Why self-organization is not like ’60 paces’ ::spoiler alert::

There is this game that people play during agile trainings called ‘60 paces’.

It is well known and shows how much more efficient self-organization is compared to a command and control environment.

I'll leave out the details of the game here. You can look them up on tastycupcakes.org via the link above, but if you haven't played the game yet, you would be depriving yourself of a great learning opportunity by looking it up. Allow yourself to be surprised, I think you will get much more out of it that way.

So this is more like an inside blogpost for people who have either played or conducted the game in the past.

In my opinion there is one thing missing in the game – a round zero. Where you just let people do whatever they want for two minutes. And ask the control questions (see game description) afterwards.

Then continue playing as described in the original description.

From my point of view this approach illustrates one aspect that is not addressed by the original simulation and which is also very often forgotten in naive lean and agile implementations:

Without a known and clear unifying goal there will be no progress towards any goal.

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg