As a game lover I have a decent collection of boardgames and I have also the opportunity to play many games thank to friends loving them too.
For sure I am playing these games just for fun. However some of them can be used for specific serious goals too, and may help in coaching people and teams.
This article is the introduction of a series (coming) where I am presenting some opportunities that your favourite game store could provide to help your job as Agile Coach or Scrum Master.
You are invited to follow me to know when new episode will be available.
Apart of the positive effects of playing serious games instead attend to a serious training (this requires a specific article), there are many other good reasons to reuse normal boardgames in a professional context. Let’s view some of them as first step:
Having fun: This is the primary purpose of a game, and this bring to situations of learning without the stress of a classical training situation
Availability: Normally they are easily available (eventually pre-owned) and not too much expensive
Quality of components: published games have very often high quality processes for the components improving the pleasure of the experience
The last attributes creates also opportunity to use material independently by their original purpose (in this series we will see some examples).
“Agile is essentially about collaboration”
Boardgames normally are competitive and in many cases this is ok. However in the recent years we have seen a growth of cooperative games. These games are perfect if you want to enhance collaboration in your teams or maybe want to show side effects of bad collaboration.
Another good source are solo games can be played by specific roles (maybe in leadership teams) or eventually by the whole team. These are games where you are playing against the game and this is a pretty common situation when your working as change agent.
Keep in mind that the experience of playing the game must be based on the specific purpose you want to achieve. So my suggestion is not to start with the playfulness: we are in a professional context so you need a professional reason to invest time of your team of professional in playing a game. However you can use boardgames for team building out of the professional context: in these cases simply have fun together.
In this series I will describe how I am adapting common boardgames and give some facilitation guidance so you can replicate the experience with your teams. I will not focus on the game itself (you can find plenty of reviews everywhere) but on the differences I have applied to the original game.
Keep in mind this is a work in progress, so new ideas are continuously added, on the basis of effective experience as a facilitator or as a player.
Here the (initial) index of topic I am going to cover (not in order of publication) with these (I will do my best) weekly release:
- 0–3 years jigsaw puzzles: Show effects of continuous improvements
- Megacity Oceania: Expose the impacts of dependencies
- Magic Maze: Show effects of siloed organisation
- Pandemic: Show effects on collaboration of swarming
- Dixit cards: Improve collaboration with Business
- Dixit cards: Understand how to estimate complexity
- Kanoodle Genius: A backlog for your team
- Thinkfun Laser Maze: A backlog for your team
- Smart games Roadblock: A backlog for your team
We must considerate a different section for LEGO.
I am not here to describe the great opportunities Lego bricks can provide to simulate the work (2M pages on google).
Here just the examples I have facilitated:
- LegoSPective: A different type of retrospective who combine Lego Serious Play with team improvement
- BackLego: A backlog of 100+ items you can build with free bricks you can use to understand estimation and value for each feature
- Creationary: A backlog for your team
- 3in1 creator set: A team building challenge
Stay tuned for the next articles of this series.
In the meantime feedback is very welcome, you have many channels to contact me (respond here, Twitter, LinkedIN, AGF website among all). Please use these channels also to share your ideas and experiences.
Originally published on Agile Game Factory.
“To help people, teams and organisation in their agile journey”
Corrado De Sanctis is Senior Agile Coach in Lloyds Bank and has been involved in some of the largest enterprise transformations at international level and in different industries during the recent years. Corrado is a known member of the Agile community in London; he is speaker on Agile topics and he is the convener for “Lean, Agile Delivery and Coaching Network” and “Digital Transformation in London” meetup groups (~4000 members) . He is also founder of SAM, Scrum Agile Milano, meetup group directly supported by Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance. Corrado strongly believes in experienced learning and he is creator, facilitator and player of agile serious games. His games and experiences are available at the AgileGameFactory website.
DISCLAIMER. Notes presented here are personal and cannot be related in any way to any of my employers.
