Plan the Year — participant sheet
Eight quarters. Two truths.
The score on screen is your reputation — what the org sees. Beneath it sits your Foundation — the health of your team and your codebase. Shortcuts raise the first and quietly spend the second, and the bill arrives quarters later. This sheet is where you commit a plan before you play, and where you settle up with it afterwards.
1 · Forecast — fill in BEFORE Q1
2 · The Foundation bands
| Band | What it means |
|---|---|
| Solid | Sustainable pace. Clean delivery compounds. |
| Strained | The team absorbs the pressure — for now. |
| Cracking | Warning signs. Two quarters here and people start breaking. |
| Crumbling | The bill arrives: burnout attrition and debt incidents fire. |
What erodes it:
- Shipping a project that still carries tech debt to hit the deadline
- Running projects understaffed quarter after quarter
- Leaving active work with nobody on it
- Letting projects slide past their deadline
What rebuilds it: clean, fully-staffed, on-time delivery — and quarters where you don’t overreach.
3 · Forecast checks — fill in when the room pauses
4 · Debrief — after the Story of the Year
1. Which consequence in my Story could I have named when I seeded it?
2. Forecast vs. final screen — where was my gap: optimism about output, or blindness about cost?
3. The real-life version of my final Foundation band, for my actual team, is…
4. The shortcut that felt free — who paid for it, and when?
5. One concrete behavior that is “playing for the foundation” in our next real quarter:
5 · Map the game to your world
| In the game | On my team, this is… |
|---|---|
| A project shipped with tech debt | |
| A quarter of understaffed crunch | |
| A Rush Quarter event | |
| Burnout attrition (someone quits) | |
| A Favor spent |