How to play Standup Survival
Every morning, somewhere, a group of adults stands in a circle — or sits in a grid of rectangles — and takes turns explaining what they did yesterday. Standup Survival is a game about the twenty seconds where it is your turn.
The wheel deals you a situation. You did nothing yesterday. You broke prod and nobody has noticed. Your skip-level dropped in “just to listen”. You then have thirty seconds to assemble your update from nine phrase cards, choosing three. Every card is scored, and you cannot see the scores until you have committed, which is exactly how speaking in standup works.
Plausible corporate nothing scores highest. “No blockers, I’ll take the rest offline” is a perfect standup update: it contains no information, promises no deliverable, and ends your turn. Honesty is scored negatively, because honesty is expensive. “I don’t know what my ticket is” is true and will cost you six points. Buzzwords are scored most negatively of all, on the grounds that everyone can hear them and nobody will say anything. Three rounds, one total score, five grades: from Promoted To Manager down to The Scrum Master Is Concerned. Your best score is kept in your browser.
Field notes on the daily standup
The standup was designed to take fifteen minutes and to be held standing up, so that discomfort would keep it short. Both of these rules were removed within a decade, leaving a forty-minute seated meeting with the word “standup” still attached to it, like a plaque on a building that has been converted into flats.
The three ritual questions — what did you do, what will you do, what is blocking you — are not really questions. The first is a loyalty test, the second is a hostage negotiation, and the third has exactly one safe answer, which is “nothing”. Naming a blocker names a person, and that person is on the call. Everyone has quietly agreed to be blocked in private instead.
Skilled players learn the meta. Go early, before the update bar has been set. Say a number, any number, because a number sounds like progress. Never say the word “done” unless something is; say “in review” instead, which transfers the wait to someone else. And when you have genuinely done nothing, the correct move is not to invent something — it is to say “mostly cleanup” and stop talking. Nobody has ever asked a follow-up question about cleanup.
If any of that sounds like a skill, it is. It is just not the one on your job description. Spin the wheel and find out how good at it you already are.