Make risks visible with “RAID bingo”

To help teams mitigate risks and other concerns — and make them explicit and visible — I like to do a RAID brainstorm, either at a kickoff/inception and/or at points after a project has started. (RAID is an acronym for Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies.) As with any sort of group brainstorming, the key is to facilitate cognitive diversity by allowing individuals to come up with as many ideas without being biased or inhibited by groupthink.

One technique I use to draw out as many unique ideas — and avoid the boredom and tedium that usually come with talking about risks — is RAID Bingo. Here’s how you do it:

1. Divide the group into multiple small teams of 3-5 people.
2. Have each team draw on a wall/large-poster sheet a 4×4 grid* with column headings of R, A, I and D.
3. Instruct the teams to write risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies on post-it notes and place them in the appropriate columns as fast as possible. The goal is to be the first team to have three items in any column or four in any row. The first team to do so should shout “Bingo!”
4. When a team shouts Bingo, tell all teams to pause. Invite the winning team to announce and briefly describe each of their items.
5. Resume play! Have the teams keep their post-it notes on the boards and continue to try to get a(nother) full column or row.
6. The next team to shout Bingo must have all unique items (they cannot have the same items that the first winning team used).
7. Repeat until the teams have covered most of their boards (usually by the third “Bingo”). Then do the final Bingo “coverall” — first team to cover all squares wins.

Unified, final RAID list

After you’ve generated many unique project concerns, unify all teams’ contributions into one board. At this point, you can discuss them in more depth or simply defer the discussion and mitigation strategy until later (but hopefully not too much later!).

*Depending on time available and the number of people in the group, and therefore the number of small Bingo teams, you may choose to make the columns bigger (four blank squares for a smaller group) or shorter (three blank squares for three or more teams or less time).