[second thoughts about previous post]

What I didn’t think of in the aforementioned case, was to tell the group that the game’s presentation was “you will be in three teams”…

Cross-experiences (‘chiasmus’)

Curious experience in a seminar I led some time ago.

The seminar is about Team Efficiency; takes place within a company; attendees are a real-life team starting an ambitious project. This exercise I have led 60+ times in the past 10 years, in French & in English, in EMEA, AP & N-America. It needs the group to be split in subgroups (3 in this case); the subgroups have to organize (independently) to achieve a common goal (re-constructing a physical object, with constraints that lead them to split the tasks & cooperate) -no competition is implied between the subgroups nor usually happening.

What happened this time was, the 3 subgroups organized as a whole (subverting the rules in certain way) in order to produce the results, without getting at all through the game phase, nor interacting actually with each other within the subgroups; in a way they devised a ’solution’ that was essentially centered about a ‘Taylor-style’ work division & execution; without any fun (other than —maybe— subverting the rules).

The debriefing was rather akward. What I felt was a misunderstanding. The game was supposed to be about having fun in subgroups. Maybe the group’s reaction showed their impatience to get down to business.

But in my experience, the (few) groups that had that kind of reaction in the past had either a legal specialist among them, or a strong rebellious streak i.e. they did it as a challenge towards the facilitator (me).
So the whole discussion turned around ‘what happened?’ and all of a sudden they commented about “In the last seminar I had they insisted on ‘thinking out the box’ so I looked for the trick around the rules”, “In another seminar ‘they’ had insisted on the fact there was no competition but it finally appeared that there was (i.e. ‘they’ had lied)”

So there we went. Put the past in the past. Build a future. Build possibilities. Instead of coming from the past restraining ourselves into believing what’s possible is what we already experienced, can we come from a future where things are possible even when we never experienced them before, even if we don’t know whether they are possible?

Now why was this so curious for me? Because at a point intime, I later felt I was the one who was coming from the past (past experiences with other groups who had done this in a rebellious way) & they were coming from a future where they would have to re-invent & tweak rules; & beware of double-bind messages from their organization…

[Chiasmus: a reversal in the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases, as in “He went to the country, to the town went she.” Websters Unabridged Dictionary – might also mean 'you thought they were there and you were here; but they were here & you were there']