inventedhere

Recently I participated in the workshop “Future Fun Course”. Obviously the course conducted with on Design Thinking. So I thought I knew what was going to happen there: brainstorming, doing points of view and everything. Even though I consider myself a savvy Design Thinker (as if you could ever be that), I always welcome connected events as a great way to expand my design thinking toolbox, e. g. learning new warmups or other brainstorming methods.

This time I took away an amazing exercise based on building a team and learning to work within it. I was startled by the results and took away an import learning for myself so I figured, you might want to try it, too.

The Lego Exercise is a great thing to do in the early stages of teamwork. Be it in school, at companies or at the D-School before immersing yourself in a new project. It does not necessarily have to take place in the beginning of a process. The learnings that participants can take away from it are worthwhile in any stage of teamwork.

To do this exercise you need a set of cards with individual tasks on them. You can download and print the one we have prepared or just copy the questions. Hand out one card to each team member. We found that seven people each team is the ideal number for doing the exercise. You also need a bunch of good old Lego bricks. I use this set, which comes in a handy box. It has enough bricks even for two teams.

The goal in this exercise is to build a Lego construction as a team. At the same time, each member of the group has to make sure, that her or his task from the card is achieved within the construction. Now this would be easy if it wasn’t for the fact that no one is allowed to talk after having received the cards. Give it twenty minutes and watch the teams. Afterwards the teams should take some time to evaluate the process and what they have learned from it.

Most common insight is, that it sometimes makes sense to let your team members just go for their aims. As you watch the LEGO construction grow you understand, where the team wants and needs to go. Another learning is the importance to understand and respect each team member’s individual goals. You will see it is useful and necessary to integrate them into the overall goal of the team.

It is also very interesting for a coach to watch the individual needs embedded in the construction. When I introduced the exercise at the D-School, the two teams who took part came up with completely different kinds of constructions:

One of the teams during the exercise

2 completely different results

If you have ever been in a meeting you probably know about the issues of most of them:  too long, too boring and too ineffective.

Our bus meeting
A few days ago I had scheduled a face to face meeting with Clemens to plan out one of our projects.

Somehow we started a little late and I had to catch a bus. Since we had to go in the same direction anyway we decided to move the meeting onto the bus. I had to get off earlier so we had about 15 minutes and not a second longer. What happened?

Well, at this meeting there was no typical: “Okay, I can stay for 5 more minutes to discuss this.”

Due to that restriction we didn’t spend much time on unimportant issues, as we wouldn’t have had any time left for the important ones. We accelerated our discussion on the whole project plan and meanwhile split up our tasks. As I jumped off the bus, each of us had a list of tasks in hand.

If we had done this in a café or at the office, it might have taken us an hour or so to get to the same result.

How does this affect your meetings?
We highly suggest trying out the bus meeting. Of course this is not to say that you should do all your meetings on a bus. Just do it once to experience the power of the real, unstretchable time constraint.

Once it is impossible to stay in the meeting for any longer, you will see that everything will just squeeze into the amount of time you have set before.

How to do this at the office?
In contrast to a regular office meeting the physical separation after the set time in the bus is, what made the time constraint unstretchable for us. Although we thought of other ways to build time constraints as on the bus meeting, it is hard to find them.

But we did think of some solutions that might work for you:

• Schedule a meeting right before going to lunch or right before you have to catch a train.
• Meeting a really important customer? Great – schedule your internal meeting right before it!
• Use a TimeTimer or make one person the time keeper, who then adjournes the meeting as soon as the time is up. (be very disciplined for that!)

Now bear these lines in mind as you go for it: time is running!