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High-performing agile teams thrive on adaptability, collaboration, and continuous improvement. But for learning to truly happen, teams need psychological safety—a culture where people feel comfortable speaking up, sharing ideas, and acknowledging failures without fear of judgment. One of the most overlooked aspects of team inclusion in agile team dynamics is how people learn. Not everyone processes information the same way, and understanding diverse learning styles can help create environments where all team members feel supported, engaged, and empowered to contribute.

Want to find out your specific learning preferences? Download your free Learning Style Quiz and Guide on how each learner type absorbs knowledge best.

Understanding Learning Styles and Learner Types

Think of a time you learned something quickly and effectively, and try to pinpoint what made it work for you. If it was a learning experience you enjoyed and found useful, the way the information was presented was probably well aligned with the way your brain likes to process new knowledge. For some people, that might look like videos, or a chance to practice and apply, or having time to read and take notes down.

Understanding your own learner type and how you best process information will improve your self-awareness at work, enabling you to learn more effectively and advocate for your learning needs.

But why is it important to understand the learner types of those around you?

• Team awareness → Adapt to others, improve team collaboration and inclusion
• Leaders & trainers → Support diverse learners, create accessible environments
• Inclusion → Recognizing and valuing different ways people process information and communicate
• Psychological safety → People learn best when they feel safe to ask, experiment and fail

Before we get into looking at the four learning styles, let’s take a moment to recognize that learning preferences aren’t one-size-fits-all—many people have a mix of preferences and may not fit neatly into just one category. Diverse learners—those who process, absorb, and express knowledge in different ways—benefit from flexible approaches, and may align with more than one learning style, parts of a few, or none at all. Neurodiversity in the workplace is an important consideration here—neurodivergent individuals often have unique information processing styles and may need additional support to ensure they can engage effectively. The key is to find what works best for you and create an environment where everyone can learn in their own way.

The VARK Learning Model: Four Learner Types

The VARK learning model categorizes learners into four main types:

Psychological Safety & Team Inclusion in Agile

Now that you understand your own learning style—and that others may learn very differently—let’s talk about how this contributes to team effectiveness.

Learning, growth, and innovation are cornerstones of high-performing agile teams, but these things don’t happen in isolation. They can really only happen in environments where people feel safe to ask questions, experiment, and share ideas. It is well known that a key factor of successful and effective agile teams is their positive, healthy culture, and this is where psychological safety and inclusion come in.

Psychological safety and inclusion are essential for agile teams because they:

• enable people to learn and grow
• help teams adapt and change quickly
• reduce fear of failure, leading to innovation
• prevent misalignment and financial loss due to fear of speaking up

Inclusion and psychological safety aren’t just ‘nice to have’ - they make agile work.

➡️ What is inclusion?

Ensuring that everyone, regardless of background, identity, or learning style, has equal opportunity to contribute, feel valued, and thrive in a team or workplace.

How to foster inclusion in the workplace:

• Adapt communication and learning approaches to support different learner types.
• Create accessible ways for everyone to engage e.g. visuals, discussions, written formats, hands-on activities.
• Actively seek out and respect different perspectives in meetings, planning, and decision-making.
• Ensure all voices are heard by structuring discussions to prevent dominant voices from taking over.

➡️ What is psychological safety?

A team environment where individuals feel safe to speak up, take risks, ask questions, and share ideas without fear of judgment, rejection, or punishment.

How to build psychological safety in the workplace:

• Normalize giving and receiving feedback in a constructive, blame-free way.
• Encourage curiosity—frame mistakes as learning opportunities rather than failures.
• Leaders should model vulnerability by admitting when they don’t have all the answers.
• Create a culture where all input is valued by acknowledging contributions, even if they aren’t implemented.

Agility is a learning process

The strongest agile teams learn, adapt, and have a culture of continuous improvement. Psychological safety enables teams to ask questions, challenge ideas, and experiment without fear - key to fast and effective feedback mechanisms.

Why psychological safety matters for all learners…

People process information differently—safe environments let all learners express needs, engage in their way, and contribute fully. Diverse learners, including neurodivergent team members, may not fit one learning type—psychological safety ensures they can ask for what they need without judgment, and feel valued for the way they engage with and process information.

The impact on agility?

• Align: Safety fosters open discussion → better decisions, clear priorities.
• Improve: Teams feel safe to experiment → faster learning, better solutions.
• Inform: Feedback flows freely → smarter investment decisions, stronger adaptability.

What does this look like in practice?

Retrospectives: The Ultimate Learning & Inclusion Space

Retrospectives are where Agile teams pause to reflect, learn, and improve. But for a retro to be effective, it must be psychologically safe and inclusive—because without trust, learning can’t happen.

So, what makes a retrospective psychologically safe and inclusive?

✅ All voices are heard → Everyone, regardless of communication or learning style, has a way to contribute.
✅ Blame-free reflection → The focus is on learning and improving, not pointing fingers.
✅ Actionable follow-through → The team sees real change as a result of their input, building trust.

How to Create Inclusive & Safe Retros

To ensure your retrospectives work for all learning styles, consider:

• Use multiple ways to gather input → Anonymous feedback, written reflections, open discussion, or interactive boards.
• Encourage different communication styles → Some may prefer speaking up in the moment, while others need time to process and write.
• Follow through on feedback → If teams don’t see changes happen, engagement will drop.

A great retro is not just a meeting—it’s a space for learning, collaboration, and trust-building. And the right tools can help.

How Easy Agile TeamRhythm Helps Agile Teams Run Inclusive, Psychologically Safe Retros

While Easy Agile TeamRhythm is a Jira app built for creating, estimating, and sequencing work at a team level on an interactive user story map, it is also a platform for running engaging and effective agile retrospectives. The retrospectives feature of Easy Agile TeamRhythm allows uses to create and track action items from retros by group feedback, identifying themes, and converting them into Jira issues for each planning. You can use templates, mood surveys, and timers to keep your ceremonies focused and effective.

Build collaboration and improve team alignment

Easy Agile TeamRhythm makes team retrospectives boards the hub for learning and improvement, allowing teams to celebrate wins, share learnings, and improve their team alignment and workflow. The ability to set privacy and permissions ensures that team information is only available to those your team trusts.

How Easy Agile TeamRhythm features create psychological safety and inclusion

Final thoughts

Inclusion and psychological safety aren’t just concepts—they’re the foundation of high-performing Agile teams. By recognizing different learning styles, creating space for all voices, and fostering a culture where people feel safe to learn and experiment, teams can truly thrive. What’s one thing you’ll do to make your Agile team more inclusive, supportive, and effective? Small changes can have a big impact.

Start building more inclusive, collaborative teams

Download your free copy of the Learning Style Quiz. Use it to gain lasting insights into how your team learns and works best.

Agile software development uses iteration to improve agile practices. More than that, development teams use agile principles to enhance self-organization. Improving the Scrum framework leads to improvements in rapid deliverables and product outcomes through iteration.

But taking on agile when you're not familiar with this approach can be challenging. Team members need a bridging tool. A bridging tool like virtual team building activities supports new learning activities. New learning promotes new ways of thinking that promote continuous improvement. Enter, Agile games!

Learn how these games can support team-building and promote problem-solving for better software development processes, and which agile games to look for.

What are agile games?

Agile games are online games that entire teams can play. These games were created for team-building activities. They help nurture effective teams by getting everyone to work towards a common goal. When agile teams put their heads together, communicate effectively, and take on new learning, everyone wins — including product owners.

Team building games drive innovation by encouraging a new perspective through team-building exercises. Agile games are fun, but they are also practical. This practical approach enables team members to adopt new behaviors.

When they play agile games, teams implement better working methodologies in software development. Agile games support team building through new learning activities and iteration.

Ultimately, agile games augment the good communication and self-organization of DevOps teams. The outcome of playing agile games is that your team members more rapidly assimilate agile software.

As agile teams improve their problem-solving skills, they reap multiple benefits that might have fallen along the wayside if they didn't use an agile methodology or these agile games.

Types of agile games

There are multiple agile games that you can use to familiarize new teams with agile software. Tastycupcakes developed many of these simple games as ice breakers, which encourage introverts to participate more fully in Scrum practices. These games also help build multitasking skills in high-pressure DevOps environments, which any agile coach will be happy to use.

Now that you have some groundwork to help you understand the thinking behind agile games, you’re probably keen to find out what types of games you can play to build teamwork.

Here are a few agile games to whet your appetite. This list of games goes from the shortest to the longest playing times, each with its own objective.

1. Chocolate Bar Game

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjectives5 mins4+Virtual & in-personTeam building activity for customer feedback and iteration

The Chocolate Bar Game is ideal for new teams who are unfamiliar with agile practices. Teamwork improves as the members play this game and learn more about iteration. Entire teams can also play this game to understand how to integrate customer feedback into their retrospectives.

You can either play the game in person or play an online game with remote teams.

The Chocolate Bar game works as a Scrum simulation. The goal is to create a chocolate bar as if you were taking instructions from the product owner. Development teams choose their product manager who can also be the product owner. The rest of the agile team are the customers.

The product owner acts as a facilitator, instructing team members to create a chocolate bar that appeals to the target market. This chocolate bar must be delicious and can be made from either dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or white chocolate.

Additionally, the team can select a range of fillings to improve their product. Toppings and other unique features also come into play as teams can include organic or gluten-free features that cater to a niche market.

After each iteration, the project manager provides the team with customer feedback. Customers can give the software development team (or chocolate bar creation team) a thumbs up for their creation if they approve of the chocolate made by the agile team. Customers can also give team members a thumbs down if they don’t like the initial stages of their chocolate bar creation.

Teamwork involves recording customers' responses for changes before the next iteration, which involves the chocolate bar fillings. The team members will continue building their chocolate bar, adding or subtracting fillings and toppings until most customers are happy with their creation.

As you can see, playing the Chocolate Bar Game involves repetitive iteration based on customer feedback, which is the objective of this agile game.

2. How to Hug

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjective5 mins (or less)3+Virtual onlyAgile team collaboration

How to Hug is a simple game for improving team collaboration, especially on a remote team. How to Hug is a great icebreaker when introducing new team members.

The Scrum team can access this agile team-building activity online. The entire team uploads their photos for display on the How to Hug virtual circle. The whole team can then vote to place their image at the circle's center.

Once the agile team has a central image, the rest of the members move their images to touch the Scrum Master's image at the circle's center.

Everyone has a chance to place their image at the center of the circle, and the team repeats the process. Although a simple game, this is one of those virtual team-building activities that involve lots of laughs.

Team members learn about each other during this virtual hugging session with collaboration and team bonding helping to create a great team.

3. Ball Point Game

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjective15 mins, split into 3-min sessions4+In-person & virtualAgile production process

The objective in playing Ball Point is for the Scrum team to navigate agile projects better. By understanding the agile production process, the team appreciates the importance of self-organization. Self-organization is the cornerstone for creating Scrum processes that work so that the entire team can engage in effective iteration.

Entire teams can play this game physically or online, using game icons on the virtual whiteboard.

The common goal is for the team to move a ball or several balls around the table. Team members must all touch the ball or balls once. After one team member touches the ball, the next person must do the same. The Scrum team earns a point if they successfully manage to move the ball around the table.

Each sprint lasts for three minutes, and the whole team must participate in five sprints to see who wins the Ball Point game. During the first sprint, the team discusses their strategy and takes notes to anticipate how many points they will score in the first minute.

The second minute involves moving the ball around the table. The Scrum team records their points and new learning in the third minute.

As the game progresses, teamwork intensifies as members add more balls in the following sprint rounds. As the team passes balls simultaneously, the game becomes more complex. More thinking is required in the iteration process as team members attempt to increase their scores. After each round, the teams engage in a brief retrospective to see what tactics they can use to score more points in the next sprint. Simple but effective!

4. Marshmallow Tower

Playing TimePlayer RequiredFormatObjectives20 mins4+In-person onlyIteration & collaboration

This is an in-person team building activity, and the team will need a few supplies:

• Dry spaghetti
• One yard of tape
• One yard of string
• Marshmallows

Team members must engage in this learning activity in groups of four people. The Scrum master hands out 20 pieces of spaghetti to each team, along with the other provisions.

The objective here is to build the highest marshmallow tower with these items. The marshmallow tower must be freestanding, and team members must place all the marshmallows at the top of the structure. Some agile games use one marshmallow, while others match the marshmallow numbers with the spaghetti sticks.

Inevitably, the tower collapses as the team places the marshmallow on top. But the goal is to simulate the Scrum retrospective through several iterations. The whole team must quickly regroup through good communication and collaboration to improve each successive round.

The concept sounds simple, but its execution is deceptively tricky. Teams need to collaborate quickly, and you’re sure to see plenty of towers collapse at the last second as teams scramble to place the marshmallow on top of their structures.

But, repeat the challenge several times, and you’ll see teams refine their approaches to collaboration and iterate on their earlier creations.

5. LEGO Flow Game

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjectives60-90 mins3-9In-person onlyScrum simulation, iteration, collaboration, workflow

The LEGO Flow game focuses on a Scrum simulation. Agile teams build a virtual LEGO Advent Calendar to detail work items in an efficient workflow. Each section of the workflow involves specific role players.

The common goal is to build the items, find the following advent calendar number (analysis) and then identify a set of LEGO pieces that must align with the supply source (suppliers).

The Scrum team builds (builders) the LEGO item as they progress through the game. Team members must engage in constant iteration to determine whether the build is correct and acceptable to the market representatives or product owner (acceptors).

Agile coaches will love using this game as it is an excellent tool to introduce new teams to Agile. LEGO Flow offers new teams the opportunity to engage in new learning activities through a simulated Scrum exercise.

LEGO Flow is an agile game that requires three rounds, each with its own objective. These objectives include batch and phase-driven processes together with time-boxed and flow-based processes.

After each of the three rounds, teamwork involves sprint retrospectives to understand what went well and what challenges the team encountered. The objective is to analyze the pros and cons of each sprint approach, demonstrating the benefits of teamwork. The game ends with the building of an overall Cumulative Flow Diagram.

This diagram allows the whole team to view its strategies and decisions, consider where they went wrong in each round of this agile game, and enhance their workflow.

If time allows, the Scrum master can question team members about what policy changes they would make for future sprints.

Agile games and team building activities

The whole team can transform their work-life with virtual team-building activities over Zoom. Having some fun while learning definitely beats using a physical whiteboard and sticky notes to introduce new teams to the Scrum framework.

Easy Agile apps are yet another innovative way to ease your new team into the Agile family. Dive into the world of Easy Agile Scrum Workflow for Jira that you can combine with LEGO Flow.

Agile is about empowering teams to take ownership, feel truly engaged, and foster a culture of collaboration. More than ever, teams are required to deliver with greater adaptability, speed, and engagement. The future is more ambiguous and complex, and Agile teams must know how best to respond to these changing conditions.

Agile experts John Walpole, Dean MacNeil, and Nick Muldoon share their success formula behind the high-functioning Agile teams at Lyft, Valiantys, and Easy Agile. You will learn:

• How to create a compelling 'why' that the whole team can get behind
• How to empower your teams
• The qualities of high-performing Agile teams

WATCH NOW

Create a compelling 'why' that the whole team can get behind

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I think Agile is not a silver bullet. We have people who look at Agile and say, "Oh, well, this is going to solve all of our woes." And it's not; it's certainly not a turnkey thing.

Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO at Easy Agile

Agile is not a silver bullet. It is not a methodology that will solve leaders, teams and individuals' problems. Agile is a continuous improvement journey of "adaptability in evolutionary theory; it's about responding to either a new environment or changes in your environment to again, not just survive but to thrive," said Dean.

Set your Agile teams up for success by teaching them to thrive by empowering them to lead change, make mistakes, build a solid foundation, and be open to learning, changing, and communicating the meaningful 'why' behind their work. You will see an explosion in Agile team success when you have a "cohesive team aligned to a common mission with a growth mindset."

Motivate your Agile teams by connecting their work with a meaningful 'why.' Schedule a meeting to ensure you constantly discuss their work's more profound purpose. Bring up a real-life customer example. John shared, "At Lyft, we share stories in a fortnightly meeting. We offer free accessible rides to those in wheelchairs or those who struggle to pay for a ride but need access to transportation to get to work or school.

"Bring your personas to life with these real-life examples, so it's front and center in your employee's minds," said John.

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Empowering your teams

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Peter Drucker

Your employees need to lead the change. "If you look at great leaders in recent Agile transformations, you might want to look at a company like Porsche," said Dean. Dean shares how Porsche has inspired Valiantys because "every employee at Porsche is leading the change. So they're all bought into it; they all have that sense of leadership to drive it.". Porsche's employees are leading the change because their leadership communicates the 'why' well. "Fun is number one when their CIO lists off the top three reasons 'why' everyone is so fired up about the Agile transformation. Because you can have fun on the job, your job is not supposed to be a grim duty. It's supposed to be something you look forward to."

"Empower your teams to make mistakes," said John.

Empower your Agile teams to fail and make mistakes through powerful questions. Leaders have to change their tone from "oh no, who do I fire?" to "what's the challenge? What can I do to help?". Express to your team that you're on a journey to learn as much as they are. In doing so, the leader humanizes themselves and becomes more vulnerable.

Leadership sets the tone. As a company scales, the responsibility to create the culture and the risk appetite falls more on leadership.

Qualities of high-performing, Agile teams

1. Create a solid foundation

Set your Agile team up for success with a stable team unit. Don't keep moving teams around; create long-term Agile teams to allow individuals to get to know each other and humanize one another. "I think stability is key to having the tacit knowledge keeping together and this open mindset where they're willing to learn; I love that," said Nick.

2. Open to learning and adapting

For Agile teams to continuously improve, they must constantly be learning and adapting. "You can't get that learning and adaptation if you keep just stirring the pot. Because you're going to keep scattering that knowledge, you want to take hold, and then, of course, you want to spread the knowledge to the organization then," said Dean.

3. Share feedback and do the retrospective

Ensure your Agile teams are demonstrating working product on a regular occurrence. If you're practicing Scrum, make sure you are doing the weekly sprint review. This allows the team to receive feedback from stakeholders and keep iterating and moving forward, ensuring they stay in movement. "Do your retrospective," said Dean." We're looking at what we delivered, and now we're going to look at how we delivered it." It is imperative that Scrum teams gather at the end of each sprint to discuss what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what can be improved on for next time. Otherwise, you invite complacency and stagnation into your Scrum process — the antithesis of Agile.

Using Easy Agile to set your Agile teams up for success

Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports your team's Agile practices in Jira. The user story map format in TeamRhythm transforms your flat product maps into a dynamic and flexible visual representation of work. Watch the highlights tour to see how Easy Agile TeamRhythm makes sprint planning, managing your backlog, and team retrospectives easier. Visit Atlassian Marketplace to start your free, 30-day trial today.

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