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This game illustrates the benefits of self-organization – among other things…
Instructions
Introduce this simply as a warm-up or on-your-feet exercise, to avoid pre-conceptions.
All participants stand up and spread out around the room. Ask people not to speak. Each person silently picks two people (not those standing close by) to be their partners.
Objective
Ask each person to move to a positon in the room so that they form an equilateral triangle with their partners.
If the two partners do not move this is an easy thing to do, but of course they do move because they are also trying to create equilateral triangles with their own partners. This movement to create the triangles will not come to rest. (see note #1)
After a minute or two has elapsed and people are still milling about, give the instruction: “Now resolve this.”
What happens? Well different things with different groups. Sometimes they begin asking the facilitator questions: Can we talk now? Can we change partners? Can the triangles overlap/interlock? Sometimes a ‘dominant male’ will take over: You do this, you do that… In all cases resolution will occur very quickly.
Debrief
What happened? What was your experience, what was hard/easy/annoying/good/etc. How did it feel to reach resolution? All kinds of parallels with software projects have been expressed, e.g. “the requirements were unclear”, “communication was the key to the solution”, “once we understood the parameters the execution was simple”. You may also hear “who put [dominant_male] in charge?” or other questions of that kind. The group should of course, answer these themselves. Try not to have expectations of responses. This exercise continues to suprise me in the way that participants see parallels with many different aspects of an Agile software development process.
The exercise lasts no more than 5 minutes. Debrief may be 5-10 minutes.
Note #1
The triangles will not come to rest, except in a few extremely rare cases where partner choices do not cross over. The larger the group, the less likely this is to happen. Should it occur… adapt! Maybe ask the group how this worked out, would it always work out? What if they did it again? Try it a second time…