Players will sometimes hoard cards in the hope of meeting their departmental objectives. There is no focus on the customer. Players compete simply to meet their own departmental objectives. As the rounds progress, players begin to cooperate and have a sense of trust that the other players are engaged with them in meeting the customer needs, not simply meeting departmental objectives. As they implement their strategy and engage in conversation and cooperation throughout the fiscal year, the number of useful products increases dramatically.
Teams often go from producing no useful products to producing the maximum number of useful products.
The teams are accomplishing more, yet they are using exactly the same deck of cards, and hence, exactly the same resources they used in the first fiscal year. The difference can be found in the waste rate. The waste rate is the number of cards left unused at the end of each fiscal year. Even the most efficient teams will still have two cards which are not in a completed product at the end of the year, since it is impossible to delete all waste from a system. If the participants have input into the budget process for your organization, they may see parallels in resource use and allocation.