Timing:

30 minutes including prep and debrief

Overview:
A simple little game to help Scrum teams learn the importance of having a common understanding of a story.

So a while back I was having seeing a team have different interpretations of a story causing some confusion. Differing interpretations of the feature caused a little backtracking and introduced waste into the sprints.. nothing awful, just not ideal.

I came up with a very simple exercise to help the team understand that we can too easily make assumptions that everyone understand exactly what we mean, and the in fact our mental models are often quite different.

So I asked them to write down how they make Spaghetti Bolognese (or if you prefer, like me, Ragu*), a dish most us were likely to know. So they spent a few minutes thinking about it, and after everyone was done we went round the team reading out the ingredients.

Can you guess what happened?

Everyone had similar ingredients, but not the same. Most people had Mince, Onion, Carrot, Tomatoes.. some extended it into Celery (correct), a few added mushrooms (wrong), I had both Beef & Pork mince as well as Pancetta, Red Wine, Nutmeg, Oregano, Milk and Beef stock and not Spaghetti but Tagliatelle (I was taught this way by an 84yr old Italian Nonna, any deviation was food crime in her eyes ).

Learning Points:

So what did it tell us? We all know what Spaghetti Bolognese (*cough*  Tagliatelle al Ragu) is, but all had different interpretations. The team could draw the parallel from this to the assumptions we were making about other peoples understanding of a feature. It led to some very interesting discussions and a team habit of reiterating to each other the feature under development during sprint planning.

It eliminated much of the confusion and helped the team pull in a single direction.

Link to Game:

Ragu or Bolognese?

*Not Ragu the brand, Ragu is the correct name for the dish we know as Spaghetti Bolognese.

• 1 hour

Players (5..8 recommended):

• Project manager or facilitator
• Internal team

Ingredients:

• internet access
• a goal

Directions:
Circles of Influence, created by Deb Colden, can help you achieve your action potential by identifying connections that will lead you to success. Take advantage of this game to expand your network and turn your thoughts into plans.

Clicking on the image to the right will start an “instant play” game at innovationgames.com. Here, these two circles will be used as the “game board,” which will help you organize your connections and support. As a group, define your goals by dragging the blue stars from the upper left corner to the top of the board and describing what each represents. Then, move on to the circles.

• Left circle: “Circle of the Task”
• Right Circle: “Board of Directors”

The “Circle of the Task” represents people who can help you accomplish your goal. “Board of Directors,” is for people who will help you no matter what, and on whom you can rely on to provide encouragement and advice.

There will be two different icons that players can drag onto the circles and describe to represent your network:

• Green people – those in your “Circle of the Task”
• Blue people – those on your “Board of Directors”

All moves can be seen in real time by each participant, so everyone can edit the positions and descriptions of the icons. Also, the integrated chat facility allows you and your players to collaborate to uncover your connections.

Key Points:
This game involves visual organization and extensive collaboration to identify people who will help you reach your destination. By writing specific names, you can turn potential connections into beneficial relationships, and form a more focused approach on how to achieve your objective. Get the job done by expanding your network while utilizing the support of those who know you best.

A physical-participation disentanglement puzzle that helps a group learn how to work together (self-organize) and can be used to illustrate the difference between self-organization and command-control management or simply as a get-to-know-you icebreaker. Standing in a circle, group members reach across to connect hands with different people. The group then tries to unravel the “human knot” by unthreading their bodies without letting go of each other people’s hands.

Why you’d use it:

As a management-awareness game to illustrate required change in behavior and leadership on a management level (e.g., illustrate the change from ‘task-oriented’ management towards ‘goal/value-oriented’ management).

Timing: 15-30 minutes

Materials and environment: space (indoor or outdoor) big enough for a groups of 7-16 people (can scale for up to 200 people)

Instructions (from Holden Leadership Center):

1. If necessary split the entire group into smaller groups of 7 to 16 people (too many people in a human knot becomes extremely difficult). Groups of 10-12 are ideal.
2. Arrange group members in a circle, standing shoulder to shoulder.
3. Tell everyone to put his or her right hand up in the air and then grab the hand of someone across the circle.
4. Everyone then puts his or her left hand up in the air and grabs the hand of a different person.
5. Check to make sure that everyone is holding the hands of two different people and that not holding hands with someone directly next to him or her.
6. Tell group members to untangle themselves to make a circle without breaking the chain of hands.
7. If group members break the chain they need to start over.

Notes: 

• To illustrate the concept of centralized, top-down decision-making vs. self-organizing, run the activity twice: The first time, have a “manager” tell the participants how to solve the knot (they must obey); the second time, remove the manager (or let the manager observe and answer questions for the team) and let the participants solve for themselves.
• You can give teams a time limit on this activity to make it more challenging.
• You can also mute/ blindfold participants throughout the activity.
• Instead of making groups start over when the chain is broken you can create penalties like blinding or muting a group member.

Debrief/ discussion questions:

1. How did it feel to be successful/ unsuccessful?
2. How did it feel to be mute? Blind?
3. What strategy did your team end up using to complete the task?
4. Who were the leaders in this activity?
5. Did the team reach consensus on a plan of action? What process did the team go through to reach consensus?
6. How do you feel your team communicated during this activity?

Links:

• http://leadership.uoregon.edu/resources/exercises_tips/team_builders/human_knot
• http://wilderdom.com/games/descriptions/HumanKnot.html

Timing:

Prep: Printing out the handouts

Activity: 45 – 60 minutes, depending on the size of the group

Materials:

Handouts, pads of paper (# attendees / 2), pens (same as pads of paper)

Instructions:

This activity will occur in two rounds. The first round involves each person in the audience working along. You will ask them to write a story about something interesting that happened to them at work recently. Give them five minutes to write. At the end of the five minutes, ask for volunteers to share their stories. Two or three should be sufficient. Expect that generally they will be somewhat mundane/pedestrian, and also be prepared that someone might be very funny or fascinating.

The second round involves pairing. Each pair will write a short story (fiction), based on “requirements” (see The Requirements below). The pair will take turns working on the story, alternating as indicated below.

Activity will be broken into two minute turns.

During each turn, one member of the pair will write, while the other will watch and ensure that the constraints are met (see The Rules below).

At the end of each turn, you will have them switch roles.

There will be seven turns.

At the end of the time (all seven turns), you will give them two more minutes to “refactor” their stories.  Then you will give as many pairs as possible an opportunity to read their stories aloud to the rest of the class. Expect a mix of boring/mundane (john said and then mary said) and incredibly creative/funny.

1. Introduce the setting: work, geography, industry, weather, time of day,…
2. Introduce character one: gender, name, age, education, single/married/paired/whatever
3. Introduce character two: gender, name, age, education, pet(s), hobbies
4. Introduce character one’s job
5. Conversation between One and Two about a problem at work
6. Manager appears and participates in conversation
7. All three go out for lunch: where, what kind of food, how do they get there

The Rules

• No sentences longer than twenty words – shoot for ten or less.
• Character names no more than two syllables.
• No paragraphs longer than five sentences.
• No “he said” and “she said” – must use names.
• No sentence may begin with “So” or “And” or “But”.
• Use adjectives judiciously.
• Locale must be a real place.

Gomez Goobers was a happy place to work. GG, as it is known in the industry, is in the heart of Chicago’s South Loop. In September, the weather was cooling off and people were walking the streets for pleasure.

GG’s lead programmer, Tim Thomas, loved living in Chicago. After college, he met Mary, whom he married two years later. Tim and Mary have been married for three years now. Tim and Mary live in a small, two-bedroom house in a nearby suburb of Chicago.

Tim’s counterpart was Billie Bliss, the lead QA. Billie, who is an avid dog lover, lives in town in an apartment overlooking the lake with her Beagle named Bugle. Everyone wonders where Billie got the money to afford a place like that. At twenty-five, she’s too young to have accumulated much. Her co-workers speculate, and her family and friends aren’t telling.

After completing both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science, Tim came to work at GG. He loves technology, loves programming, and has progressed rapidly in the year and a half he’s been at GG. He has already worked in several programming languages and on several operating systems. These days, he’s focused on Ruby on Rails on a Linux platform.

Tim and Billie have been struggling with getting their teams to work together more effectively. Unfortunately, they are plagued by…

Decide who is going to write, and who is going to observe for the first turn.

Learning Points:

• Working in pairs produces results that we would never produce on our own
• Creativity is increased by pairing
• Pairing can be fun
• Pairing produces more effective results than working alone

• 1 hour

Players (5..8 recommended):

• Project leader or facilitator
• Project staff

Ingredients:

• Internet access
• A past project to analyze

Directions:
The goal of this retrospective game, as described in Diana Larsen and Esther Derby’s Agile Retrospectives, is to identify your top-priority items to enhance your iteration. Clicking on the image to the right will take you to an “instant play” game at innovationgames.com. Here, this image will be used as the “game board,” which categorizes the four aspects of the past project that you will be focusing on. You will also see four icons in the top left corner, which represent your ideas. Each image correlates with a different section of the graph:

• Quadrant 1: Frown face for aspects you disliked, should be changed
• Quadrant 2: Smiley face for aspects you liked, should be repeated
• Quadrant 3: Light bulb for new ideas to try
• Quadrant 4: People you appreciated

To add the icons, simply drag them to the board and describe what they represent. Everyone can edit the placement and description of each image, which can be seen in real time. Collaborate through the chat facilitator to build from each other’s ideas and improve your past project.

Key Points:
Learning Matrix allows you to perform retrospective analysis while maintaining a positive environment. By narrowing down your thoughts, you can discover how to enhance your project for the future and lay out your plan for immediate improvement. Collaborate to identify what should be repeated, changed, or tried, and to congratulate team members for a job well-done.

• 1 hour

Players (5..8 recommended)

• Project team (manager, director, developers, designers, programmers, etc.)
• Neutral facilitator recommended

Ingredients

• Internet access
• A past project to reflect on

Directions
The goal of this game, introduced by Diana Larsen, is to efficiently form high-quality plans through retrospective analysis by recognizing factors that are within the team’s control. Before identifying what you want to improve, you must first be clear on the dimensions you can regulate and what you need to adapt to. Clicking on the link to the right will take you to an “instant play” game at innovationgames.com. Here, the image will be used as the “game board,” which consists of three concentric circles. Each circle represents a different element of your project:

• Inner circle: “Team Controls” – what your team can directly manage
• Middle circle: “Team Influences” –persuasive actions that your team can take to move ahead
• Outer circle: “The Soup” – elements that cannot be changed. This term — explained further by James Shore – refers to the environments we work in and have adapted to. Ideas from the other 2 circles can identify ways to respond to the barriers floating in our “soup.”

You will find an icon of blue squares at the upper left corner of the board. Each square symbolizes an idea, which players describe and drag onto the respective circle.

All edits of square placements and descriptions made by the players can be seen in real time. Communicate throughout the game using the integrated chat facility to get a better understanding of each move.

Key Points
Negative self-evaluating activities often end up emotional and unproductive. Take advantage of this game’s visual organization and extensive collaboration to avoid the blame and hopelessness that cover up ideas for future improvement. By identifying factors your team can control, influence, or cannot change, you can collectively discover how to respond to and overcome various situations. Play Circles and Soup to recognize what you can do to avoid barriers and gain insight on what actions will most effectively enhance your project.

Materials: None – just your hands.

Instructions

Four person team, around a table in a bar. One member chooses to use Zhong Zhi to surface an issue about poor performance.

Everyone takes their hands off the table. On the count of three, everyone is to put their right hand down on the table with between one and four fingers extended. The team wins if there’s one person with one finger extended, one person with two, one with three, one with four. Ready, steady, play.

It is unlikely this will happen by chance (less than one chance in ten). Repeat until either (a) it does happen by chance, or (b, preferably) someone notices that there’s nothing in the rules about not talking to one another before putting the hands down.

Variations

For the problem of over committal : same game except that the number of fingers put down should be 3, 4, 5 and 6. Either (a) someone says lets use both hands [increase team size] or (b, preferably) the team refuses to play until the goal is achievable.

For teams who want to investigate the sense of winners and losers, or of creative solutions within fixed constraints. The team divides into pairs, preferably facing across the table like a foursome playing bridge. When the hands appear, a pair wins if they have the same number of fingers while other pairs do not. Non-verbal communication is allowed. Once a team has won using a form of communication, that form may not be used again.

Learning Points

“So, we don’t talk to each other unless someone makes us”

“We accepted the crazy target, why didn’t we just say no?”

Background

The first suggestion for a name, Middle Finger, was considered offensive. Zhong Zhi (get a Mandarin Chinese speaker to help you with pronunciation) means middle finger, and we hope is less offensive and cooler.

Written up by Jonathan Clarke with credit to my friends at Agile 2011, in the Agile Game Incubator session run by Michael McCullough and Don McGreal.

It is a game in which multiple teams have to coordinate to fold certain quantities of different airplanes that meet certain acceptance criteria (like being able to fly ). John has made a nice matrix on what aspects of agile are covered by this game:

I have not been able to test this game myself, but I am planning on doing it soon.

Ingredients:
• Internet access

Players (5..8 recommended):
• Event leader
• Employees / team members or event attendees

The goal of this game, based on Nick Oostvogel’s Actions Centered, is to examine multiple aspects of an event in order to form original ideas on how it can be enhanced in the future. Clicking on this image will start an “instant play” game at innovationgames.com. Here, this image will be used as the “game board,” and there will be five different icons that players can drag onto the chart and describe to capture their ideas.

• Puzzles: Questions for which you have no answer, represented by a question mark.
• Risks: Future pitfalls that can endanger the project, represented by a bomb.
• Appreciations: What you liked during the previous iteration, represented by a smiley face.
• Wishes: Not improvements, but ideas of your ideal project, represented by a star.

The chart is divided into five quadrants for the five categories of thoughts.

All moves can be seen in real time by each participant, so everyone can collaborate to edit the ideas. Also, you can use the integrated chat facility to encourage the players to expand on their ideas and come up with fresh insights.

Key Points:
This unique strategy involves extensive teamwork and spatial organization, so your group can think differently about retrospectives and brainstorm changes for progress. Also, by writing thoughts down and working together, participants will be more comfortable providing ideas for how to improve the event rather than feeling as if they are criticizing past ideas. Play Actions for Retrospectives to reflect on the past in order to advance toward the future.