



I attended some great courses recently by the Agile Coaching Institute and would highly encourage taking any of their workshops. During each of these we played a game called 35. I found it extremely valuable for reaching consensus of what all the members thought was important very quickly. After completing the game we were able to work from a prioritized list that resonated with the group. And it only took about 10 minutes!

Below is a facilitators guide to running it. These were posted originally on Lyssa Adkins blog with a link to a powerpoint. I took the contents of the presentation, modified them slightly and posted them here.

Facilitating 35:

Announce the topic (e.g. learning objective, vision, etc…) to the group

Each person writes their version of that topic idea on an index card and draws a small box in the corner. See the front of card picture below)

Each person flips the card over and writes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in a column on the left side. See the back of card picture below

Everyone walks around and mixes up the cards by handing them to a random person

When the facilitator says “stop” people pair up and apportion 7 points between the 2 cards, giving more points to the card that speaks to them the most (there is no 3.5 😏)

Do this for 4 more rounds

Each person sums up the scores on the card they are holding and writes it in the box on the front of the card

The card with the highest score “wins” and you can order the cards by their score to reflect priority

Notes

Fast way to get a group to come to one idea while building shared knowledge of all the contributions to that idea and hearing all voices

Works best with a group of 10 or more

For a big group you can have everyone go up to a white board and place their card in the appropriate rank order. This will create a nice histogram

When to do it: create mission/vision statements establish sprint goal statements learning objectives of workshop prioritize a product backlog



If you have had experience with 35, please post those in the comments. Thanks for reading.

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