Team Responsibility Game at Global Scrum Gathering Berlin

Are you an agile coach or a scrum master who often hears complaints like: „Honestly, Alice and me do most of the work, and we can’t fully rely on Eve.“ or „I feel a bit left out, Alice and Bob decide most of the stuff on their own and then simply present me with the results.“

Are you a team member where you are a part of this dynamic?

When we want to work together in a healthy team, we need healthy working relationships between the team members.

Often teams get out of balance, some team members describe themselves as carrying 130% of the load and see others as only carrying 70%. In a private conversation with a scrum master or agile coach these „70%“ team members often describe themselves as not being fully part of the team because the „130%“ members simply do or decide stuff without asking.

The reasons for this are manifold and is not always easy to have good conversations and root cause analysis about this.

The team responsibility game offers a felt experience of this concept that can then in a team conversation be mapped onto the real team dynamics. So it serves as very powerful conversation starter (usually in a retrospective) to explore if there are imbalances in the team, to have the team openly discuss them and to take actions to bring balance back to the team.

The exercise shows clearly the human system dynamics, that if one person claims a bit more than his own power and responsibility it is also because some else gives up a bit of his own power and responsibility. So the exercises makes it possible to talk about this without blaming anyone because it explains the behaviour of team member as a natural effect of the human system dynamics and not a personal fault.

We will run the exercise, debrief it, and I will present and discuss how to apply this exercise in your teams. And we will have lots of fun!