Excellent process awareness and team building tool

Wooden mannequins pushing puzzle pieces into the right placeYesterday, I had the pleasure of being introduced to a fun tool during a team building exercise, called “Lutts, Mipps & Wors”. As I thought this tool was really fun and could be very helpful in an environment where you need to develop:

  • process awareness,
  • problem solving, and
  • teamwork skills

I am introducing it to you now. Whereas the exercise might seem fairly simple as such, the difficulty actually lies in understanding what you need to do as the units of measurement are not expressed in a way you are used to.

The task reads as follows: A man drives from city A to city B, then to C, and then to D. The objective is to calculate how long it takes him, in units of wors.

There are 26 data cards which contain elements of the required data needed for solving the problem (some are really needed and some not but it is up to the participants to find out!). Cut them out and distribute them evenly to the participants.

There are many ways in which to facilitate this workshop but you could ask your participants to work without putting their respective cards out of their hands (so only one hand is free) and without anybody taking concrete leadership.

Access to a flip chart with markers should be given and in 10 minutes max the right answer needs to be found.

After the exercise, you can lead a discussion of the experience, and highlight various learning points that were involved.

A good guideline for conducting the workshop can be found here.

Have fun and let me know how it went!

Jenny

 

 

About the Gangnam Style and Culture

Seoul Marked on a Map

Have you ever wondered why the “Gangnam style” is so popular? Interestingly enough, the video as well as the dance got copied, translated, parodied, re-danced all over the world. Even among business people asked to try and dance for the purpose of team building or motivation it is very attracting and instantaneously creates a good atmosphere. How can a video suddenly become so popular? Or better, what does this tell us about culture?

Well, of course there are the new media and technologies. Everybody can instantly comment and see what is happening. Secondly, the music is sort of dragging you out of the chair, inviting you to move. And then of course there are the movements… not easy I must say 😉 it certainly requires some kind of a skill plus a lot of practice to be able to somehow try and copy the swinging legs and moving hips. But the funny thing is: although not many people actually know what the “Gangnam style” actually is or means, everybody, from young to old all around the globe seems to have the same fun watching and dancing to the various versions of the one song.

What it tells me with my intercultural communication hat is that once again it gives us a prominent example that “culture” as such, is a dynamic and flexible construct which sometimes self-organizes  itself. Nobody could have known that this video would make its way that fast to different corners of the world. It also shows how music (and on that matter also sport) is uniquely able to rally people from different backgrounds and upbringings and makes people forget, even for a short period of time, where they come from and what their problems are. Well, I will definitely keep up the practice and all I can say is: Well done PSY and thanks for making us laugh!