Best Intro Exercise? LO3124

Ivancic, Maria ML (ivancicm@msmailnt.bhpese.oz.au)
Tue, 10 Oct 95 10:54:00 PDT

Replying to LO2977 --

Hi all,

Following is a summary of the responses I received regarding a short
workshop session to introduce the learning organisation:

>>Something that's worked well for us -- when I try to introduce the idea
of LO's, I don't even mention the term. The best thing is to get them to
play something like the Beer Game. Let them introduce themselves.

Trying to explain LO's and the relevant concepts is very hard to do (at
least, in my experience) verbally, or in a traditional presentation.
Collaborative/participative works much better, where the participants can
figure it out for themselves -- kind of like the Montessori school my kids
go to!

If I couldn't use a game, I'd use a case study. As long as the case is
not 30 pages long, 3 hours is plenty of time.

Mark Thayer
The University of New Mexico

>>Interesting exercises are to first identify members of your groups by
personality type. Creative, intuitive, analyst, order-manager.
Briggs-Myers has a test and there are other, simple easy identifiers.
Basically the main idea is to get a representative from each personality
type on a team and then given them all a problem to solve, report on to
the group and develop a model. If you have time, next put all like
personalities together, give a similar problem set. I believe you
willnotice a marked difference in responses from the groups. We learn
from others who are least like ourselves and results of problem solvingare
usually more through if teams are madeup of different types of people -
more variety of inputs = more variety of outputs.

an194375@anon.penet.fi <>-- Host's Note: this is an anonymous
response service on the internet.

>>At the STIA conference, Daniel Kim, did an interesting exercise that
sounds like it might fit the bill. Everyone was handed a peacock feather.
He asked them to balance it on their finger while looking at where the
feather contacts the finger - a difficult to impossible task. Next he
instructed the audience to balance it on the finger, but look at the top
of feather. Voila, no problem. Topics to discuss: systems, leverage,
events & structure, short term vs. long term thinking, etc. Linda Booth
showed the same exercise with a rolled up newspaper. Other good exercises
in Linda's book, "Systems Thinking Playbook." Available from Turning
Point Foundation, 508-278-6603.

Jim Saveland

For those interested, I ended up using a facilitator to work with the Ned
Herrmann Brain Diversity material, using the card game which brings out
the differences in peoples thinking preferences. As an exercise it went
well but the Planning weekend itself brought out some really ugly problems
within the group as a whole. This brings me to my question:

Does anyone know of any books/references/strategies for working with what
I can only describe as a chronically dysfunctional group? Most of the
stuff I have read on team building etc, seems to assume that there is some
platform on which to build. With this group I seriously doubt that.
There is many years of distrust, apathy and negativity (towards both
management and each other) which needs to be undone before they even begin
to build a team.
Any ideas?

Thanks to those who responded to my previous call for help.

--
Maria Ivancic
ivancic.maria.ml@bhp.com.au