Gamifying short term focus
We often use mini-games to set shorter-term priorities and/or to focus
particular attention on resolving an issue in the course of a sprint. Gamifying
the challenge can help a team really get out of “thinking about” and into “doing”
mode. This is especially effective for work that the team has been procrastinating
on for too long.
What is a Mini-Game
As an example, suppose the Customer Success team has collected a pile of 90
unresolved issues. The team realizes that these unresolved issues pose a major
risk of bad customer feedback, so they decide to do something about it.
The challenge and the prize
For their next 2-week sprint, the team leader sets up a Mini-Game where, if
every single unresolved issue gets a personal answer, she will take the entire
team for a fancy dinner. She also asks the team to keep score and report the
score every day.
Self-organizing to win the challenge
However, she leaves it to the team how to organize and whether to get to the 90
complaints. Feeling challenged, some team members start splitting up the
complaints across the 9 team members so that everyone has 10. They set up a
quick scoreboard and track everybody’s score against each other. But when they
see two team members falling behind, they also realize this is a team challenge
and they step in to help.
End result
More often than not, the team feels energized about meeting the challenge and
builds renewed solidarity in the process.
Mini-games: what to do and what not to do
- Do set one challenge for a sprint, don’t set multiple challenges in parallel
- Do set new challenges regularly, don’t repeat the same challenge with a new
target
- Do “celebrate” losses as much as wins, but don’t spend anywhere near the same
amount of money on them (soup kitchen rather than fancy restaurant)
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