A Game Without Thrones
A complete working simulation of an Agile Organization - in Lego. No pre-made backlogs, no command and control, pure self-organization across multiple teams and streams driven directly by business constraints and numeric metrics.
Teal? Business Agility? Holarchy? Iroquois Treaties? Spotify Chapters? Sure, we got 'em all. Also dragons, walkers, a working small council and the greatest castle in Westeros - built entirely by Wildlings!
Check out a detailed description here and the slides here. Also there's a description of learnings from a Game we ran at the 2016 CukeUp conference here.
Outline/Structure of the Workshop
10 minute preamble
Attendees split into 5-person squads in 3-squad streams. If we get sufficient attendees, these will combine into 3-stream portfolios.
We'll run 3 20 minute release cycles each consisting of:
- 5 minute sprint (squads build castle features from simple non-toxic home-made clay)
- 5 minute chapter meetings (chapters run across squads per stream and generate features and treaties)
- 5 minute council meetings + mob refactoring (each chapter picks a council rep to prioritise features)
- 5 minute squad retros (a rapid retro combined with ratification of treaties between squads)
Then one final release cycle to integrate and refactor across the streams. Watch out for dragons!
Learning Outcome
Attendees will learn:
- The Leadership-as-a-Service practice for consensus decision-making
- How to replace command and control with chapters, treaties and councils
- How to generate features and stories collaboratively from metrics and bottlenecks
- How to de-scale large organisations into small ceremonies with fast feedback and short collaboration loops
Target Audience
Business, Design and Technical Leaders, Managers, Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, RTEs, VSEs ...
Prerequisites for Attendees
No pre-requisites for participants.
