For the third time in a row I had the pleasure to participate at Play 4 Agile (Un-)Conference at Rückersbach. Three years ago Play 4 Agile 2012 was my first experience with Open Space technology and even my first encounter with the Agile “Play” Community. (Thanks to Sebs for introducing me back then!) In review this year’s Play 4 Agile was intense and enlightening as ever.
My personal highlights from #p4a14 (un-ordered):
Gamification Pre-Event
I felt honoured to be asked to help facilitate the “Gamification” Pre-Event together with Katrin and Thorsten. None of us are Gamification experts, but we were holding three sessions about “Gamification and Agile” at Play 4 Agile 2013 together with Birgit. In the last year Katrin attended the Gamification Class at Coursera, whereas I read some books and articles about gamification and made some real-live experiences with a team at CHIP. 🙂
The Pre-Event was mainly based on Kevin Werbach’s Gamification Design Process. Some results after only 3,5h were amazing and could actually work for real. My 2 favorites were Carpe Diem (Objective: “Experience more life to prolong your life.”) and a prototype on how to make house-cleaning more fun (Objective: “We want a clean and organized house.”). But I think all groups turned out with a valuable result.
“Show Me Your Data”
My session “Show Me Your Data” was about understanding and loving Kanban Metrics. (See my blog post here.) As I played it on several occasions last year (Limited WIP Munich and my new employer) and got lots of feedback on how to improve the game, I tried to bring “Show Me Your Data” to the next level. And I failed! 🙂
After 5 minutes I knew that the changes I introduced were not going to work. So the participants (and me) struggled hard and I stopped the actual game. But then started a (for me) fruitful discussion on how the game could work or could have worked.
Thanks for every participant for their input.
I personally was surprised that I got along with the failure pretty well and saw more the new opportunities that the failure created. (“If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.”)
Buy me a Feature
It was great to find my new colleague Tom among the #p4a14 participants. At our company we are struggling with prioritization on what to do next (or rather first, as the backlog is overfilled…). To have a common understanding in the company on how hard it is to decide and to reach at least some kind of agreement among managers, Tom introduced “Buy me a feature” to prioritize what should be done next about 9 months ago. We thought it was a good idea to get feedback on this approach. So Tom held a session on how and why we are using “Buy me a Feature” and how the process evolved over time. The participants were curious and gave some very valuable feedback and suggestions on how to improve. Loved it.
Creative Suitcase
This was probably the best session I attended at #p4a14. Katrin helped us packing our “Creative Suitcase” and selecting reminders on how to stay creative. I have my suitcase with me most of the time and opened it already some times in the last week…
LEGO Serious Play “Time Capsule”
I was happy to co-facilitate a LEGO Serious Play Session together with Katrin, Melanie and Sabine. The goal was to create a Time Capsule on “How I have changed my World in 6 Months”. The participants will get a photo of their model in 6 months time. I was messing around with my GoPro during that session and you can get an impression here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkGTzjRtxe0?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
This year I felt that there were quite a number of spiritual and coaching sessions proposed, and less “play” sessions. I’d loved to have more focus again on “play” next year, but I know it always depends on the people and their interest and energy.
Play 4 Agile is always about people and talking and discussing and laughing. With my life partner Mel (who was attending this year for the first time) we set as a goal for #p4a14 to have as many laughing fits as possible and we think, we did quite well! 😉
Play 4 Agile 2015 will take place on February 20-23, 2015. Can’t wait.