Team Building Workshop (Agile SW Dev)

• Check-In: a game to welcome and to attune participants to the workshop.
• Plus-Minus-Delta: a well-known retrospective tool to identify what is going well and what needs to be changed.
• Super Hero: a game to raise awareness of participants for already known and as well hidden own powers/competencies, the divergence between self-perception and public image, and team member’s diversity of strengths.
• LEGO Serious Play: a game to share individual and personal insights within the group to answer the question: “From your own personal view: How does the ideal collaboration in your dev team should look like?”

Goals of the Super Hero Game were:

• To get aware of the self-perception of already known or hidden own powers and competencies.
• To realise and accept that there often is a difference between self-perception and public image: how I recognise myself vs. how others recognise me.
• To become aware of the other team member’s diversity of strengths.

The Lego Serious Play was set up and ran at different levels of abstractions to gain specific insights and individual commitments.

Lego Serious Play 1: “Individual Models”

The goal of this LSP game was to share individual and personal insights regarding the question posed in the group. Each builder images and constructs an individual model for herself to answer the question raised by the facilitator. After building, each builder explained her model.

Lego Serious Play 2: “Shared Models, Connections and Guiding Principles”

The goal of this game was to create a shared understanding and consensus of the topic in question. The group consolidates all individual models in a common shared model agreed by all. After building the shared model, the participants identified breakpoints, interfaces, and connections in the model.

“Building Connections and Playing Emergences”

The goal of this activity was to simulate the consequences of decisions by playing scenarios. The participants explored how the models or the landscape responded to dynamic changes/events. Therefore, after building the shared model, the participants identified breakpoints, interfaces, and connections in the model.

“Guiding Principles”

The goal of this activity is to support strategic decision making in the real world. The participants shall develop high-level guidelines to implement in the real world actions/decisions derived from the models built. The facilitator asked the group to answer the question “What can I do personally to achieve the ideal state?”