I love designing experiential, fun learning activities that allow you to observe real behaviours whilst participants race (themselves, or others) to complete the challenge you’ve set them.
Tell someone they are going to do a ‘role-play’ and after the shudders and the expressions of concern, you’ll witness people displaying the behaviours they think you want to observe. On the other hand, give people a challenge like
Murder at Glasstap Grange,
Hungry Chick Inn,
Police Chase or
Island of Opportunity, and you’ll witness real behaviours. This is because participants tend to get so wrapped up in the task, they forget to ‘guard’ their behaviour, leaving you, in the bubble of fantasy, to observe reality.
This is one reason why investing time in longer training exercises, like these, really pays dividends.
Sometimes, the challenges give you some unexpected and fascinating insights into human behaviour. I don’t know how many of you have used
Jack Fruggle’s Treasure (it’s one of my favourites, because it’s so simple to facilitate) but if you have, I wonder if you too have observed a strange phenomenon. And that is, an unwillingness, or even a dogged refusal, to use the Pass Cards!
The teams have ten – and can pass these to the facilitator at any time to receive help on any other card of their choosing But they don’t. Even when I remind teams they have them; even when they are clearly running out of time, they hold on to them. Sometimes there’s a flurry of Pass Cards in the final few minutes (when it’s often too late), but I have never, ever, witnessed a team use all of the cards they have. Which is odd, because there is no doubt the Pass Cards would help them get to the treasure first.
I’ve formed my own ideas about why the Pass Cards are so rarely used. Sometimes it’s down to a lack of leadership. Sometimes, a lack of structure or organisation. Sometimes a lack of teamwork.
But the really intriguing question is, why do teams that have great leaders, and are otherwise really effective, still not use the Pass Cards? I’d love to hear your views, but my conclusions are that:
- They feel using the Pass Cards (which every team has) would somehow give them an unfair advantage in the race.
- They have a fear of ‘wasting’ them and so save them for when they might ‘really need’ them. (Which, rather overlooks the number they have, and the fact that help at the beginning is likely to be more valuable than last minute help.)
- They want to complete the challenge without ‘help’.
- They believe that accepting help would somehow lessen the value of their success.
- They feel that using the extra tools at their disposal would be akin to cheating.
I think many of us have an inbuilt reluctance to seek help, or to use tools that might be seen to give us an unfair advantage. And if that’s true, what does that tell us about business culture and leadership?
I added that paragraph slightly tongue in cheek, of course. But there’s perhaps an important learning point here for anyone in sales: People will only invest in a Pass Card if they realise the difference it could make to their success.