Activities

Games and exercises to energise meetings, build connections, and spark creativity in your workplace.

Fruit Salad Game

This is a great activity for when you are introducing relative sizing or estimation to a team. It can be used to illustrate how estimations can shake out assumptions, showing the differences in what we believe is needed to complete a task, how to do so, and the risks involved. It can also be used to create your first story point scale for your own backlog.

This version does not actually require any fruit; rather, you use index cards with fruit names. As a facilitator, you act as the Product Owner in the session. The team gives relative estimates for preparing different types of fruits to build the end product: a fruit salad.

Ball point game

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This is a great game when introducing iterative ways of working, such as Scrum. It highlights the benefits not only of early feedback loops, but also the importance of collaboration, self-organisation and working together as a team. While observing the game, you can learn a lot about the team’s communication and collaboration patterns. It can also be a fun way to create a better understanding of flow and sustainable pace.

The group works as a team, trying to get as many balls as possible through the system in 2-minute intervals. It can be used with any sized group over 5, but we’d recommend to split them into multiple teams if more than 25.

Switch List

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The human brain simply does not know how to multi-task, it can only do one job at a time and switch in between. Context switching is however not simple and takes energy and time. Still, many people struggle with understanding the benefits of limiting how much work you have in progress at the same time. 

This is a very simple activity to use when introducing concepts such as sequencing work, limit work in progress (WIP) or even just allowing focus. 

The group will write down lists as quickly as possible, in two different ways. First time with constant context switching and the second time allowing more focus.

Agile Manifesto Puzzle

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This is a simple exercise to introduce the agile manifesto. It gives you the opportunity to discuss the statements and agile values in more detail, but it also allows you to observe the group’s current understanding.

The group completes the manifesto statements by connecting the sentences that are split in two. The activity works for any sized group, but it is ideal to keep them small (2-5 people).

Challenging Assumptions Puzzle

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This activity helps teams to get into the mindset of identifying their assumptions and shows that they may not always be correct or even helpful. It can work as a warm-up before a problem-solving or creative session when you want to illustrate the concept of Functional Fixedness.

The group tries to put the puzzle pieces together. While this appears deceivingly simple, it is actually quite difficult as many common practices and ideas don’t apply to this particular puzzle. Ideally for groups of 4-16 people, but keep each team to 4 or less.

The Creative Zoo

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Creative and energetic activity that is helpful when introducing collaborative design, lean development, and customer-centred design. This is also useful for reinforcing concepts such as cross-functional teams, collaboration and incremental delivery.

The group is split into two (or more) teams and everyone is assigned a role to create a zoo model with play dough and craft material. The winner is the team with the most points for their zoo model at the end of the third iteration. You need a minimum of 9 people and this activity works well with larger groups.