From an article by Steven Grant in Comic Book Resources in answer the question ‘Where do you get your ideas?’

‘Ideas don’t come from information being neatly processed and organized, it comes from wild collisions. Rather picture all the information in your mind as a game of Jenga, all your absorbed information stacked like little blocks of wood.

Now start pulling pieces out.

The stack itself isn’t of interest. The patterns the information makes when it tumbles chaotically, the intersections or openings left when it lands in chaos, those are where ideas arise. That’s what juxtapositions are: patterns, intersections and interstices. Pattern recognition.’

A few years after I had launched Jenga at the London Toy Fair, the game was picked up by Irwin Toy, the biggest toy company in Canada. At the New York Toy Fair, early this year, I put a question to Hal Ross, formerly a sales director of Irwin Toy, and George Irwin, the current Chairman and CEO:

Why did Jenga work?

Today, each of these men is renowned throughout the toy world for an almost magical ability to pick and back a winner. Yet, even they seem unable to pinpoint and articulate what it is about Jenga that explains its success, other than to say that it’s simple, and simple in this case worked.

But, why did simple work?

I’m not sure there can be one simple answer to this question because I think we play games for reasons that are multifaceted and multilayered, some of which I discuss in more detail in the book. However,  one possible reason for Jenga’s success may come from the fact that the game addresses much of what we want from a game, in the simplest way possible. Good design is all about providing the simplest, the most economical, and the most elegant solutions to a problem. However complex the problem, we instinctively prefer the simple solution to the convoluted or complicated.

It is often said that to be a successful designer or entrepreneur you need to be able to ‘think outside the box’. Well, frankly, I think the complete opposite is true. In my opinion, an innovative designer is someone who is able to think creatively inside the box.

To suggest that we are at our most innovative and creative when we can float free of all boundaries, I believe shows a quite fundamental lack of understanding of the design process.

Boring as this may sound, designers are required to work within defined parameters, their creativity necessarily trammelled by the practical demands of having to consider cost, materials, or the market.

I would suggest, therefore, that a skilled designer must be able to identify the boundaries of the box (or market) and know what tools to use in order to fashion an innovative way of solving a problem, or addressing a need that exists within the confines of that box.  Certainly, the ability to think laterally (as implied by the outside the box metaphor) is one of a number of essential skills of the successful designer.  But I think lateral thinking can only be classed as ‘lateral’ (or perhaps, as thinking at all) if you approach, with logic, the problems contained within one box armed with an understanding of the problems and solutions of another box.

In ‘About Jenga’, I touch on how I think there is much to learn from the natural world, from animals and plants, about the nature of human commerce; about branding and marketing and trading. I should stress, however, that to glean anything useful from how an animal or plant ‘markets’ its own wares – one needs first to understand the environment (the box) within which it operates. Luckily for me, I’m married to a behavioural ecologist, an evolutionary biologist who has spent much of his life trying to unravel the mysteries of animal behaviour. I often shamelessly tap into his knowledge and understanding of his world when I step into my toy box to begin designing a new game.

Intro from an article I wrote for The Toy Book

About Jenga

The Dream

Having devised and published some forty games over the past twenty-five years, I think I can claim, with some justification, that I am a seasoned and professional board game designer with some tangible experience of the toy industry. But, back in 1982 when I left a good job with the high-tech giant, Intel, and stepped into the world of play clutching my very low-tech game, a box of 54 wooden blocks, all I had was a dream. The dream that I could build Jenga into the best selling game in the world. Yet, I knew next to nothing about the business of toys and games.

Which is probably just as well. Frankly, I don’t know if I would have attempted to launch Jenga if I had had even the slightest inkling of the (financial) risks I faced in taking my first game to market, myself.  As it turned out, I had already sold my house and my Intel shares (oh, how I was to regret parting with those gold-chip Intel shares) and had sunk the proceeds from both into manufacturing and promoting Jenga before it dawned on me that most toy retailers would not, could not, deal with a fledgling one-woman business that was selling a single unknown product with no traction. (The Toy Book vol.25, No.4 July/August 2009)

By any scale of reckoning, I think it fair to consider the game of Jenga a phenomenal success. Few novel game ideas are ever turned into products that even make it to market. Very few that do make it to market last beyond a season or two, and very, very few of those become a household name worldwide.

Jenga is one of these very, very few of the very few.

Though I am a professional games designer (one of few) and have researched, devised, published, and marketed close to forty games during the past twenty-six years (some original, some derivative, some more successful than others), I have always struggled to find an entirely satisfactory answer when asked to explain the secret of the appeal and success of Jenga, my first game.

This book is the result of my attempt to find an answer.

Opening paragraph of  Chapter Six

Patently Obvious

‘Before I launched Jenga at the London Toy Fair in January 1983, I made an appointment to see a patent agent to discuss how best to protect the game. However rationally I might discuss the risks associated with treating business as a game, my instincts as a seasoned games player kicked in the moment I decided to step into business on my own. Assuming that there were rules of engagement peculiar to business, I felt that by taking a game to market I would attract competitors who would consider it fair play to copy the game if I took no steps to prevent that.’

Excerpt from Chapter 5 ‘ The Name of the Game’

‘So, why did this word jenga feel so right to me? Why, when most new words failed, did it succeed? And why, despite this success, have I avoided – albeit unconsciously until now-launching any other game with a seemingly meaningless word for its name?’ Page 54