Miro Xmas Calendar 2023

We're halfway through! Number 5 on my top 10 favorites list is a template I created for one of the Miro Community template challenges held from time to time:

The Agile Sinking Ship template.

This particular challenge was during the so called Agile April of 2022, and the theme was Agile Games.

All entries:

• Day 1: Build Measure Learn
• Day 2: Under the Miroscope
• Day 3: Product Vision Cue
• Day 4: The OGSM Canvas
• Day 5: Cell-Based Architecture
• Day 6: Agile Sinking Ship
• Day 7: Collaborative Jigsaw Puzzle Ice Breaker
• Day 8: Technology Radar
• Day 9: Personality Retrospective
• Day 10: Agile Battleships

Background

Most games with the goal of teaching people how agile principles can be applied in reality are OK at best. I've had the privilege of participating in one game tailor-made for teaching team members the importance of agile collaboration. Yes, in singular. One. In almost ten years of working with product development.

But even a merely "OK" agile game can still be fun!

The Why

The reason why I decided to make a game based on Paul Goddard's and Geoff Watts's Celebrity Prioritisation was that it sounded fun. Simple as that. 🤷‍♀️

And it was actually quite fun to craft it in Miro.

The How

The first thing I did was to take care of the "celebrity card." I had already designed a card containing an image, a name, and a description for a template I co-created with Alexis Luscutoff and Karen Manhas for a different template challenge (we won the popular vote!), so I just reused that one.

I then designed the 20 "badges" used for prioritizing the celebrities and arranged everything in a frame. For obvious reasons, I picked a blue theme for the template. Because, you know. Ships and water.

Last but not least, I designed the introductory frame. Grabbed an image from VectorGrove and tried to arrange things in a visually appealing manner.

The game itself is very straightforward:

1. A cruise ship with a number of famous people on board has hit an iceberg and is sinking, leaving the celebrities in mortal danger. Inform players that they don't know how long it will be until the boat has sunk. The good news is that they have a rescue boat and can be heroes by rescuing the celebrities. The bad news is that the rescue boat is small — they can only rescue one person at a time.
2. Task players to work together as a team and list the celebrities in the order in which they would rescue them (divide large groups into separate "teams"). Set them a time limit of 10–15 minutes.

The goal is to agree on an order of priority for the list of celebrities that will be saved. Easier said than done! And it's practically impossible to save everyone, because of the time constraint.

So, what do we learn through this game?

• Some teams will fail to agree on an order. In this case, everyone dies. The learning point is that almost any decision is better than no decision.
• It often isn't worth arguing too much about priority 1 vs priority 2.
• Arguing about priorities 10–15 is relatively pointless; the boat will probably have sunk by then anyway.
• Once you have rescued person 1, you can get some feedback on your decision and potentially change your mind about who you rescue next.
• Most teams will decide on a set of criteria for how to decide on their order. Agile setups need this understanding too. Things become easier then.
• Prioritization is subjective — there is no getting away from that.

Summary

I ended up creating two templates for the Agile Games template challenge, but unfortunately the challenge itself was first postponed and ultimately cancelled. Despite that, I had a fun time creating the Sinking Ship game template, and I actually think it's pretty fun to play it.

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