EP14: The Ball Point Game - An Agile Training Exercise for Iteration, Flow, and Self-Organisation
Unable to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Failed to remove from Wish List.
Adding to library failed
Unable to follow podcast
Unable to unfollow podcast
EP14: The Ball Point Game - An Agile Training Exercise for Iteration, Flow, and Self-Organisation
-
Narrated by:
-
By:
Geoff and Paul discuss the long-running agile training exercise “The Ball Point Game,” often used in in-person Certified ScrumMaster courses to teach iterative improvement, inspect-and-adapt, and self-organisation. They explain the setup (typically 10–12 people and many tennis-ball-sized balls) and core rules: each ball must touch everyone, have airtime between people, not be passed to a closest neighbour, return to the starter, and dropped/removed balls incur a penalty while the team self-scores. The game is played over eight timed iterations with planning, running, scoring, and re-estimating, and teams usually improve after a chaotic first round. They highlight learning outcomes around experimentation, the dangers of targets and competition, facilitation/Scrum Master questioning, lean waste and flow, leadership dynamics, and contrasts with waterfall-style planning, and they plan to share a PDF of rules and invite listeners to submit scores or videos.
00:59 Podcast Intro Setup
01:25 Ball Point Origins
03:06 Game Rules Explained
06:18 Iterations Timing Format
10:09 Early Rounds Expectations
11:52 Experimentation Mindset
14:46 Targets Scores Psychology
18:00 Facilitation Prompts Tips
23:04 Variants Flow Competition
27:43 Wrap Up Resources Challenge
28:29 Final Goodbye
