Learning Through Games

As a trainer, I have become increasingly convinced that games and simulations provide an excellent platform for learning concepts and new behaviours. I am playing and training with more and more games than ever before. It was getting hard for me to remember all the games and decide which one to use in a particular situation. (Can someone please create a public website where we can list games, rate them and tag them by the problems they solve?)

Where Games Play

Here are some of the games that I am currently use or want to use in training.

What’s with the grid?

• People – games about people learning individual skills or learning about individuals
• System - games about the team or organization
• Concepts - games primarily about teaching concepts or ideas
• “Experiencing our reality” - games the help us understand ourselves and our context

Links – People/Concepts

• Multi-tasking (10 min)
• Collaborative Origami – collaboration & communication (15 min)
• Yellow Brick Road: Fresh Insights through peer coaching (90 min)
• Pair Draw (30 min)
• 99 Test Balloons – acceptance testing (30 min)
• Go! – Your brain on Scrum (10 min)

Links – System/Concept

• The Biggest Bang for the Buck – backlog organization and prioritization – (60 min). Game I created with Gino Marckx will be released around Agile2010.
• The Backlog is in the Eye of the Beholder – organizing backlog from stakeholder view (40 min). Game I co-created at Deep Agile.
• Business Value Game – helps understand differing sources of value. (90 min)
• Marshmallow Challenge – understand benefits of incremental design (45 min)
• XPGame – Scrum variant – basics of iterative development and acceptance testing (180 min)
• Penny Game – Flow of value, process improvement (40 min?)
• Bottleneck Game – understanding process and applying theory of constraints (90 min)
• Name Game – Limit concurrent projects (10 min)
• Movers and shapers – team dynamics (10 min)

Links – System/Reality

• Ball Point Game – process improvement, teamwork – simpler than penny game (40 min)
• Value Stream Mapping – hmmm. not a game really
• Leadership Game – self-organization and leadership styles (180 min)

Links – People/Reality

• Constellations – Share team perspectives (30 min)
• Improv Games and Hypontizing hypnotist – Get better at collaboration and innovation (10 min to ?)
• Yes, And (not Yes, But) - Shift your mindset towards collaboration (15 min)
• MarketPlace – share skills with team members (30+ min)

Other thoughts

Please draw your own maps and share them!

Other games

I did not include games that have are designed to achieve and outcome such as  retrospectives, planning poker or Innovation Games® since the primary purpose is not training/teaching. These are important too.

Happy to be finally attend InnovationGames in Chicago, July 15/16.

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