Insights
Use This Playful Exercise to Open Up Creativity, Imagination, and Openness in Teams
A little bit of play can go a long way. Next time you need an ice breaker for your brainstorm or team building, give this a try. It will put people in a place of heightened creativity, imagination, and overall openness to ideas
Team Engagement, Retention, and Experience, OH MY!
Engagement, Retention, and Experience, OH MY! This was the the theme of last nights joyful networking event. Some of the questions: 🤔 Build a model that shows what environments or conditions you have found to be most conducive to fostering employee engagement🤔💡 Build a model that that shows what strategies you have used to measure and improve retention rates🤔💡🤖 Build a model that shows how technology has transformed engagement, retention, and/or employee experience in your organization. This goes to show the power of LEGO Serious Play and how it can connect and engage both teams and people who don’t work together.
Defining Objectives for Team Off Site Meetings
Coming up with an objective is the most difficult part of what we do. This was true when I ran workshops and off-sites internally and continues in my client work today. Here is a tip - Use a pre-mortem approach when thinking about the outcomes. Imagine your offsite/workshop is over, and it was a grand success! What does it feel like? What are people saying? How does work change moving forward?
AI Tools Exist to Boost Team Performance
As we get more and more tools to improve efficiency and communication, it will become even more important for organizations to figure out how to empower teams to work together at their best. This is no easy task, especially in the face of more challenging ways of working; remote, hybrid, and distributed. My hypothesis is that the most important skills to build right now are people skills. The capacity to collaborate, innovate, and create together is where the true value will be in the coming years.
Does Your Team Have an Air Sandwich Communication Challenge?
One of the biggest challenges that compounds the air sandwich effect is the level of domain expertise from a hierarchy lens. As leaders look at the forest, and operational staff looks at the trees. Someone has to figure out the transition between the two. The best fix? Finding common ground through empathy and understanding. True understanding from all levels allows for everyone to seek win-win scenarios because success is defined clearly for all.
Top 5 Benefits of Using LEGO Serious Play for Team Building
1. Diminished Consciousness of Self 2. Inverted Persuasion 3. Equitable Expression 4. Curious Listening 5. Time Compression
Joyful Team Building: The Inward Smile
When people receive, unwrap and start handling their own LEGO story building kit, there is this smile that appears on people's faces. Sometimes its big, sometimes small. But it's personal, for them. Like they've been brought back in time. They are sitting on the edge of play and there is this excitement and joy - not to a level of exuberance, but a more patient and expectant smile.
Three Types of Team Workstyles: Baseball, Football, and Basketball (Copy)
Should 'baseball' teams be remote, 'football' teams hybrid, and 'basketball' teams in the office? The key here is understanding how work is done in teams to realize the impact of where people work and the policies and tools needed to support them.
How LEGO Serious Play is like Reese’s Pieces for Team Development
Some of the major challenges in group dynamics are the speed, pace, and focus of the individuals and group. This is why facilitated sessions are so valuable as they get people focused and paced similarly. For us at IN8 Create, we love using LEGO Serious Play as our primary method. Like Reese's Pieces, It breaks down the session into bite sized rewarding segments. I purposely use the term rewarding because for each challenge question, participants get to create a LEGO model and a story that's tied to it.
The Top 5 Commonalities That Arise From Our Team Building Events
Here are the five most popular commonalities that arise in our team buidling sessions:1. Pets - People LOVE their pets, and honestly like sharing info about them.2. Kids - Same as above3. Hobbies - Sports? Cooking? Interior Decoration? Yes! 4. Musical Instruments - I separated from hobbies as this group has a certain respect for one another 5. Vacations and Travel - Who doesn't love a good vacation?
The Tradeoffs of Virtual Vs In-Person Work
In essence, the choice between virtual and in-person work isn't about deciding which is superior. It's about recognizing and balancing the tradeoffs: the convenience and flexibility of virtual work against the potentially richer, more nuanced communication that comes with face-to-face interactions.
Have You Heard of the Cortical Homunculus?
Think of when we have an active dialogue in groups. Due to the context we are generally using the prefrontal cortex, or the logic center of our brain.
Yet when we get our hands involved, such as when we build our thoughts and ideas out of LEGO bricks, we are using more parts of our brain.
Our hands, as pictured in the cortical homunculus image above, are activating more neuron networks in our brain, which in turn can give us access to more information or knowledge that might have not been accessible when just working verbally.