Chapter 11. Bridge Building

This workshop corresponds to Chapter 3, “Team Dynamics.”

Teamwork takes hard work. When a team is assigned to a new project, there are many unknown requirements, risks, and barriers that must be handled. When team members are assigned to roles, there are often predetermined expectations of the responsibilities of each of those roles. The success of the project then becomes dependent on whether all the necessary roles were assigned and that the individuals assigned to those roles have adequate skills and experience to fulfill the needs of the role.

On an agile project, there is less emphasis on prescribed roles and more emphasis on teamwork and collaboration to accomplish the work. Team members who are new to agile may come from organizations with more structure and may have a difficult time adapting to the concept of a self-organizing team. The bridge exercise was designed to help participants discover where their strengths lie as members of a team. The exercise generates a sense of urgency that encourages the members of a team to abandon preconceived notions of canned roles and instead adapt to the needs of the project and capitalize on each team member’s strengths.

Materials

Materials for the workshop included the following:

• Plastic drinking straws

• Paper clips (any size)

• Cellophane tape

• Rubber bands

• Hardback textbooks

• Two tables or desks with a two-foot gap between them

Setup

Split the participants into teams of 4–6 people. Provide each team with an ample supply of drinking straws, paper clips, tape, and rubber bands. Situate the team near two desks or tables that have a two-foot gap between them. If space allows, locate the teams far enough away from each other so that they won’t get in each others’ way.

Facilitation

It’s important for the facilitator to provide clear direction but not to provide too much information. A key learning objective of this exercise is the self-discovery process that members of each team will go through.

When all the teams are situated with their materials, provide the following instructions: “Your goal is to build a bridge between two tables using only the materials you have been provided. Your bridge should hold the weight of a textbook without collapsing. You have 20 minutes.” Make note of the current time; then say, “1-2-3-Go!”

While the teams are figuring out how to start, draw a simple timeline on a whiteboard or flip chart that depicts the milestones 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20 (see Figure 11.1).

Figure 11.1 Bridge building timeline

Don’t mention the timeline yet. Instead, casually add a twist to the requirement by stating, “Let’s also see which bridge is strongest. When you finish, we’ll test your bridges to see which one can hold the most books without collapsing.” This casual afterthought accomplishes a couple things:

• It introduces an ambiguous goal that the team members must resolve. Together they must figure out how strong the bridge should be to beat the other teams.

• It prevents a team from creating an overly simplistic solution such as just running a couple pieces of tape between the tables and saying, “Done.”

As each time milestone is reached, draw everyone’s attention to the timeline and say, “Your project is 25% complete!” “...50% complete!” and so on. Update the timeline to show how much time is complete (see Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2 Shaded timeline after five minutes

Expect to see some scrambling after announcing the 75% milestone. As the clock winds down, count down the final seconds and make sure that everyone stops working when time runs out.

Although testing the bridges is not relevant to the team building point of the exercise, it does provide closure that the participants will expect. First test that each bridge can hold the weight of the textbook; then determine the winning team by piling on books (or other heavy objects) until each bridge collapses.

Post-Exercise Discussion

Several discussion points follow this exercise. The facilitator should avoid spending time focusing on specific design and engineering choices made. Rather, the discussion should center on the dynamics and behavior of the team during the exercise.

When the exercise concludes, consider some of the following discussion points:

• How long did the team dawdle before starting on the construction of bridge?

• Did a leader emerge? How long did that take, and how did the leader become the leader?

• How did the leader lead? How was it effective? How was it ineffective?

• Did someone play the role of the engineer or chief architect of the bridge?

• Who followed? Who led?

• Did anyone resist playing a follower role but resign to the role to keep the project moving forward?

• What conflict arose during the exercise? How did the team resolve that conflict?

• What changes happened to team dynamics after the project completion percent was announced?

• Did awareness that time was burning help motivate productivity, or did it detract focus?

• How did the team’s behavior adapt when the nonfunctional requirement was introduced after the project was well underway. (“Let’s also see which bridge is the strongest.”)

After discussing these questions, you need to draw attention to behaviors, roles, and feelings that were exposed during the exercise. When conducting this exercise with an existing team, it’s helpful to tie the learning objectives from the bridge exercise to situations that arise on an actual project the team is working on.