Bloom

I hand everyone a garden and one instruction. Grow the most flowers. Win.

So they do the obvious thing. Head down, own plot, count the blooms, guard the good cards. Very sensible. Very quiet room.

Then around round four somebody spends their turn on a neighbour's garden... and pulls ahead. That is the whole game. It takes two hours and nobody ever forgets it.

What it actually is, under the flowers

Bloom looks lovely and harmless. Plots, plants, upgrades, a scoreboard. Pure competition, apparently.

Underneath, every flower is a person, and no two want the same thing. One needs watering. One needs a bigger pot. One needs you to leave it alone for three rounds. Fertilise the wrong one and you drown it. That is attention, feedback and space, dressed up in petals, and your managers will spend two hours learning to tell which is which.

Networking slides tend to skip the awkward half. Hoarding is not a character flaw. It is completely rational for about three rounds. Then it stops working, and the cost of the first three rounds is already locked in. Bloom lets people find that out on a Tuesday afternoon rather than in a promotion cycle.

There are several ways to win. All of them run through other people.

What Happens in the Room

Rounds one and two are quiet. Heads down, own patch, counting. Looks like a solo puzzle. Feels like one too.

Round four, one or two people twig it. They spend a turn on somebody else's garden and it pays back more than spending it on their own. Their gardens start climbing. Everyone else watches this happen, decides they got lucky with the cards, and carries on guarding.

Round six is my favourite bit. That is when the hoarders do the maths. You can watch it land on their faces. A few try to pivot, but the relationships they'd need now are the ones they declined in round three, so the pivot is mostly a gesture.

And there is nearly always one player who runs the whole thing alone. Efficient, tidy, no favours asked, no favours given... and finishing near the bottom. I use that trajectory in the debrief, anonymised, every single time. Nobody argues with it, because they all watched it happen.

What it quietly tells you about your leaders

Put something valuable on the table and people stop performing their values. Here is what walks out into the open:

• Who offers first, and who sits waiting to be asked. Watch how long the waiter holds out before deciding they were always a solo player anyway.
• The scrupulously fair trader. Equal for equal, every time, with everybody. Beautifully principled. Finishes fifth. The returns in this game come from the lopsided bets where you give more than you get and wait.
• Who invests in the person who cannot pay them back yet. The one with the rubbish starting hand. Almost nobody does it in round two. The ones who do run the board by round seven.
• Whose alliances survive contact with the squeeze. Late rounds, stakes up, and you find out exactly who stops reciprocating the moment reciprocating costs something.
• Who changes their mind in public. The evidence is on the table by round five. Some people switch. Some double down, because switching would mean saying the first plan was wrong, in front of colleagues, out loud.

None of this is a metaphor you have to sell them afterwards. It is just how they behaved for two hours with witnesses.

When to Bring This In

• Someone brilliant just got promoted into a role with no authority in it. They are discovering that "because I said so" does not cross a function boundary. This is the game for that week.
• Technical teams who are superb in their lane and know nobody outside it. Bloom prices the isolation for them. Out loud. On a scoreboard.
• Teams who agree relationships matter and have never once acted like it. Everyone nods at the slide. Nobody sends the message. This closes that gap.
• The session right before a 360. Give people their own data on their own patterns first. The colleague feedback then reads as confirmation instead of an ambush.

When I'll Tell You It's the Wrong Game

• When the problem is the org chart, not the people. No cross-functional meetings, nowhere to actually connect. Bloom changes behaviour. It cannot rebuild your structure, and I'd rather say so than take the booking.
• Groups under 10. The compounding needs bodies. Below ten it never really gets going and the debrief has nothing sharp to compare.
• Teams who are genuinely already good at this. Bloom is a diagnosis, not a celebration. If there's nothing to find, you've paid me to confirm a thing you knew.

Who It's For

New managers. Project leads. Business partners. Anyone whose results depend on people they cannot instruct.

And technically strong teams who go a bit stiff at the word "networking". You can tell that person to network more for a year. Two hours of Bloom and they work it out themselves, which is the only version that survives Monday.

The moment nobody forgets

It comes late, and it is always the same shape. Somebody realises the person they turned down in round three is now the one everybody else is queuing up to trade with.

They don't say anything. They just go very still and look at the table. That is the whole workshop, right there, and it cost me nothing to arrange. The game did it.

Specific Patterns That Surface

• Who offers before being asked, and who waits to be asked
• Who backs the player with nothing, and who only ever trades with the strong
• Who changes plan when the plan stops working, and who holds the line and blames the cards
• Who notices what somebody else needs and just brings it over
• Whose alliances hold in the last three rounds, and whose quietly evaporate

Good Weeks to Run It

• Frontline managers who have just been handed influence and no authority to go with it
• Technical teams who are strong on their own and cut off from everyone else
• Teams where "you should network more" has been said a hundred times and changed nothing - here they get their own data instead of your opinion
• Just before a 360, so people arrive knowing their own patterns

Weeks It Won't Help

• When the gap is structural and there is genuinely nowhere in your org to build a cross-functional relationship
• Groups under 10 - not enough density, and the dynamics never get going
• When the real question is authority and decision-making rather than influence - Ripple Effect or Planetfall fits better, and I'll point you there rather than sell you this

The debrief is the actual product

The game is the bait. The debrief is where it lands, and it runs on EPPA - Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application.

Nobody walks out with takeaways. They walk out with one behaviour, one situation and one date. And I run it myself, because I am the person who watched them play, and you cannot hand that over to somebody holding a facilitator guide.

If you want the thinking behind it

Same ideas, written out properly:

• Stakeholder management for managers - the skill Bloom is built to build.
• How to build trust on a team - why investing in people compounds.
• First-time manager guide - for the newly promoted, who need this most.
• The Put The Player First framework - how I design all of these.

Bring this to your team

Tell me about your leaders and where the relationships are thin. I'll tell you straight whether Bloom is the right game or whether you want a different one. There's no hard sell here. I only have seven games and I'd rather run the correct one.

Message me on WhatsApp Call +91 99458 61640

Come and see if it fits

Twenty minutes on a call. Your team, your goal, my honest answer.

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With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.