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 |