Game of 35 (for Consensus and Prioritization)

I attended some great courses recently by the Agile Coaching Institute and would highly encourage taking any of their workshops. During each of these we played a game called 35. I found it extremely valuable for reaching consensus of what all the members thought was important very quickly. After completing the game we were able to work from a prioritized list that resonated with the group. And it only took about 10 minutes!

Below is a facilitators guide to running it. These were posted originally on Lyssa Adkins blog with a link to a powerpoint. I took the contents of the presentation, modified them slightly and posted them here.

Facilitating 35:

• Announce the topic (e.g. learning objective, vision, etc…) to the group
• Each person writes their version of that topic idea on an index card and draws a small box in the corner. See the front of card picture below)
• Each person flips the card over and writes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in a column on the left side. See the back of card picture below
• Everyone walks around and mixes up the cards by handing them to a random person
• When the facilitator says “stop” people pair up and apportion 7 points between the 2 cards, giving more points to the card that speaks to them the most (there is no 3.5 😏)
• Do this for 4 more rounds
• Each person sums up the scores on the card they are holding and writes it in the box on the front of the card
• The card with the highest score “wins” and you can order the cards by their score to reflect priority

Front of Card

Back of Card

Notes

• Fast way to get a group to come to one idea while building shared knowledge of all the contributions to that idea and hearing all voices
• Works best with a group of 10 or more
• For a big group you can have everyone go up to a white board and place their card in the appropriate rank order. This will create a nice histogram
• When to do it:
  • create mission/vision statements
  • establish sprint goal statements
  • learning objectives of workshop
  • prioritize a product backlog

If you have had experience with 35, please post those in the comments. Thanks for reading.