What If Scrum Teams Play Bingo
We Agile coaches, work closely with teams in their Agile transformation adventure and witness all the processes they go through.
We sometimes use feedbacks, trainings, different methods and good practices, different experiments from all around the world and articles to encourage teams to acquire good habits suitable for Agile way of thinking and behavior. Our aim is to encourage them to think differently.
It is not so easy to think and act out of the box. Someone who ate with his right hand until yesterday , now we call them to use his left hand . Change and transformation is a painful process that takes time.
It takes time to acquire new habits and fully absorb the new way of working during agile transformations. The old habits emerge from their hiding places with a moment of distraction, a slight fluctuation in the environment.
Because the brain chooses the old best method: “You don’t pour the food in the spoon with your right hand.”
However, we coaches, are not going to stay with the teams forever, right? So while we are not with them, while the turmoil continues inside and outside the Sprint, will they be able to keep open the new windows we opened together and continue to experience this new world? Will I be able to tie a red thread to their fingers as we leaves them and say don’t forget? Can we remind them that another way might be possible?
While searching for different Ice Breaker activities for teams, I came across “Human Bingo” Then the question came to my mind why not to apply it to a Sprint. I wonder if I can give “Sprint Bingo” as a rope tied to their fingers that would remind them not return to their old habits?
Think about it:
If there would be a tool that reminds them what actions and behaviour that they want to see in them during a Sprint. And if this tool could be designed in their hand under their desire. Moreover, if each team was free to draw their own game and even determine their final reward.
Let’s take a closer look. What does “Sprint Bingo” look like? Here is a simple design that I made for myself.
Lets see the Sprint Bingo rules:
1.Activity; It starts with Sprint Planning and ends with Sprint Retrospective.
2.Sprint Bingo cards are dealt to all users. (Using Mural or Miro Boards in digital works very well. You just need to multiply the Bingo cards as much as the user count )
3. Each player who completes the activities written on the card closes that cell on his card.
4. At the end of the Sprint Retrospective, the person who closes the most activity cell on his Sprint Bingo card is the winner. Winning is a good feeling, And it would be great feeling if there is a small prize from team :)
5. Sprint Bingo cards can be updated at the end of each Sprint with other activities that the team accepts.
The whole design can be reshaped over and over according to the behavior or habits that the team wants to see in itself, or create new ones.
When I was a kid, I had a friend who was very comfortable writing with his left hand. Even when his left hand got tired, he could take the pen in his right hand. When he was very young, her mother had realized his left hand talent. And she encouraged him to write with the other hand. Of course, they did a lot of work and repetitions until he got used to it. Many times he had to listen to his mother’s unending warnings. But in the end he turned into a person who could use both right and left hand.
When our fingers were tired of writing, he could easily passed the pen to the other hand without stopping. I have always wondered what it would be like if my mother encouraged left-handed writing, and if there were stimuli around me that encouraged me to use my left hand all the time.
Could Sprint Bingo help them to absorb new habits besides gamifying them in the long term?
We’ started to play :) Together we will experiment, learn, have fun and develop.
