The objective is throughput of balls. You are one team. Each Sprint is 2 minutes with 1 minute for a retrospective in between. Each ball must pass through each team member’s hands at least once. Dropped balls are not counted. Each ball must have air-time and go up before it goes down You cannot pass a ball to someone directly to your left or right The end point must also be the start point. 

I start this exercise by simply putting the rules up on the wall. I then set my big, highly visible timer for a 1 minute timebox for them to self-organise. There is total chaos. In the absence of someone telling them what to do there are many competing ideas about how the team might approach this task. Often the Team reverts to command and control. The most dominant, noisy person tries to “take control” in the face of the impending timebox end and starts telling people what to do. I stand back and watch, fascinated.

After one minute the planning timebox ends and the Sprint starts. There is even more chaos but under pressure from the container (the timebox), the Team have to start. Typically the Team typically don’t appreciate that it is better to just get on and deliver something of value, as opposed to spending more time shouting at each other. They just have to blindly follow the Scrum mechanisms and start. They normally find this very difficult.

Typically, they look at the instructions again and respond by forming a simple physical structure (often two lines facing each other) and just start by person one throwing one ball at a time to person two (who is in the opposite line). Person two then throws the ball to person three who opposite them and beside person one. They throw the ball back and forth down the lines and one person at the end has to either batch the nearly-completed balls up and drop them back to the start or do it one at a time. 

During that first Sprint the frustration of just starting without lots of upfront planning is evident. The Team are highly aware that they are dysfunctional; they feel it deep down that this team isn’t working as it could.

At the end of Sprint One we count up the completed and the dropped (discarded) balls. I normally write this on the whiteboard for them to see. I then start the timer for 1 minute for the Sprint One retrospective. 

During this time they work together to figure out what worked, what didn’t worked and how they might improve. It is important that as their trainer I do not participate in this; they must self-organise.

The first retrospective is normally hectic and confusing. The team are still just a group of individuals finding their way with no real team identity. There is little shared knowledge, no real trust yet and a strong desire for direction. Leadership starts to emerge in the absence of management. They are what Bruce Tuckman would have classified “forming” in his seminal work “The Stages of Team Performance”.

Typically the end of the timebox for the Retrospective suddenly looms. With 10 seconds to go they realise they haven’t made any concrete decisions and that Sprint Two is about to start. At this point someone will often say “let’s just try. We’re nearly out of time”. The retrospective time box ends and they are now onto Sprint Two. I record their decisions on the whiteboard and I set the timer for two minutes and inform them that Sprint Two has started.

In Sprint Two we often see the first signs of emergent order. The Team changes the Team agreed to in the previous retrospective typically have a positive impact. The Team start to gel but there is often conflict (“he is such a useless thrower!”), roles (one person often acts as they person who starts and finishes the cycle of ball throwing), goals, standards and processes (“just slow down and do it properly guys”). This is what Tuckman called “storming”. It is healthy but often involves tension.

Sprint Two ends. We count up the completed and dropped balls again and reflect on our outcome as a Team. Typically we have improved but there is a feeling that there is clearly room for further improvement. The Sprint Two Retrospective starts.

The frustration of performing sub-optimally brings out new behaviours. In the absence of a manager, quitter people start to find their voice. The Team starts to find an identity greater than that of the individuals combined. There is a feeling in the room that great things are possible. This time, they start keep an eye on the timer – they don’t want to waste their precious 60 seconds on chatter that doesn’t result in action. Rapid fire decisions start to happen. Wastage starts to get eliminated. Progress!

Keep reading! Part two of this blog is here.