The Ball Game is a simulation I like to build into my Agile training curriculum. After a series of iterations and self-discovery, the players will recognize certain truths that turn out to be key to successful agile practices. Some of these lessons are detailed in this part.
Core Lessons
Let’s take a moment and explore the core lessons in detail.
C1 – Planning is Important
This is a core lesson of the Ball Game. Unless the team comes up with some agreed-upon way of passing requirements among themselves, things quickly devolve into chaos. Balls get dropped. Steps get skipped. The first iteration of the game is pretty chaotic.
Reality Check: Agile works better if you sit down and plan out how your team will interact. The need for a working agreement is intuitively obvious. You’ve never done this before, in this way, with these people. So why would you think everyone will just ‘know’ how to interact?
C2 – Time Boxes Cause Stress
A player in this simulation is usually in for a shock when the facilitator declares that ‘planning time’ is over, and it’s time to run the first simulation. I guarantee someone is going to complain or ask for more time. Don’t let them. Encourage everyone to do their best and assure them they will get a chance to improve in the next iteration.
Duration of Planning is a factor here. In the simulation we deliberately time-box planning to force the team to make a plan quickly. This is partially to simulate that you don’t have an infinite amount of time to derive the “best” solution all the time. Sometimes you only get enough time for one idea. More time does not necessarily equate to better solutions. Sometimes the best confirmation that your method is sound will be found when actually trying it out.
Reality Check: I know there are people in the group who would plan this thing to death, orchestrating each toss down to the microsecond. They would do so with the best of intentions. They would do so in the name of efficiency and throughput. But ultimately, they would waste everyone’s time. Because you can’t plan for every contingency. We put the team in the time box to force them to feel the stress of having to follow a schedule. We also do so to illustrate the point that even the most perfect plan won’t account for everything. Often in agile circles the team must take a leap of faith and begin moving without having all the facts. We want them to experience this. And finally, it starts to introduce the notion that we’ll learn more by trying, failing, and adjusting that we would by just planning alone.
C3 – Skill Plays a Part
Another core lesson of the Ball Game. Your plan may be perfect, but execution is still a factor. It doesn’t matter if you know you need to throw each ball to Joan, you also have to be able to get the ball to Joan. Some people just have terrible aim.
Reality Check: In the Real World, not everyone on your team is immediately skillful at collaboration. The act of tossing a ball from one person to another simulates this fact. When you first start doing agile, you’re not going to be perfect. Accept this. Practice to get better.
C4 – Faster is Not Necessarily Better
This Core Lesson usually sinks in around the second iteration. In order to improve, the team just tries to throw the balls faster. When they go faster, their aim gets worse, and people’s reaction times become a factor.
Reality Check: This simulates the fact that wishing to go faster doesn’t mean you will. The team can only go as fast as their skill allows. If they try to go faster, defects slip into the system and balls get dropped.
C5 – The Importance of Communication
You’ll see it right away. A ball will be thrown, the intended recipient will turn to face the thrower, and it bounces off their chest, head, outstretched hands…it doesn’t matter. It’s now a dead ball. A defect. Maybe it was the heat of the moment. Maybe it was that the team agreed that we could put more than one ball in the air at a time. Those are both great ideas. With great power comes great responsibility.
Reality Check: There are a lot of balls flying around. Don’t forget to let Joan know when there’s a ball flying at her face! Seriously! Throwing things over a wall and hoping the person at the other end is ready for it is just asking for trouble.
C6 – The Importance of Retrospectives
Perhaps the most important lesson to learn here, is that you can’t improve the system without talking about how to improve the system. Those retrospective sessions, brief as they are, provide a tremendous amount of value in improving team performance.
Reality Check: The Team needs to talk through the way they work and try out new ideas. Whether they revamp their entire strategy, or simply move a little closer together to shorten air time, these sessions are as vital to the simulation as Retrospectives will be to their Inspect & Adapt cycle in Agile.
