Ball game

What the game is meant to demonstrate

This game simulates being in an agile team working in ‘sprints’, collaboratively inspecting and adapting.

The group will learn:

that the traditional method of achieving a task may not be the best one. Teams need to inspect and adapt.
a team gets gradually better as they work together more - Tuckman’s stages of group development.
estimates are typically poor without performance data.

They should also learn:

delivery teams will generally reach a natural velocity.
most process improvements are marginal. To significantly improve performance, teams often need to make transformative improvements.

How long it takes to run

15-30 minutes

Materials you’ll need

6-18 foam balls (or enough to give each small team at least 6 balls, if they ask)

Flip chart for writing observations

Pen for writing observations

Printed or written rules:

A ball must be touched by every member of the team before it becomes a Magic Ball.
It must be touched first and last by the Wizard.
You can’t pass a ball to the person next to you.

‘Magic Ball’ facilitator’s guide

1. Divide participants into team of 5-6.

Groups of 6+ may create uncomfortable personal-space situations. Whereas groups of 3-4 make it difficult for teams not to pass to the person next to them.

Give each team 1 foam ball.

2. Share the written rules with everyone.

Tell the teams you are going to run 6 iterations of 30 seconds each. They must use each iteration to make as many ‘Magic Balls’ as possible.

3. For demonstration purposes, the facilitator should join one of the teams to demonstrate how to pass the ball within the team, initially throwing it under hand to the person across from them to plant the idea that ‘touching a ball’ means throwing.

If anyone asks:

if they can do something very different (such as standing around the ball and touching it) say something like ‘hm - it’s not against the rules, but we’ve always done it this way.’
if there are any more balls, say something like ‘hm - it’s not against the rules, but I’ll have to speak to our procurement department’. Use this to stall introduction of additional balls until improvement has plateaued.

Try not to accept innovation for the first iteration.

4. Get an estimate from each team of how many Magic Balls they think they can make.

Record this for each team.

5. Run a 30 second iteration.

Ask each team how many Magic Balls they managed to create.

Record this the actual results for each team under the estimate.

6. Allow the teams 1 minute to discuss how to improve the process.

Ask for an estimate

7. Repeat for up to six rounds.

Ideally after the second or third rounds, you should see a levelling out in performance i.e. similar numbers of Magic Balls being produced.

If the teams are extremely innovative and change the process significantly every time this won’t happen, but if you have multiple teams you should see it at least once. This is useful as a demonstration of velocity levelling out.

However you also want the team to go through at least one more transformative change. Encourage the team to think about what else they could do.

If you need to, make up some ridiculous statistic such as “The world record is 800 Magic Balls. Can you beat that?” You could also plant the idea of having multiple balls which should lead to transformative change.

8. At the conclusion of the exercise, debrief for five to ten minutes. What did the teams notice about their performance?