How Escape Rooms Taught Me Everything I Needed to Know About Teams
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A look at the science of teams through the lens of escape rooms
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How Escape Rooms Taught Me Everything I Needed to Know About Teams
- 1. How Escape Rooms Taught Me Everything I Needed to Know About Teams #AGILESCIENCE #TEAMBUILDING #SERIOUSSCIENCE
- 2. We like to get locked up in rooms
- 3. What are Escape Rooms? Image source: https://www.escaperoomla.com/the-theatre
- 8. Teams - Definition “[a] team is a group of people who are interdependent with respect to information, resources, knowledge and skills and who seek to combine their efforts to achieve a common goal” - Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management Real team, with clear boundaries, interdependence among members, and at least moderate stability of membership over time – Richard Hackman - Harvard - 2004
- 9. Poll Factors that you think affect team growth
- 11. Mark, don’t pick that lock
- 12. Same team every time
- 17. Escaping the room is the only thing that matters
- 18. How many locks does this room have?
- 19. Shared Language
- 20. Risks
- 21. It’s okay to make mistake
- 22. Dissent
- 24. When slowed, yell for help
- 25. Value Cohesion
- 26. What Escape Rooms don’t teach us
- 30. Self-Organizing
- 31. Common Myths
- 32. Bigger is better
- 33. Top Talent
- 34. Some “Teams” are not really Teams
- 39. Conditions to Create a Great Team Common Goal Shared Approach (Working Agreements) Psychological Safety Stable Membership Dedicated Team Membership Self-Organizing Clear Boundaries 3-8 People
- 40. Finally – Escape Rooms build teams that are good at…
- 41. Building Great Teams – Member Selection Choose for: Able to give and receive feedback Focus on learning and mastery Respect for others Emotional intelligence Skill in the work
- 42. Building Great Teams - Growth Pay attention to communication and cohesion Develop common Vision Build learning into the system Build a review process into the system Focus on flow Create working agreements
- 43. Thanks to… Ottawa: Escape Manor (they have a lot of rooms), Jigsaw Ottawa, Lockdown Ottawa, Unlocked Ottawa Kingston: Improbable Escapes, Sherlock’s Escapes
- 44. References (good science here) The New Science of Building Great Teams - Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams The Hidden Benefits of Keeping Teams Intact https://hbr.org/2013/12/the- hidden-benefits-of-keeping-teams-intact Team Building: How to Get Real Results from Team Building Activities: https://scienceforwork.com/blog/team-building/ What is psychological safety and why is it the key to great teamwork? https://www.impraise.com/blog/what-is-psychological-safety-and-why-is- it-the-key-to-great-teamwork Leading Teams – Setting the Stage for Great Performances – Richard Hackman: https://www.amazon.ca/Leading-Teams-Setting-Stage- Performances/dp/1578513332/
- 45. References (Seriously good science) People Analytics by Ben Waber: https://www.amazon.ca/People-Analytics- Technology-Transform-Business/dp/0133158314 Five Steps for Creating High-Performance Teams: https://agilepainrelief.com/high-performance-teams The Guide to Effective Agile Retrospectives: https://agilepainrelief.com/guide-to-effective-agile-retrospectives What is the Recommended Scrum Team Size? https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/scrum-team-size.html Scrum by Example – Team Friction Inspires Working Agreements - https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/team-friction-inspires-working- agreements.html
- 46. References – Last one Specialists and their Limitations: https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/specialists-are-overrated.html Cross Skilling: https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/how-to-cross-skill-and- grow-t-shaped-team-members.html Impact of Agile Quantified: https://www.infoq.com/articles/quantifying- impact-agile/ and https://www.infoq.com/presentations/agile-quantify/ High Performance Teams – Special Report – David Wilkinson https://www.oxford-review.com/high-performance-teams-special-report/
Editor's Notes
- My wife, I and our friends like to get locked up in rooms.
- You just got locked in a room with 5 of your closest friends. To leave you must solve a series of puzzles 60 minutes or less. The clues for these puzzles are often hidden in plain sight – perhaps there is one letter in each of the posters shown here. Perhaps these letters would help open a lock. Sometimes the clues are in the open but the information you need to understand those clues are hidden inside a locked box.
- …and like Charlie Brown we kept going back to kick the ball again. We did our first escape room in 2015 - We missed by two puzzles – so we changed our team membership - completely - We failed another four or five times, but we kept the team together
- - Then after one frustrating failure in Jan 2017, we tried again and got out – there was no magic turning point. Part of it was just learning how to get out of each others way. - It was at this point I realized that we stopped being a bunch of people trying to escape a locked room, and we became a team.
- Common Goal
- Working Agreements
- Even among a group of friends, didn’t magically go from never having worked together as a team to successful room escapes.
- Collaboration Solving puzzles requires seeing a problem from a number of different angles – sometime quite literally. The solution to many direction locks might be hidden in a piece of text that mentions up, down, left, right; North, South, East, West – the challenge is which bits of the text matter or what order to read them in. On other occasions you have a street map and need to find a list of destinations. We never go more than a couple of minutes before asking for help. Often help shows up, saying something like: “Tell me what’s going with this puzzle”. Sometimes the act of explaining the puzzle to another player helps make something clear to the person explaining it.
- We have
- Bottlenecks and Cross skilling Stuck waiting for the Specialist to work on a puzzle. You don’t have time to stay stuck. Start work.
- It doesn’t matter who did what, it matters that the puzzles got solved. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if our math puzzles specialist solves the puzzle it – it matters that we succeed in escaping.
- Share Information When we step into a room, or discover an additional room, we always inventory the locks. We have two letter locks with 5 letters each, three four digit number locks and one three digit number lock Many times a piece of information that seems inconsequential to you solves a puzzle that someone else. What appears to be random Photo source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/squeakymarmot/30062552265/
- When talking about puzzles we now have a shared language – an outsider joining our team would be confused. For instance when we enter a new room someone will start counting the locks and call out: “We have 3 letter locks – 5 letters each; two number locks, four digits and one key lock. The key is like…”
- Time out locks – many safes have time out locks. You get three tries and then you’re locked out for 5 minutes. On at least one occasion an unnamed member of the team blew it. We had less than five minutes left to go, we were stuck. We thought we had the combination but it hadn’t worked. This person tried the code one last time and the safe timed out. -- it was the thing that got talked about the most in the after action review and I still hear about to this day. Whenever we try a new room, the team asks are there timeout locks and then people look at me. The Group has to decide its risk tolerance, riskier decisions need a group check.
- Psychological Safety Not a lack of candor, but an environment where trying new things and making mistakes is supported. “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.“ – Amy Edmondson – Harvard.
- A dissenter who looks at the problem differently has often helped us escape. -- The challenge is that dissent must be seen as authentic. \ Devil’s Advocate or Ritual Dissent (Snowden) is called contrived dissent: “The problem as per this seems to have little imapct on the decision making whereas genuine conflict, dissent or diversity of views seems to help.”[1]
- A 45 – 60 minute room, requires 2+ hrs to debrief
- Don’t wait until you’ve been stuck for 5 minutes. We do a consensus check – when we’ve been stuck for what feels like a while we ask the Game Master (or Guide) for a clue. Most games give 1-3 clues and it still counts as an escape It’s the times we haven’t that we failed our escapes
- Hackman and co in studying Senior Leadership teams: “Not surprisingly, we found that almost every senior team we studied thought that it had set unambiguous boundaries. Yet when we asked members to describe their team, fewer than 10% agreed about who was on it. And these were teams of senior executives!” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Review on Building Better Teams .
- There is a study that shows that R&D teams do need an influx of new talent to maintain creativity and freshness—but only at the rate of one person every three to four years. In fact changing team members is associated with making mistakes – NTSB accidents study 73% of accidents in their database happened in first day of crew’s flying together Harvard Business Review on Building Better Teams .
- Team building interventions improve team members’ feelings and team interactions, but don’t have a considerable effect on team performance;