This is a fantastic game I picked up at the Agile Alliance
conference in Florida a couple of years ago.
It offers deep learning with respect to self-organisation and learning
cycles, and a number of people I’ve facilitated it for in conference settings have
asked for a facilitation guide.
The mission of the team playing the game is to “beat the
facilitator” by preventing them from sitting in a vacant chair for 1 minute. You should allow roughly an hour for the
activity.
Setup
The smallest group I have played the game with is 7, and the
largest about 100. With large numbers,
you will want to break into groups of 25-30 with a facilitator per group (it’s
very easy to recruit and instruct a facilitator on the spot).
To setup, you need an open space with one chair per player,
one for the facilitator and plenty of room to move. Ask each team member to grab a chair, and to
randomly organise themselves in the space available. You don’t want a regular arrangement, and
certainly not an orderly circle. You
want chairs facing in multiple directions fairly evenly distributed throughout
the space (some in the middle, some on the edges.
Briefing
The rules are very simple.
Inform the participants that their goal is to learn about
self-organisation and learning cycles.
Their goal is to block you from occupying a vacant seat for 60
seconds. The constraints are as follows:
- Any number of people can be moving at once to occupy the chair the facilitator is aiming for
- Once you have stood up (or even half stood up), you cannot sit down in the same chair .. you must find a new chair to sit in.
- The chairs cannot be moved from their starting position.
- No physical blocking is allowed. You can’t push the facilitator out of the way or impede them from moving in their desired direction.
- The facilitator can only move at a walk, the team can move as fast as they like. It’s not a running race, it’s a strategy game.
The play
You may or may not choose to warn participants they are
likely to take 4 to 5 attempts just to reach 10 seconds. Most groups will take 30-40 attempts to solve
it. You have various hints to offer
along the way, with the hints later on the list being more powerful accelerators.
·
Are they hearing every voice at their
retrospectives or allowing dominators?
·
Have they remembered that the game is about
self-organisation (if they make the inevitable mistake of attempting to have
one or two people co-ordinate)?
·
Are they trying to reinvent the wheel every
retrospective? What about making a small
tweak then testing it? It generally
takes 10 seconds to decide whether a change was positive or negative (as long
as it takes to fail) as opposed to debating it for 40 seconds?
·
The most important ingredient in a
self-organising team is trust! (This is
usually the last hint that helps the breakthrough. Most teams find a winning strategy then have
one or two people who keep panicking and breaking it)
The Debrief
The debrief usually drives itself, however some key
learnings I look to draw out are:
- A self-organising team still needs a strategy and some agreed rules. It needs to be developed by the team to guide the way they work together.
- The uniting power of a shared mission
- The notion of improvement through small course corrections. A retrospective should identify a small change which can be actioned within 2 weeks, then evaluated as an input to selecting the next small change. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of large “all or nothing” changes.
Places and Times to use the activity
I most commonly use this activity as part of team
formation. It’s brilliant to run with a
freshly formed team as it really unites them, drops some traditional barriers
(nothing like sprinting around a room to do that) and sets the scene for what
their retrospectives should feel like. I
also use it as part of release train launches (teams of teams) for similar
outcomes.
Alternatively, it’s great to run with a team instead of a
regular retrospective. It will both
drive some interesting reflections on how they work as a team and re-invigorate
their retrospectives.
Lastly, you can use it anytime as a community building
activity.
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