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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.

bsjoberg:

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