To conduct agile or UX workshops, “speed boat”is one of the most popular innovation game. It helps us in understanding & identifying features or problems that hold us back but in a fun way. Philosophy of speed boat not only applies for our projects, products or teams. The same can also help us find out what hurdles are stopping us to achieve our aims & goals in personal lives or in making an organization grow. The idea of a speed boat is to have a boat which takes us to our dream island with the help of favorable winds. However this progress can be stopped either by anchors, pirates, rocks or other obstacles.
So how do we play the game?
- Draw a speed boat on a chart which represents a product, team or project and the objective of this speedboat is to reach its dream island.
- After drawing the speedboat, make the dream island where you want to see the team, product, project or may be the company for that matter.
- Once these two things are done, give the team 5 minutes and ask them to put what they would like to see on their dream island.
- Now ask them to write what is their favorable or opportune wind that would take the boat to the destination. Again give them 5 min for this.
- Then one needs to ask what is anchoring the progress of the boat towards the dream island.
In the end ask the team to analyse and come with plans to overcome the anchors.
Learnings from the game
This agility game motivates people to think and agree as a team which in turn helps to plan out the right strategy. Participants present what helps them to move forward and what is holding them back without any hesitation. They come up with solutions that would help the team move ahead. In the end, speed boat helps in finding out the obstacles that a team could face which can then be prioritized and planned to remove.
Author
Co-founder of People10, a 'total agile' software development and consulting company.