This presentation was given at the Lean Software and Systems Conference 2012 (LSSC12).

We are in the midst of a massive transformation of human work into partnerships with machine systems. At the leading edge are people who build those systems and who are reinventing the way they produce value using the concepts embodied in Kanban and Lean. Multiplayer video games represent our most highly evolved forms of human-computer team interaction. Games offer a detailed blueprint for how work can be reconfigured to be more engaging, productive and even deeply satisfying. The ingredients used by great game designers are knowable and can be assembled to complement and greatly enhance the transformation envisioned in Lean software and systems approaches. These benefits require that game ideas be deployed in ways that individual workers (players) see as legitimately satisfying their interests and those of the enterprise’s epic story.