrepreneurial capacity of local market actors (e.g. producers, input retailers, last mile delivery entrepreneurs) and investing in their collaborative resilience capabilities. This format challenges players (team members) to think about how to maximize both impact today and resilience for tomorrow when designing and implementing real-world programs in agriculture, WASH, and other sectors.

Organizations can prioritize consistent, frequent, non-urgent routines with staff in which games balance day-to-day crises and deadlines with protected time and energy for learning, integration, and associative thinking capabilities. The results can be tangible and mission-centric: more and more colleagues forming into a critical mass of confident professionals drawing on deep experience - but experience that was generated quickly, safely, and creatively through carefully-designed gamification formats.