Innovation isn’t a special gift available only to a few creative geniuses, it’s a by-product of how they behave.  Innovative teams create change and breakthrough products not by rigorously “following a process,” but by challenging and reinventing the rules of the process.

Serious Games?

The game of business has changed, and now it’s “arrival of the fittest.” Organizations serious about competing know they have to innovate to stay ahead — sometimes just to keep up.  But your teams can’t plan their way to breakthroughs. Whoever meets the needs of their customers and stakeholders first, wins.  

That’s serious.

Innovation requires teamwork, collaboration, and open-ended exploration of possibilities. The best innovators couple simulation and experimentation to rapidly evolve the change they need to succeed. And they do it by working together using some simple rules.

That’s games.

Innovation Games® are a powerful set of collaborative analysis techniques and tools.  Unlike dot-voting, requirements spreadsheets, or process diagrams, they engage the “hard-wired” deep mental structures of our brains to uncover hidden needs and build true consensus.  By coupling these techniques with the transformative power of Agile, you will learn to transform your teams from mere production engines into innovation engines of extraordinary value.

That’s serious games.

Innovation Games for Agile Teams

The Games can be used to help teams improve their products — and their processes — without heavy analysis, quantitative research, or other “big effort up front” methods that slow teams down.  The feedback loops of Agile can be used to accelerate the cycle of putting these improvements into reality.

This course combines the collaborative insight of Innovation Games®, the transformative power of Scrum, and principles of effective distributed teams into one incredible class.  You will not find this course elsewhere!

Examples

The principles and techniques learned in this course can be applied almost anywhere that rapid transformation, team consensus, or breakthrough ideas are necessary.  Just a few examples:

• A Director of Development prioritizes project initiatives for the next year using Buy A Feature
• A Product Manager uses Prune the Product Tree to facilitate a release roadmap
• An Agile PMO eliminates wasted effort by using Show And Tell with their stakeholders
• A ScrumMaster uses Start Your Day to help his team improve their development process
• A Project Manager helps her team maintain project focus with Remember The Future

Course Agenda

This course covers in-person and online games (vital for distributed teams!) and includes sections on facilitation and presentation skills, how to structure game sessions, and how to meld the games with the Scrum framework for process improvement.

The course is light on presented material, and very heavy on simulation, participation, and interactive discussion. Prepare to be engaged!

• Day 1
  • Essential Agile
  • The Scrum framework
  • Why Innovation Games: L-Mode/R-Mode and Whole Brain thinking 
  • Planning, playing and post-processing Innovation Games®
  • Team facilitation and coaching skills
  • The relationship between product development and process improvement
  • Experience in playing and facilitating 4 of the Games
• Day 2
  • Exploring the phases of Innovation Games® — case studies
  • Adapting the Games to specific needs
  • Innovation Games® Online
  • Facilitating distributed teams
  • Experience in playing and facilitating 3 specific Games
  • Adopting the Games and Agile innovation at your organization

What You Will Learn

Upon completing this course, participants will be able to use Innovation Games® coupled with Agile processes to:

• Evolve business processes just as they evolve products
• Rapidly discover “unknown” requirements
• Build consensus — not just requirements — for virtual/distributed teams
• Keep the “engine” of your Agile team fed with real product needs
• Build and foster trust relationships between Agile teams and their stakeholders 
• Quickly prioritize requirements based on real need for breakthrough delivery

Course Parameters