Something really cool happened this past week. I’m currently in the process of getting the museum I work at on board with utilizing Goosechase in the work we do. In order to make my case, I put on a Goosechase experience for our staff holiday party.
For context, our workplace is terribly siloed, with my front facing staff sometimes going months without seeing the face of some staff members who prefer to hide away in their top floor office or work from home. It has been a challenge to try to change that, to get staff to interact with one another in a way that feels meaningful and even-footed.
Enter: the holiday party.
The experience was a fun one to create, and seemingly equally as fun to participate in. By including challenges to talk to someone you haven’t met before, to talk to high level staff about non-work topics (and take a selfie with the organization’s president!), to start a dance-off with at least 8 people, and more, I witnessed something really cool happen. The regular division between departments began to blur and, with each additional submission, it became clear that staff were learning more than one another beyond the small-talk that accompanies onboarding in most cases.
I am mentioning this here for a few reasons. First of all, I just think it is really cool to see regular social patterns interrupted to alter the flow of how humans experience otherwise “normal” scenarios. Also, I initially began to pursue Goosechase at my museum because I want visitors to the museum to feel like guests and not just attendees - they should have an experience that enhances their visit, and Goosechase really fits the need. Truly, what I think visitors (and most humans) want is a sense of community and belonging. I hadn’t even anticipated that the experience I made could generate that feeling of community among a group of people who were usually so estranged from one another.
I wanted to share this story here because, as a service professional, I have been puzzling over how to bring people together in a culture that is individualistic, and I think there may be even more possibilities that I am overlooking. I am wondering if others have had similar experiences to mine and/or what other applications have been used to create communities where there were none before. What a cool way to bring people together!
