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“Win as much as you can” is a game to explore how sub-groups in a larger team can balance
their desire to win more as a sub-group with their desire to win as a team and also to reflect on how cooperation and competition might affect multiparty negotiations.
Practitioners:
This method was refined by Gabriel Brezoiu (General Manager) and Alexandra Peca (Head of Democracy & Human Rights) through several youth mobility projects (training courses and youth exchanges). Gabriel is a trainer, youth worker, social media expert, and project manager working in the youth field since 2007. As a non-formal education
trainer in entrepreneurship, Gabriel is specialised in using design thinking, Business Canvas Model, creative expression, and digital tools methodologies to enhance young people and youth workers’ entrepreneurial spirit and to support them to transform
their ideas into actions.
Alexandra has been working as a project manager for the past 4 years, focusing on the
topics of youth participation, civic education, youth work, digital education, human rights. As a former Promoter for European Democracy, a project of the European Parliament Liaison Office in Romania, Alexandra is dedicated to creating at GEYC an environment in which young people feel involved and empowered, they know their rights and they develop a responsible attitude toward civic and democratic engagement.
Objectives:
The objectives of this method are to:
> Develop the participants’ creative thinking;
> Foster their negotiation skills;
> Foster collaboration between participants.
Structure of the process:
The participants are split in equal groups and each group receives a psychological profile of an entrepreneur and according to their profile, they have to play the game „Win as much as you can”, with the purpose of learning the importance of cooperation and trust between entrepreneurs.
The game consists of 10 rounds in which each team has to decide to put forward an X or a Y. According to the composition of the letters put forward the teams will receive different points according to the payoff schedule, which will be added to the score grid.
Before round 5, 8 and 10 one representative of each team comes to the circle in the middle to negotiate with the representatives of other teams (the rest of the teams cannot interfere!). The payoff of round 5 will be then tripled, the payoff of round 8 multiplied by 5 and that of round 10 multiplied by 10. At the end of the exercise, the trainer totals up the scores. Usually, the trainer team wins some money (i.e. the participants lose as they did not fully cooperate together).
Ideas of entrepreneurship profiles:
-> You are a successful business owner. For you, trust is very important and your employees know that your relationship with them is based on that.
-> The people in your village know you as „the gambler”. You have had more businesses
than wives and you can’t seem to keep your employees around you.
-> You have decided to open your first business. You start to look for people who have the same drive as you, but you find it a bit hard to trust them with handling very important tasks, so you give them small assignments and do the rest by yourself.
-> You have been let down by people so many times that you prefer to do everything by
yourself. You think the best things are done when you do them yourself.
Template to use: https://bit.ly/winasmuch
Your Approach:
This is a game about trust, communication and partnership. Some questions that could be used, are:
> How did you like the game/use one word to describe the game (in order to let off some
steam)
> Did you play against each other or against the team? Why?
> Imagine that the four teams are competing companies/businesses, what does the game
highlight then about the business environment?
> What does the exercise highlight about trust and communication between business partners?
> How did the representatives of the teams feel during and after the negotiations in the
middle?
> Was it easy to bring home the decisions made in the middle?
> What suggestions could be made to improve cooperation?
> How could the process have gone more smoothly?
Remarks
This activity can be very easily adapted to any topic that you are working on.
Source/Acknowledgments:
Written by: Gabriel Brezoiu & Alexandra Peca, GEYC, Romania
The European Commission’s support for the production of this website does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Project No. : 2020-1-FR02-KA227-YOU-018692