The Message

To meet the demands of a changing world, we must all advance towards new ways of working and managing . Servant managers must empower knowledge workers to self-organise.  People know how to do their jobs.  Managers can serve the work instead of commanding it, liberating workers to get on with it, and supporting them with whatever they need.

(We still need managers. There is much to do even when we let people get on with the work.)

The Message is a large-scale simulation designed by Teal Unicorn, to experience how this is possible.

It demonstrates how a large number of people can self-organise to do creative work (software, design, bespoke manufacturing, … any knowledge work). It shows how we can scale Agile concepts from a team to a tribe to many tribes without the heavy weight of certain popular frameworks.

It draws ideas from other games, including OpenSpace¹, Game Without Thrones², and LeSS Dynamics³.

The game runs for a full day with 40-200 people (or more!!) in a large indoor space.
Our record so far is 130 in HaNoi in 2022: 4 tribes of 6 teams each.

We work together to write messages on the walls with paper. The simulation provides a minimum set of standards and patterns for teams to self-organise to do and improve the work.

Wellington NZ, 2018

We learn just what happens when you let the people doing the work design the work, collaboratively. They self-organise into agile teams to achieve the outcome they have chosen.

You can understand a person in an hour of playing more than a year of talking. 

– Plato

• A game that simulates a moving, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.
• 1 game that simulates how to get customers is in your mind
• 1 game that simulates how to build an agile team consisting of which functional parts
• 1 game that simulates how to operate, adapt, adapt, adapt with changing needs and problems of customers.
• 1 game on how to organize interactive agile team groups, adapt and adjust in conflict, ambiguity, disagreement.
• 1 simulator game that visualizes the flow of information, tasks, requests ..
• 1 game that simulates how to apply Lean Coffee and Openspace Technology.
• 1 game with many management theories used agile leadership, invitational leadership, crisis leadership, open leadership
• A game that uses agile sales techniques, pitching sales , agile coordinating …

And the result was definitely more than the expectations …
There are many more to discover and interesting things that only participates can sympathize and understand.

– David Thanh, MB Military Bank

GO AHEAD, LEARN AHEAD

Take-aways for those who haven’t had a chance to attend:

• What customers spend money to buy is good enough.
• For a productive meeting, all members need to know what the purpose of the meeting is and focus on that purpose, not rush.
• See change as an opportunity to grow instead of stressing about it.
• Customer involvement in product development is as soon as possible. This saves a lot of resources for the organization.
• When the achievement of the whole organization is clearly present, everyone, each individual is very excited, motivated to work, connected with teammates, with the company and the ego of each person reduces.
• Unhealthy competition, not supporting each other in the organization will kill the growth of the whole organization.
• Managers don’t always have answers for everything. But the manager has a duty to support how to make the work of the members done in the smoothest, easiest, human-looking way.
• When employees are in trouble, don’t jump in to help. Let them swim by themselves; if they don’t fall, they won’t learn the lesson. However, it is impossible to let them be free falling and not looking up. Choose the right time to step in, accompany them.
• When you are at the learning level, learn and do exactly as you are instructed. Master the rules so you can break them!!!
• Believe in your teammates like you believe in yourself.
• The flow of information in the organization is particularly important. Breaking news is easy to fall into a state of being single, accidentally stepping on each other’s feet, duplicate work content or no one does the work to do.
• Work according to skill, not position.

           – Nguyễn Thị Hà Anh, Amber Academy

© Copyright 2019-2022 Two Hills Ltd www.twohills.co.nz
The Message game by Two Hills Ltd trading as Teal Unicorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Contact us.

1 OpenSpace Guide, the great Harrison Owen www.openspaceworld.com/users_guide.htm
2 A Game Without Thrones from Peter Merel www.linkedin.com/pulse/game-without-thrones-peter-…
GWoT is one of the key training simulations in XSCALE’s Exponential Business Agility(XBA) course. Public training sessions are available.
3 The LeSS Dynamics game, Agilix agilix.nl/blog/blog-534-the-less-dynamics-game/

The LeSS Dynamics Game by Cesario Ramos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.