Jumpstart Teams

03/05/07

Here’s a little exercise you can use to help turn a bunch of people into a team in a short time.

Put a practical object on a table where everyone can see it. It might be a pencil, paper cup, sponge, ruler, or whatever is at hand.

Tell people you’re going to give them two (or three) minutes to list all the ways they could use the object.

Encourage creativity by providing an example before they begin. Hold up a different object and tick off a few things it can be used for.A paperclip, for instance, can be used to:

Hold paper together

Stir soup (unbent)

Serve as a makeshift cotter pin

Pick a lock

Poke holes

Retrieve items lost down a drain

Fight off an attacker

Catch fish

Plug a very small hole in a dike

Reset a Palm Pilot
After this introduction, have people start creating their own lists. Stop the exercise after the allotted time and have them count the number of uses they came up with.

Next, divide your group into teams of at least three people and put each in a different part of the room. Have it come up with as many uses for the same object as it can in the same amount of time.

Each team should be able to come up with more uses for the object than each person did individually (added together). If they did, congratulate them for coming together as a team.

Groups that couldn’t beat their individual totals may have problems functioning as a team.Reasons might include:

One person dominated the group.

Two people kept talking at the same time.

Not listening to each other, people shouted out many of the same uses.

Some in the group filtered out ideas they didn’t think were “good enough.”

Some members weren’t confident enough to voice their ideas.

Whatever the outcome, you have information you can use to shape the session at hand and you’ve already broken the ice and encouraged “out of the box” thinking.