Team Members’ Profile Game

When teaching in a SCRUM course, there are two major objectives I want to achieve shortly: create trust and collaboration among the attendees and let them to feel as a team.

Both the objectives above reported, are ambitious and challenging: it is such a difficult thing to achieve when individuals know each other very well and for a long time, how is it possible with people that meet each other the first time?

Of course it is difficult, but in my opinion it is necessary (mandatory) to create such a climate (environment) to facilitate the process of learning of the attendees (process of collaboration between the team members).

So, usually I start my courses with a collaborative game called “Team Members’s Profile” that is a combination of some agile habits (make avatars representing each team member to use with index cards and task board) and a game (write and share with others something of yourself) and that makes use of a brilliant metaphor to represent the team: the A-TEAM (do you remember the serial TV?).

Source: Wikipedia

Such a team, altought a little rude, is able to reach every target and accomplish to every mission and is a perfect example of a SCRUM team. Its major strength is its cross-abilities. Every team member of the A-Team, brings in his own skills that no one other possesses and is precisely the mix of their skills that allow them to complete succesfully their missions.

Coming back to the example, after the introduction of the A-Team metaphor, I want every team member express his/her own subjectivity, asking them to take a post-it note, draw their avatar on the left top area and write the most important things/words/adjectives of themselves, they want to share with the others attendees.

When finished, and before giving them the possibility to describe the avatar and to explain what they wrote, I ask the attendees to choose the most important thing they wrote and to state it as a phrase/statement, on a new post-it and finally fold it in two parts.

Then, I ask the attendees to pass for three times the post-it to their neighbour, in order to be sure that each one receives a post-it they do not know.

At this point I ask the attendees to form groups of twos (the two members of each group, should not know each other), to read the statement written in the post-it and, in two minutes, to explain to the other person what they read.

What I stress the most, is that they should try to communicate, better as they can, their personal interpretation of the message.

This exercise aims to different results:

Let everyone facing uncertainty
Putting each one in someone other’s shoes.
Actually, you are called to understand, feel, make it yours and finally explain, something that someone else thinks and feels.
Communicate face-to-face with another attendee (team member)
Practice the art of listening

We have three rounds and, finally, I ask the attendees to explain the first original post-it (that with the avatar), give insights about the statement on the second one and finally stick it at the “A TEAM WALL”.