Role Playing

Origin. Moreno's psychodrama; adapted through Synectics and design research.

Mechanism. Simulates a stakeholder's constraint set from inside it. Adopting a role recruits knowledge the practitioner has but cannot retrieve when asked directly, because the retrieval cue is the situation rather than the question.

Procedure. Assign roles with concrete constraints, not adjectives: the on-call engineer at 3am, the procurement officer whose bonus depends on cost. Play the scenario. Record what each role notices that the analyst did not.

Applies to. Service design, adversarial review, and any system whose Limitationss are enacted rather than computed.

Limitations. Roles played as caricature return the caricature. The constraint set must be researched, or the exercise confirms the practitioner's prior about the stakeholder.