The COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed the way we work. To preserve business continuity, companies had to scramble to continue operating remotely, even when they never thought it was possible. Culture, tooling, processes and trust levels were some of the paradigms that had to be redefined in order to adapt to a new reality which still persists to this day.
As an Agile Coach, many aspects of my role had to be adapted as well, particularly how training was conducted. To be effective, training sessions need to be engaging, interesting, and most importantly, fun. But due to the challenge of working remotely, one common problem I faced was: “How do I convert in-person training sessions into remote training sessions and still maintain the same level of quality?” Simply migrating everything online doesn’t work most of the time — imagine a very long and boring slide deck presentation.
In order to achieve a stimulating experience for participants, there are some really awesome ‘serious games’ out there that the agile community uses in in-person training sessions that result in thought-provoking discussions, eureka moments and penetrative learnings. One such example is the famous Penny Game. Which raises the question: how could I turn the experiential Penny Game into a remote activity?
In this article, I will be sharing with you my remote-ification of the Penny Game and my key learnings from facilitating a few sessions. If you are already familiar with the game and don’t require a brief introduction, you can skip ahead to the Remote Version section directly.
This is a theory-of-constraints-based game which shows that the flow of work is more important than the efficiency of each work stage, assuming that work flows downstream to other workers.
In the in-person game, each worker simulates tasks by flipping pennies, which are then sent downstream to the next worker. Many lightbulb moments surface by running the game a few rounds, changing the batch size of how many pennies each worker flips before sending downstream, timing the individual workers tasks, and measuring the time the pennies take to go through the whole system. I discuss these realisations in the Debriefing section below.
Needless to say, converting the in-person game into a remote version was difficult. Some trainers used visual collaboration platforms like Miro or Mural to simulate the same activities but I wanted to avoid this. Not all in-person activities work the same way online and I had foreseen many instances where this would not turn out to be a great online activity (I would love to hear about your experience if you have successfully done so).
Eventually, I ended up ruminating on the learnings that the game tries to produce and thought: “If I was creating an online game from scratch to teach these lessons, what would it look like?”
One of the first ideas that came to mind was to have participants type messages to each other. Similar to flipping pennies, typing also takes up quite a bit of time but not a lot, so it seemed like a good fit.
Here is the full list of modifications based on the original game:
> Batches are
> simulated by
> sending parts
> of the message
> independently
Before we start the game, we’ll also need to set up the following logistics, batches, and context for the participants:
Logistics
2. Once the order is established, each participant needs to make sure of 2 things:
In this example, Andre will receive messages from Fez and will be sending messages to Maria.
3. In *Zoom, this is easily accomplished by setting your chat to be able to only send private messages to the next person. Fez sets to send private messages to Andre; Andre to Maria; etc. Direct your other gamers to do the same.
*Note: Since participants will be sending and receiving messages in the same window, some may get confused if they are typing one message while receiving another one simultaneously.
4. Alternatively, I used the chat popping feature in Skype to open two messaging windows — one for the person before me and one for the person after me. In this example, Andre will have two chat windows opened: one for Fez and one for Maria.
5. The first person will receive the message from the facilitator.
6. The role of director can either be played by the last person or the facilitator (have the last person send the messages to the director).
7. Instruct the participants to have a stopwatch handy. Remember, they will be timing themselves.
Batches
For the batches, I chose famous book openings that had similar lengths of text to type, but feel free to add your own flavour when running this game. Naturally, you don’t show these to the participants.
From Jane Rule’s book Desert of the Heart:
1. Batch of 11 words (71 letters)
Note: I removed the accent on the word clichés to make it easier to type.
From William Gaddis’ book A Frolic of His Own:
2. Batch of 7 words (74 letters):
From George Orwell’s book 1984:
3. Batch of 4 words (73 letters)
Context
In the game, participants will be workers, and each typing activity represents the work that needs to be done on their stage and then sent down the line. In a waterfall software development shop, these levels could be: analysis, design, code, test, deploy, etc. Feel free to let the participants choose based on what kind of team they are.
Now that you have your prerequisites ready, it’s time to introduce the gameplay. Explain the following:
As a facilitator, you start your own timer when everybody is ready and send the secret batch message(s) to the first participant. I recommend playing a dramatic song to set the mood.
When the message comes back to you, stop the timer and update the timings in the table as shown in the example below:
*TtM time to market
For the second and, time permitting, third rounds, explain that participants will now be receiving two (and four) batches instead, and they will need to send them individually. It might be the case where participants receive the second batch in the middle of sending the first batch.
Like the in-person version, the facilitator will time two metrics:
After a fun second and maybe third run, update the table again. One notable difference from the in-person Penny Game is that individual timings are usually slower than first round timings. This is not always the case for this set up, so you may want to add a 3-second “hand-over” cost for each batch or overall to simulate this. Nevertheless, you will see that the overall timing is still so much more efficient even with this hand-over cost.
As mentioned, great discussions emerge from the timings on the table around flow, bottlenecks, WIP, time to market, etc. Some important learnings are:
What’s at play here is the concept of system’s thinking. Local optimisations do not necessarily lead to global optimisations. On the contrary, it may cause the overall performance to degrade. That’s why focusing on the flow of the entire system (global optimisation) before focusing on local optimisation leads to better system performance. Henrik Kniberg also highlights this on his video Resource Utilization Trap.
I have facilitated a few sessions of the Non-Penny Game and they have worked out well, with discussions, learnings, and a-hás happening as expected. One of the sessions I facilitated had 10 participants and it turned out that there was a lot of waiting, so I wouldn’t recommend it. The max number of participants seems to be around six.
For most of my 1-hour remote sessions, I only did two rounds: Batch of 11 and Batch of 4, since setting up and debriefing discussions take time.
Things to keep in mind
I would like to end off this article by sharing a quote that I learned from a client this year: “Steal with pride and share with delight”. Feel free to use the Non-Penny Game in your training sessions and workshops. I hope this remote exercise can help you, your team and your participants understand the concept of system’s thinking in greater detail and improve organisational workflow.
If you decide to run it, I encourage you to connect with me and share your experience. I’m sure there are a lot of improvements other facilitators will uncover and as a community, we can create an experience that is not just full of learnings, but also enjoyable for all.
Have fun!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.