Ball Point Game

The object of the game is to pass as many balls as possible through the team in 2 minutes. There are relatively few rules, but they must be adhered to. These are effectively the team’s constraints. Here they are:

• You play in one or several Teams 
• Starting point equals endpoint 
• No passing of the ball to your direct neighbour 
• The ball must have air-time i.e. It must not be passed directly from hand to hand.
  
• If you drop a ball, you cannot pick it up.
• Everyone in the room participates and every team member must touch each ball for it to count.
• Two minutes per iteration
  One minute for continuous improvement & new estimate 
• You play five iterations
  
• If you’ve played this game before, please participate silently so you don’t spoil it for others.

You have 2 minutes to self-organize and plan your approach. One person from the group will write on the flipchart an estimate of how many balls the team thinks it can do.

You will then play the game for 2 minutes. At the end of the game, you will record on the flipchart how many balls the team actually managed to do, alongside their original estimate.

You will then spend 1 minute learning how to improve, making a note of what the team has decided to change on the flipchart next to the estimate and actual. Then do it again.

In all, you will do 5 iterations, recording the estimate, actual and changes each time.

Next, you'll have a 15-minute debrief asking:

• What happened?
• Which iteration felt best? Why?
• Where did you feel the Scrum Flow?

Some of the other parallels with agile or lean, and some of the questions worth posing to the team, are:

• were improvements achieved by working harder or faster?
• were there bottlenecks? how were they identified?
• how well did the team self-organize?
• the game had a natural rythm and flow, like continuous flow advocated in lean thinking
• face to face communication – would it have worked as well if communication was by phone or by email?
• would it have helped to document the process?
• where did the leadership come from? and in what style?
• using the number of points as a simple measure of the team’s results, did the estimate and actual start to converge? (until the process was changed)