Time: 80 minutes for 5 participants
Requirements: sticky notes, IndexCards and felt-pens
Preperation
Prepare a space for every single participant. You can use FlipCharts or use a dedicated wall-space:
Be sure you have enough Sticky Notes available and Markers or felt-pens as well.
Start the Game
Ask Participants ‘Regarding the last Sprint, what would I like to change in the next Sprint?’ Create 20 Ideas/Topics within a strict TimeBox of 5 minutes. Use one StickyNote for each Idea/Topic (5 min)
Why 20 Topics at least? This sounds challenging. The reason for this challenge is quite simple – Participants need to do a real Brainstorming and be creative. If you want to be creative and collect as much Ideas as possible you’re not allowed to judge on an Idea as it come up. If you start to judge your Ideas during creating Ideas you kill Creativity! Write down everything as it pop up in your mind!
Let Participants do this in silence!
By forcing yourself to come up with 20 Ideas/Topics in a short TimeBox, you put your internal critic on hold and write everything down, including the obvious and weak. The first third will be the same old Ideas. The second third will be more interesting and the last third will show more insights, curiosity and complexity. (Cracking Creativity by Michael Michalko)
After this ‘Blue Sky thinking’ regarding change, give Participants a TimeBox of 3 minutes to prioritize their Ideas. (3 min)
Let Participants write down their 3-Top-Ideas, having the highest Value, on IndexCards – each Idea on one Card. (2 min)
Start Bowling
Ask a volunteer to start the Agile Bowling. The Volunteer read aloud her Idea/Topic with the highest value and let her give a short comment on that – TimeBox (1 min)
Now, give all other Participants a TimeBox of 3 minutes to create at least 10 effects – question: ‘If we change this Idea, what effects will have that to our Team?’
Write down every effect on one single StickyNote! (3 min)
During this TimeBox, let the Volunteer post her Idea/Topic on the Wall. Make sure their is enough space for the upcoming StickyNotes!
Now, let Participants post their StickyNotes with the effects below the posted IndexCard. When all effects are posted, let them read aloud the effects and let them remove all duplicates!
Make a dot-voting on the effects, every Participant has 3 dots. Let them dot-vote on the effect with the highest value for the Team.
Write down the count of all effects on an extra StickyNote and post it under all the other StickyNotes. Below the count, post the effect with the most dots, as this is the effect with the highest value for the Team. (6 min)
Now, repeat this Agile Bowling with every Participant. Make sure that every Participant has a unique Idea/Topic – that’s the reason why People choosed 3 top-ideas with the highest value!
After finishing Agile Bowling with all Participants, you can calculate the score. For calculating a score for a Participant, multiply the count of effects with the count of dots on the effect with the highest value.
The Participant with the top-score wins a bar of chocolate.
Winning a bar of chocolate is just for fun – it has nothing to do with the overall outcome!!!
At the end, ask every Participant to take their effect-StickyNote with the highest value for the Team and let them make this effect happen in the upcoming sprint.
Debriefing
Make a debriefing of this Retrospective and let Participants give you Feedback on the exercise.
Participants may feel exhausted, as it is really challenging to be creative.
As I did this Retrospective with a Team in Germany, the points on the following picture are in german. Read the translation below!
- strung out
- exhausted
- creative
- productive
- inspired
- happy
- motivated
- guilty conscience about using so much StickyNotes
The Feedback of the Team was awesome. There was just one negative point as some People had a guilty conscience about using so much StickyNotes!
Variations
You can use Agile Bowling also as Empiric Experience, just modify the questions! In addition, you can play more than just one round of Agile Bowling, depending how much time is available!
vinylbaustein 
Mar 12, 2012 @ 21:20:07
Hi Thorsten,
As me and the team were so enthusiastic about the Agile Golf, I want to do agile bowling for the next retro. I especially like the idea that you have to come up with 20 changes, just to stimulate creativity. Reading your blog I have two questions:
1) What do you mean by “If we change this Idea, what effects will have that to our Team?”. Can you give an example idea and an example effect?
“At the end, ask every Participant to take their effect-StickyNote with the highest value for the Team and let them make this effect happen in the upcoming sprint.”
2) Why do they have to take the effect-stickyNote instead of the change index card? Isn’t the change index card telling him what should be changed?
Regards,
Mario
Mar 13, 2012 @ 14:03:48
Hi Mario,
great that you’ll try Agile Bowling for your next retrospective, much appreciated!
Regarding your questions:
1)
Each change has impacts to your team. For example, if you decide to hire an Agile Tester, this decision will have several impacts. First you have more costs to cover, the salary. You need a desk and equipment for this person, etc.. What are impacts on your team? If the person is hired as an Agile Tester for several teams, you’ll have other impacts than hiring an Agile Tester especially for your own team. An additional effect could be to get better estimations as an Agile Tester will estimate from his own perspective.
One single change can have several impacts for a team or the whole company. When you start thinking about impacts and effects a change will have, you’ll get a clearer picture of a situation and you can decide what effects are welcome and what do you want to avoid.
2)
When you start thinking about effects and impacts, you could find out that you don’t want to have a special change but you want to make a special effect or impact happen regarding to the change you have examined. To make this effect happen it could be, that you don’t need to implement the examined change and the effort to make the effect or impact happen could be much smaller than implementing an examined change.
I just found out that for most people it’s easier to make smaller effects happen than to change a situation. Small single steps instead of huge changes will be more sustainable. It’s a little bit like splitting storys into tasks. Regarding the Agile Bowling, a change is a story and an effect is a task…
I hope that helps!
Best,
Thorsten