I went the other day to an Agile Serious Games session organized by Wemanity, and we did nice exercises to illustrate the values and advantages of Agile Management. If you’re not familiar with the expression ‘serious games’, it’s used when playing a game that has a professional purpose, that makes the participants experience a problem and sometimes also a solution.
I would like to share with you the ‘ping-pong race’ serious game:
- Create teams of at least 5 people. It works very well with more people, try to keep it in teams of around 10 people, though it doesn’t matter if you only have one team. You’ll need at least 30 ping-pong balls and a basket per each team.
- Tell people to group making a circle. One person of the team will take the ping-pong balls from their container and this same person will be in charge of putting the ball that has already been passed to everybody in the basket provided. He’s the only one who will touch two times the ball. Each ball has to be passed to every team member, following these simple rules:
- The ball cannot be passed to a neighbor (the person immediately next to your right or to your left).
- The ball has to be in the air for a short time when passing it, you cannot put it directly in the hands of the person.
- All persons on the team have to receive the ball at one time, except for the first person that touches it twice.
- Balls that fall on the floor don’t count. Leave them there until timeout.
- The objective is to have as many balls in the basket as possible.
- Time the game: give them 5 minutes to discuss how to organize themselves, then one minute to play the game (or more if the group is big).
First time this game is run, they end-up with a small number of balls that completed the assignment. But now comes the key element of this game: ask them if they think they could do better a second time. Let each team discuss between them for 2 to 5 minutes and then run the game again for a minute.
Usually the second time all teams do better. Allowing them again some time to reorganize and running it a third time provides still better results.
The key part of the game is not the game itself, it doesn’t really matter who won the race, nor how many balls were in the basket. The key part is to realize that taking some time-off to think about how you are doing your work in order to improve it is worth the time lost on those meetings. Teams understand the point of the game and that they see that they can improve by self-organization. It makes them interact, communicate and take action instead of waiting for instructions to improve their work. In the Agile-SCRUM methodology this is covered by the Sprint retrospectives.
Image from www.agilest.org
This game is always fun to play, the whole cycle lasts around half hour, and it really shows people the benefits of having time to reflect on how you’re doing your job. And as you are doing it at work, it shows that the management encourages people to take initiatives 😉
In any case, it creates a nice feeling of team-building! It’s definitely worth the try.
