Some time ago myself and a few committed individuals embarked on a tour of the UK that became known in legend as The Big Balls Tour.
The brief from the client was simple.
Teach us something about Agile in 60 minutes.
The session was to fit into a multi-disciplinary day for people in leadership positions across the client’s offices.
Our group met to consider options. 60 minutes was not long. What messages did we want to get across? What outcomes did we want to generate? What thoughts did we want to trigger?
After several exhaustive discussions, we settled on the ball game created by Boris Gloger.
The organisers were swiftly in touch. What equipment did we need? A projector, TV, computer connections, and PowerPoint were assumed.
We replied – all we needed was a dedicated room. And a decent meal. No other equipment or facilities necessary. Just one single room with a door. Windows optional.
A week before the tour began, we heard our session had been cut to 30 minutes.
A couple of days before event one, we heard we couldn’t have a dedicated room, due to space.
Day 1 of the tour we were in London. Our 9.30 slot was delayed due to the “introductions to the day” overrunning. Lack of a room meant we positioned ourselves by the coffee laid out for the morning break.
Our instruction poster went up.
At 10.10 the organiser popped out to say our slot was now just 20 minutes.
At 10.15 our first intrepid group of leaders arrived. They heard the instructions, and round one began. Chaos. One of their group was on crutches, and many balls were thrown at the poor individual only to bounce off various parts of him. But by round 3, the final round, the group had self-organised, found a way to achieve the objective, and delivered value in a record time.
In a large number of workshops across the country, we spotted interesting patterns amongst the audience. In some locations, a room was provided as requested, often with chairs and a table. Some groups used to a command and control culture spent the entirety of round 1 at their desks planning out the activity.
In groups where a culture of experimentation existed, within a few seconds of outlining the instructions, everyone was up and front practising, using their minute for planning to see what worked and what didn’t.
Often the debate between rounds, given all the suggestions – could the group agree on a single improvement?
As facilitators, our interpretation of the rules different slightly. But that is no different to the world of football refereeing. What was valuable was seeing a team, previously unknown to each other, work together to solve a problem
What I particularly like about this exercise, whether you have 20 minutes, 60 minutes, or longer to run it, is the number of learning points that can come out. Here are a few for starters:
- The basics of scrum – iteration, review, retro
- self organisation
- natural velocity of a team
- waterfall v agile
- importance of coaching
- using your data to forecast
- thinking outside box to change natural velocity
- flow will happen
- if challenge is doable
- people are not disturbed
- the work has meaning
- fail fast
- experiment
- did you experience stress
- who was the leader
- defect handling
- loudest voice – beach ball variant
- all team members contributed
- find the constraint and work to resolve it
- business value after just 2 minutes
- working less to achieve more
- sustainable pace
- personalities of team; leaders, thinkers, doers
- staying on top of trends, developments
- be a servant leader as the scrum master/ coach
- continuous improvement
- shared goal and common purpose
- face to face communication
- no documentation needed
On to the key questions
Where was the best food?
Unquestionably Liverpool on the night before, hospitality courtesy of Mowgli. The chat bombs were exceptional.
Where are the balls now?
They were briefly abandoned in a shopping trolley but are now tucked away ready for the post-covid era where once again it becomes safe for a group of people to touch 100 spherical objects rapidly in a short space of time.
The original game from Boris is at https://www.borisgloger.com/wp-content/uploads/Publikationen/Tools/Ball_Point_Game.pdf. There are now lots of online/WFH variants including https://www.tastycupcakes.org/2020/04/ball-point-wfh-game/
