Would there be a need to bring Agile to a perfect world? What if the world is perfectly imperfect, and what would that mean for how we bring Agile to teams and organizations? Since this is a Games conference, what does Game Theory say? James P. Carse posits in the book Finite and Infinite Games "There is only one infinite game." Perhaps any game you can finish isn't the game with your most important score.

What game are you playing when you do "the Agile"? What is your role and the role of those you serve? Oppressor, Victim, Rescuer, Challenger, Coach, or Author? And what do you think Authority and Responsibility have to do with it? And what of values, or God forbid, dare we ask about Love?

We will be using Open Space Technology (OST) the last day of the conference. OST seems impossibly simple, yet has frequently demonstrated astoundingly powerful effects. Many have said it's a perfect match for Agile because both OST and Agile revolve around self-organization. OST is also the core component of the Agile Alliance's growing AgileOpen program. What is the power of OST? And what is "Open Space" anyway? In this keynote you'll get to experience and play with these and other provocative and perhaps controversial questions and themes in a micro OST 'game' that you might consider bringing back to your own teams.

The winds of Agile change are blowing – occasionally a tornado bringing dramatic, sometimes unexpected change, and other times a gentle breeze that changes little.  While you can’t control the weather, you can shape the climate around your team.  A team’s climate profoundly impacts engagement, collaboration and results.  AND it is something a team can co-create for itself – irrespective of the organization’s core culture.

In this interactive session, we will explore what an Agile climate is, how Agilists anywhere can influence it and the role that Agile games can play in fostering an awesome Agile climate, no matter what culture storms may be brewing beyond the team.

World is imperfect but we have a chance of making it better by innovating and using our creativity.

At last year's Agile Games, I shared my Agile Creativity game which enables problem solving, and the feedback from the audience was super positive. I've heard from several of participants that they are using this game to solve complex problems enabling agility in their enterprises throughout the year.

This year, I want to share an innovation game called "Bust the Mold" that has never been applied to Agile before. 

In this highly participatory workshop, we will co-create a new view on common Agile beliefs and challenge familiar concepts using the "Bust the Mold" technique. This innovative crowd-sourcing tool was first introduced by a pioneer in creative learning, Rob Cordova, and has not been applied in an Agile environment outside of Dun & Bradstreet where I work.

The workshop is facilitated in small groups without any limit of participants. It generates a lot of laughter, new ideas, and practical concepts that can be immediately used. Everyone has a chance to actively participate. Participants move around the room, constantly contribute new ideas, challenge stereotypes, and engage in building the shared vision.

During the workshop, participants will come up with experiments and new ideas to validate. Everyone leaves the workshop with a positive feeling of contributing to old concepts in a new, highly innovative way.

The workshop is relevant to any level of Agile experience - from beginners to most experienced participants because it is all about collaboration and innovation!

We are going to play a matching game aimed at teaching you intuition. The same kind of games used to teach people to identify chickens when they are young, or teach actually pigeons to detect cancer from MRI slides.

Come learn how to learn taste and see the patterns only your subconscious can detect.

Games for Learning about Retrospection and New Idea Development

Game Name: Empathy Map

Presenter:​ Savvy Katham

Track:​ GameJam

Type:​ Interactive Game Play

Audience Level:​ All

Room Setup:​ Rounds

Duration:​ 60 minutes

Keywords:​ Play, Retrospection, Learning-game, New idea generation

Abstract:

People deliver. Period. However, if people are understood they will deliver MORE.

Empathy Map game focuses on understanding teams (people) and their thoughts and taking necessary action as needed. It helps teams to express emotions that they encounter through out the project execution.

This game can be played with different audiences with the variation in the situation.

• How is a persona looking at the product?
• How is a team member feeling about the development of a product?

Information:

A drawing is given to each table that contains Think and Feel? , Hear?, See? Say and Do?, Pain

and Gain

A situation is given to all attendees.

Attendees have to put their write-up stickies under each category mentioned above.

Learning outcomes:

• Creates an open environment to brainstorm about a product or a feature
• It helps to understand personas

Target Audience:

All stakeholders who would like to take understand personas and incorporate the feedback in a product.

MIT is home to one of the world's oldest and largest scavenger hunts, the MIT Mystery Hunt. To honor this tradition, I propose running an Agile Scavenger Hunt - a team event where the clues, activities, and strategies related to Agile Principles.

The rules of the game are setup to encourage showing examples of Agile in action - delivery early and often, prioritize by Cost of Delay, face-to-face communications, collaboration, determine value to the customer, etc. We ran this event in Barcelona for a global team formation event - rules & clues attached. We would customize them for Cambridge/Boston.

This energizing and connection building session will include three Constellation icebreaker games that are built to connect attendees with one another which leads to more productive sessions (e.g., workshops, training, etc.).  It will start with the Timeline Constellation, followed by the Blast-off Constellation, and concluded with the Orbital Constellation.  Each Constellation game provides a different way to learn about the participants.  Each game will get played and it will conclude with comparing and contrasting the three games so that the participate thinks through how each Constellation game can be used in their environment and upcoming session.

Executives and managers can turbocharge an Agile Transformation...or stop it before it even starts. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering “how come they don’t get it”, then these games are for you.

In this exercise we’ll show you how to connect the critical values of transparency, autonomy, negotiability and responsiveness to Executive concerns like resource utilization, capital budgeting, risk analysis and annual planning. It starts with exploring and respecting the differences between approaches, the questions under the questions. It concludes with shared vocabulary, mutual understanding, and goals aligned. Let’s start seeing each other as runways, not roadblocks, on the journey to better organizations.

Have you heard about Design Thinking but unsure about where it all fits in with all these other buzzwords like Lean UX and Agile? Get your learn on with this creative journey through the lens of a dinner party. 

How many times have you sat through a brainstorm session and melted under the table only to hope you can crawl out the door with ninja-like stealth? Brainstorming doesn't have to suck, but sometimes it does because people have a hard time breaking out of their usual thought process. 

Blow up the brainstorm barrier with WWXD: What Would X Do?

WWXD is great for:

• Getting people to break down the barriers to creative thinking #outsideofthebox
• Getting people to laugh
• People who love superheroes from Winston Churchill to Iron Man
• Get people to think about what someone other than them would want. (People sometimes feel more comfortable sharing ideas in this way.)

Learn how to kickoff your next brainstorm session with a bang by getting teams to think like Wonder Woman, your mom, dad, Trump, Steve Jobs, or your favorite Kardashian. 

Are you as powerful as you need to be? Do you over power the room and rub people the wrong way?

Why is that? What if there was something you could do about it?

In improvisation, in order to create realistic and compelling characters we study status. That is, how does how we carry ourselves impact our relationship status with other people and how does it change in relation to others?

In this session, we'll explore status, and play with making ourselves more or less powerful. We'll then examine how this plays out in our work environments and how we need to adjust our status depending on which groups or individuals we're interacting with.

You'll also learn the one status trick that will dramatically increase your chances of getting hired in your next interview.

Move beyond the labels!

Do you have a Team Charter? Do you use it?

Fact is - many teams have had a team charter-like activity or discussion - however it mostly stays as a generic declaration of terms rather than an operative tool.

Without exception - all the teams I've worked with, declared in their charters that they want to have trust between team members as well as help one another, and manage conflict effectively.

What would your team say???

In this session we'll learn how to move beyond the label in the team charter and create Conduct Objectives - a highly effective tool for a high performance team

A fun and connective experience of improvisational humanity

Objective:  Get three principles in a row.

Materials:  Game Board (3x3 12" squares), Printed long principles.  Printed short principles.  Sticky notes.  Writing Tool.

Time box:  User Defined (Default to 90 minutes)

Flow:  Twelve agile principles are spread across a room.  Players vote with their feet by standing near the principle that could provide guidance on how to solve their biggest challenge.  With the most voted principle, the class creates and selects a challenge, then aligns practices that may mitigate each.  The outcome is a principle, challenge and practice mitigation grouping.  Class then rolls a dice to determine where the principle grouping will be placed on the game board.   After the selected principle has been placed, players vote again for the next highest value principle.  Game is over when players get 3 principle in a row or reach the time box.

What creates an amazing conference, meeting, or conversation? Among other things, the ability to be honest, well-structured, and naturally calibrate to what is right here and now. Agile Games focuses on creating the most well-adapted interactions possible. What happens when we turn that lens on ourselves? When we take a look at the conference, at who we are in this space, and what we really want and need to say? This session will be a full dive into experiential authenticity, focused on making our time at Agile Games as productive as possible, and demonstrating games that can be used to safely bring forth truth in any meeting or social situation.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? This exercise illustrates the language (verbal and non-verbal) and perspectives present when being an optimist or a pessimist.

How can you use improv in your meetings?  In this 75 minute interactive workshop, we'll take some basic improv games and skills and expand upon them to use with teams.  The focus will be on leveraging games to shine a light on common team dynamics and enhance or break those patterns to create a healthier and happier team environment.

One the most significant ceremony of any Agile Team is Daily Standup where the team members get together and plan for their day. But quite often the daily standup turns into a zombie status update meeting where team members come together to blurt out their updates and walk away to their desk without ever maximizing the benefit of that meet up.

In this session I will share a case study of how we created a simple experiment that turned into Standup Poker and revolutionized our Daily Standup. This technique helped us uncover true insights of teams progress and got the team talking about strategic planning and plan to remove any impediments as a "team" on daily basis to accomplish their sprint goal and commitments.

We learnt that when team members started using this technique, hidden impediments and dependencies started to emerge and team members organically started to re-plan and prioritize their work to accomplish the Sprint Goal. Product Owner also found great value in this technique as this helped them see the teams true progress and engage with the team to re-prioritize user stories and even take a story out of the sprint if required. Scrum Masters started to observe a trend in the confidence level over the span of the sprint and brought that information to Sprint Retrospective to discuss and brainstorm ways to improve and keep the confidence levels high throughout the sprint. The discussions and observations due to Standup poker resulted in teams committing better and more confidently during Sprint Planning and got into the rhythm of always accomplishing their sprint goal, but more importantly they started improving everyday and got into "continuous improvement" mode.

The content, exercise and message of this session highlight the agile principles of individuals and interactions over process and tools and fostering the mindset of continuous improvement.

In this session we will share examples, stories and experiences from trying the Standup Poker and how this simple technique converted a bunch of individuals into a TEAM !!!

As psychology advises, an action becomes a habit when it is backed up by principles. This is equally applicable to Agile. We all know well Agile by being, not Agile by doing is a sustainable and lasting way of transforming groups and organizations. Then, the question is: how do we teach Agile values and principles? Would it help memorizing them? Most likely it won’t because it will be “doing” Agile without believing in them and making them our own.

So the goal is to internalize Agile values and principles, make them memorable. Share and elicit examples that resonate with the audience and help them answer the question “what’s in it for me?”

This exercise is being done in teams. I am going to share several games that help participants internalize agile values and principles.

1. One is a matching game with several cases specific to Agile and Agile Games conference. Then, participants will come up with their own examples. In the third iteration, we will have participants will “build on what is happening”, i.e. do matching based on cases created by other teams.
2. The second one is the lean “five why’s” game applied to Agile values. After sharing technique of conducting root cause analysis using five “why’s”, I will ask the participants to continue working in terms to come up with the underlying reason for each of the values and share with others. This is a competition with the prizes (laminated copies of Agile Manifesto with values and principles).
3. Finally, the teams will re-write Agile values and principles as they apply to non-software teams (human resources: hiring and onboarding teams), executive teams, finance, and others, and share their Business Agility Manifesto’s with each other.
4. In the workshop retro, we will brainstorm on other creative ways of teaching agile values and principles. Results will be shared with all participants, so that they can immediately use these ideas with their companies and clients.

I also have a 30-minute of this workshop which can be used as a tutorial to teach Agile Manifesto.