A Game Without Thrones ... online!

Serious Play, Leadership-as-a-Service, Descaling Metrics and the Camelot Model radically accelerate Business Agility and DevOps to ... blah de blah de blah ...

That's too many five dollar words - it makes a muddle out of stuff that, when you get it, simply makes sense. The Game Without Thrones isn't rocket science so isn't there some way to cut to the chase here without losing the meaning - ?

Indeed there is. A new cloud platform, Welo, lets groups of sixty play the GWoT together in an augmented reality from the comfort of their cribs. Show, don't tell is the way forward. That's how, this June, we'll be running GWoT at the XP 2021 conference and the Paris Business Agility conference. Well, after an Australian beta-test on June 9. Plus, from July, it's how XSCALE Coaches will bring GWoT to their clients around the world online. We're all out of Lego.

This article puts a frame around that vision. It explains why and how GWoT stops bureaucracy and replaces it with agility. But to grok it - to really get how this works - you'll need to come play the game with your team. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is ...

The Descaling Matrix. Er, Metrics ...

We all know what blue-pill bureaucracy looks like. Too many meetings with too many people. Deciders who don't share the experiences of the people executing their decisions. Left hand and right hand doing things that have nothing to do with each other. Chains that bind humanity made of office paper.

You can't solve a problem you can't measure. So GWoT is based on three simple metrics that measure the length of bureaucratic chains. Curiously, there seems to be a pattern here that solves for these metrics. It's just not the one we're used to. So buckle your seat-belt, Dorothy, 'cause Kansas is going bye-bye ...

1. Doer-Decider Distance: How many person-to-person conversations between decision-makers and people executing their decisions? The longer those loops, the slower learning flows between all parts of the organization.
2. Lateral Learning Latency: How many person-to-person conversations separate members of one team from the other teams whose decisions must align with theirs. Times how often do those conversations occur?
3. Maximum Meeting Members: How many people are required in any meeting to get decisions made for which they're respectively responsible? The bigger the meeting, the inefficient and HiPPO-dominated.

It's instructive to survey and translate these descaling metrics to RGB colors. It's easy to optimize for just one of them without changing your org-chart, but then the other two blow out. To optimize all three we need to improve how teams make decisions together, how learning flows between teams, and how teams across an organization align their goals, outcomes, and ways of working ...

Leadership as a Service

LaaS is a simple protocol for teams at all levels of an organization to make, timely, well-informed consensus decisions. GWoT applies the LaaS protocol at three levels: self-organizing feature teams, self-managing business streams delivering one epic each, and a self-directing portfolio of streams collaborating on a single product. In the game, this product is a castle for the mutual defense of participants against an onslaught of dragons, ice-zombies, and invading human armies. So there's a lot of decisions to make this way!

1. DRIs: Teams attach a Directly Responsible Individual to every agenda item in a meeting or work item in a backlog. The DRI carries sole responsibility for execution of the team's decisions about that item.
2. Balance of Powers: If the team is unanimous in its decision about some item - unanimous except for that item's DRI - they overrule the DRI about it. If they run out of time to become unanimous, the DRI overrules them.
3. Decide the Decider: One individual in a meeting acts as "Speaker" to decide (a) which DRI to attach to each work item; and (b) how much time to allow for unanimity before the DRI decides per Balance of Powers.

Of course we're all used to the traditional way of deciding where there's one person in the room with power to make decisions and everyone else can only try to influence that person. Using Laas instead, each person in the room provides leadership and each can only lead through influence, not power.

The Camelot Model

It's one thing for teams to become autonomous by self-organizing through LaaS, another to keep them aligned to purpose while learning and responding to change independently. There are three alignment practices built into GWoT to solve this.

1. Quality Circles. A commonplace Lean practice since the 1960s rebranded by agilists as "Chapters". But its the same idea. People with the same function on different teams meet regularly to share learning. These quality circles happen in parallel so no team is starved of any functional capability.
2. Round Councils. A practice inspired by the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace. Instead of inefficiently gathering representatives of teams as in the Scrum of Scrums, circle members take turns meeting in councils that prioritize, coordinate and simplify proposals made by their circles.
3. BDD Treaties. Quality circles propose new product features and working agreements between teams in BDD form. Councils alone prioritize features but the working agreement proposals are subject to veto by all affected teams. If none of the teams veto, the agreement takes effect as a "treaty".

Welo and Miro

The general form of the GWoT runs as described in this pre-Covid podcast. We can't get a crowd playing Lego in a big room like we used to, however, so at XP 2021 and Paris BACon, we'll run over Welo and Miro.

Most folks have used Miro - it's like powerpoint on steroids. That's where we're building our castles. But Welo is less well known. You can think of it as Zoom rooms on steroids. Like Zoom, it lets people videoconference. But far better than Zoom rooms, it places each video persistently in a circle on a chair in a room in a little virtual reality office. That sounds trivial but its really powerful. It provides both a shared context and the ability to see who people in your room are paying attention to. You can literally see them looking at each other.

That restores the spatial and social cues we're missing from our physical offices which makes it ideal for conference events and training games. It's an augmented reality office space. Rather than having to imagine what a Camelot team, circle or council looks like, you can actually see them operating all around you. That pretty picture you see here isn't just an abstract diagram of what we're doing as we play - its the actual space you inhabit as you play!

Where to Sign Up

We've just scheduled the Aussie beta test for June 9 - bookings here. It's free but seats are strictly limited to sixty so please don't register unless you're really going to turn up!

Then you can catch it at XP 2021 on June 18 and Paris BACon on June 25. Those conferences have paid registration but note we won't be charging conference attendees anything extra to take part in the GWoTs there.

And then ... XSCALE Alliance will run at least one public GWoT a month for free from July onwards. Those events will start out limited to sixty too but we aim to scale them up to the hundreds and then the thousands soon. Well, properly speaking, to descale the hundreds and thousands ... you get the idea!

Finally, if you'd like a private GWoT to run in your organization, drop us a line to [email protected] to let us know. Note that we're not offering private GWoTs until August at the earliest. But don't hesitate to let us know now if you're interested - we have a lot of balls in the air!