Lateral Insight – when gamification is misleading

I beg to differ —Against gamification when it comes to team practices

Gamification has popped up a lot lately on my social medias as a way for a team to improve. More precisely, it’s about using achievement badges and scores. That’s where I beg to differ ✋🏻.
I see how attractively fun it seems, but in my experience it encourages a misleading pursuit that many passionate practioners fall into. In gaming linguo let me call it “practice hunting”. New automated testing framework, new iteration retrospective format, more elaborated kanban, higher “done” criterias, catch’em all!

This pursuance contradicts several high performance principles

1. do not fix what is not broken
2. repetition and consistency lead to mastery

On the later, the more you do something the better you get at it, and in this sense boredom is to be seek for a technique to be mastered. If you’re out for novelty, disciplined practice means the novelty is to be found first in the evolution and betterment of a known technique, not in the discovery in yet another technique.

Practices are not pokemons, you don’t need to catch them all

What’s keeping me busy these days —

I’m trying to reach a new type of clientele and be more differentiated but that gets my work a bit all over the place to be honest so I’m having a hard time prioritizing my next steps. On top of if

• sorting out the most sticky messages for my talk on Doing Transformations Right at Voxxed Days 2019. Only 30 minutes, dang
• crafting a set of services for startups in a more biteable size, like workshops and one time coaching sessions
• adapting an Agile Management program I’m running to be more relatable to an asian / non-westerner audience
  oh gosh, there’s so much more on this list. Well, you know my struggle now

Questions I’m trying to sort —

I have the intuition that bringing an army of Agile coach is counter-efficient to scale up a transformation, but I’m still not deadshot clear about why. I feel it’s violating a couple of change principles but I want more practical examples of what’s wrong with it.

My best work in scaling Agile was solo or in teams of 2 or 3 coaches when there was no option to bring more coach. Our options were limited to adapting our approach and leveraging more on the people of the organisation themselves. Am I biased by that experience?

This was Lateral Insight, your weekly dose of lateral thinking by Giom
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Tags: Agile, Agile Coaching, Agile Facilitator, Gamification, lateral insight, Team Practices