Overcooking your Team
It’s all Scrum and (Video) Games Vol. 1
Before we begin, you should know two things about me. Like a lot of Scrum Masters whom I have the honor of knowing, I like to make connections between seemingly distant topics. And like a lot of my colleagues in IT, I like playing video games.
Here at Serious Scrum, we are very serious about Scrum, its practices and pitfalls. Our goal is to help us and you, dear Reader, to use Scrum better and understand its deeper truths. In a way, we’re talking on a “Practitioner” to “Master” level, and touch “Student” mostly when we reaffirm the need for basics. This is not to say that our articles aren’t easy to understand, just that our audience consists mostly of people who already practice Scrum. People like us.
But how can we teach these very basics to others in a way that is efficient, interactive, and fun, to allow those we work with to truly understand the benefits of what we are doing? There’s always the proven way of giving a workshop. We can also work with haptic tools like Lego to visualize how our actions impact the chain of delivery, but for a while now I have been wondering if there aren’t other ways, just for the sake of completion.
Well, remember my fondness for video games and Scrum?
As Buzzfeed would write: What happened next will not surprise you.
One fateful day, as I was sitting on the couch surrounded by friends playing the lovely indie gem Overcooked, our kitchen caught fire.
In the game, of course.
Nevertheless, our panic was just as real. We tried to put it out, but it cost us too much time and in the end, we didn’t reach the necessary score to finish the level.
“So, what now?” I asked, still laughing.
“We should install smoke detectors”, joked one of my friends.
“Nah, the fire isn’t that hard to detect,” said another. That was true. Half the screen was on fire.
“What about not leaving the steak on the oven for too long? I mean, we were all standing around the dirty dishes, getting in each other’s way anyway. Might as well have one person responsible for not-burning steak.”
Huh. We’d just done a mini-retro.
And if this game makes people do retros, what else can we learn from it that will help us Scrum better? Turns out it’s several things, one of which is the fact that you can teach people the concepts of Scrum with video games.
The term Gamification is a commonplace by now. Using systems commonly found in games to ease the learning of adults has spread beyond esoteric new-age retreats to corporate headquarters.
Playing games to teach new concepts is not just “alright”, it is a strategy that belongs in every Scrum Master’s toolbox. Just look at the Kanban Game or Scrumchkin. With this in mind, let us see a few of the concepts that can be taught by playing games, with Overcooked in particular.
As you can see, the game begins deceptively simple, much like any other greenfield product you may ever work on. In the top left, you can see orders coming in, which require different ingredients to be gathered from the (virtual) southeast, cut in the southwest, cooked in the pots to the northwest, and delivered to the tables on the east. So far, so easy. But there’s a timer in the bottom right corner that mercilessly ticks down, and a “cash” tracker in the bottom left corner which you need to get up to a pretty high level to get the best rating available.
Oh and also only one person can ever interact with an object at any given time and players block each other’s movement. Enjoy the chaos.
The parallels to Product development are easy to see. We all share one goal, we have a metric that measures our viability, and we must share the work to get ahead. Because unlike at the beginning where a simple soup just requires cutting and cooking, you soon encounter more challenging recipes, and suddenly have to get ingredients, chop, batter, fry, grind, steam, broil, bake, pan fry, cook and gather and clean dishes at the same time.
That is to say: the game evolves from a barely controlled environment to a complicated one. And just as it is finished, it puts you on an airship that suddenly crashes and requires completely different recipes than you thought you might need at the beginning.
Yup, our environment is now complex.
With the complexity of the environment, players must adapt not only their in game tactics, but also their meta-game strategy. While it’s enough to delegate one or two tasks to each player at the beginning of the game, later levels get increasingly chaotic and require ad-hoc changes in responsibilities. Additionally, not every task takes equally long. Chopping onions is done within a second or two, but fetching new ones can take up to 10 seconds based on the level. Frying battered fish takes 10 seconds, but fries only take 8. But if you spend those two seconds next to the fryer, who is going to fetch new plates and clean the dirty dishes? Wasn’t that your job?
To summarize, the game teaches cross-functionality and self-organization like no other method I have seen yet. Only teams where each player individually not only understands what must be done at every moment, but is also willing and capable to do tasks that pop up. In addition, the game makes clear that this can not always be the answer. More often than not, players are separated and need to throw ingredients to each other, underlining the notion that yes, sometimes hand-offs are necessary, but they always cost valuable time.
In short, I’d recommend trying this game with a few friends, and if you like it, it’s a good tool to explain several agile concepts that go beyond what I have mentioned here.
Let me know how it works out for you, and see you in the next episode, where we will be building factories.
Other Games you might like are:
SPACETEAM (a “cooperative shouting game” you can download for free and play with people in the same wifi. It’s a wonderful, chaotic mess and delivers the same concepts of complexity and teamwork.
Trine 2 (a game where several heroes must combine their powers in new and creative ways to overcome enemies).
Tools Up (same concept as Overcooked, even though not as finely crafted).
Do you want to write for Serious Scrum or seriously discuss Scrum?
