Hi guys, this time I want to share an exercise for your new project ramp up. I think this activity is extremely important, because as Lyssa Adkins says “Throwing people in a room or holding a “kick off” is different than a good team start up”. Usually, when a team is formed, people do not know each others, so it´s always a good idea to create some activities that allow team members to get to know each other. The “Tribes” exercise is quite easy yet quite powerful, let´s see how it works…
You must have a big open area with enough space where people can walk around without a problem. After that, ask team members to share some ideas on the topics they are interested in loudly, so that everyone in the room can hear them. People that share same interests on the same topic join the person in the center of the room; this will form a small “tribe”. Ask other individuals to do the same and observe how “tribes” are formed and reformed around the new individual/interest. This is a great exercise that can be used as an ice-breaker activity. It´s always very interesting to observe people´s expressions when they realize that there are many people with the same interests. As a result, the group will understand the other´s appreciations better.
If you want to go deeper in the exercise, you can, for example,ask people to do the same with Agile Best Practices, so that all team members familiarize themselves with different agile skills of their team members. Below you can find few examples, you can create hundreds of them.
* All my tribe members that appreciate pair programming, join me
* All my tribe members that are specialists in TDD, join me
* All my tribe members that love Cucumber, join me
* All my tribe members that think retrospectives are a fundamental part of our project, join me.
I believe, using this exercise will create some kind of bonds among team members and will help them to understand where they position themselves, on personal level and/or on the technical level.
What do you think about it? Let me know whether you use it…
