The Lean-STAR Game

Timing: 15 minutes Overview: This is a short game to explain why WIP is bad. It has so many variants, one of which is the lean simulation game with paper airplanes by Jeff Patton. Instead of building airplanes, we connect five dots of a star. Resources: Print 10 copies per team from this Star-Connect pdf file. Steps: Form teams of 5’s. Each team member is responsible to connect…

X-Matrix Jigsaw Puzzle

Timing: 1 hour Overview: This short exercise is intended to give participants a feel for populating an X-Matrix, without the need to have a shared context, and without having to disclose confidential knowledge about their organisations. It consists of a pre-defined and generic set of “pieces” with which to populate the various X-Matrix sections, deciding which pieces should go where, and how they fit together. The “jigsaw pieces” with…

Cards Against Agility

Cards Against Agility is based on the game Cards Against Humanity, where the former was developed at the Play 4 Agile event in Germany in February 2017. Purpose: either to develop awareness or poke fun at Agile practices, as the questions and answers can be rather irreverent. As the original game states: “Cards Against Humanity is a party game for horrible people. Unlike most of…

Failure Memory Game

The Failure Memory Game is is a game for learning from failures and experiencing how a team or an organisation can benefit from an open failure culture.Participants reflect on their own way, or the team’s culture to handle failures, and directly experience the consequences in a safe space for experimenting and learning. Who plays, and when? This game is usually played by a group of…

Logo Maze (why we test first)

Timing: 20-30 minutes Materials: 1-pack of sticky notes pens for each group of 3-5 people dry erase board, table, window or wall to set up the maze Instructions: Explain to the audience that we’re going to play a game that allows them to program a robotic turtle to navigate through a maze, as pictured below. There are four simple commands in our programming language: forward,…