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- Role-Plays work very well to learn and improve agile practices, the reason is explained in The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge:
6. THE DELUSION OF LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE
The most powerful learning comes from direct experience. Indeed, we learn eating, crawling, walking, and communicating through direct trial and error—through taking an action and seeing the consequences of that action; then taking a new and different action. But what happens when we can no longer observe the consequences of our actions? What happens if the primary consequences of our actions are in the distant future or in a distant part of the larger system within which we operate? We each have a "learning horizon," a breadth of vision in time and space within which we assess our effectiveness. When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon, it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience.
Role-Plays simulate complex real life experiences bringing actions near primary consequences, together under same the "learning horizon", so it became possible to learn again through direct trial and error quick cycles.
An interesting example:
Diving into Complexity: Developing Probabilistic Decentralized Thinking through Role-Playing Activities (MIT Media Laboratory - Northwestern University)