Blog Entry

A few years ago, Deborah Meehan, the marvelous Executive Director of the Leadership Learning Community (on whose board I serve), taught me a great icebreaker, which I’ve used again and again over the years.

It’s a group counting exercise, and the goal is simple: Count to the number of people in the group. In other words, if there are 10 people in your group, the goal is to count to 10. If there are 20 people, the goal is to count to 20. Anyone may jump in at any time to say a number, although individuals may only say one number. If two people say a number at the same time, then the group starts over at one.

If you find yourself with a group of 10 or more people, get in a circle, and try this exercise a few times. It’s hard. If you find yourself failing over and over again (and chances are, you will), ask people to close their eyes, breathe, and try it again.

Guess what happens? Turns out it’s easier to do this exercise when your eyes are closed.

In some ways, this makes sense. You rely on your eyes for visual cues, but past a certain group size, you simply can’t see everything. If you’re to have any chance of succeeding, you need to rely on your other senses. Closing your eyes forces you to do that. What’s surprising to most of us (me included) is that you can, in fact, rely on your other senses. I’ve seen this exercise work with 40 people, and I’m anxious to try it with more.

I recently introduced this exercise to Jay Cross’s new group, Learning Irregulars, and I learned something new about it from Claudia Welss and Bill Daul, who are both improv enthusiasts. Improv groups do this exercise all the time, with lots of interesting variations, and they have learned something fascinating about it. It’s possible for a group to get better at it, with practice.

Groups need to reach a level of mindfulness in order to perform this relatively simple exercise successfully. It’s not that difficult to reach this level of mindfulness, and it’s even easier if we work at it. But achieving mindfulness is rarely our first instinct. Instead, we tend to reach for crutches.

Consider, for example, the humble teleconference. How many times have you been on a teleconference where people talk over each other, where others struggle to get a word in edgewise, or where there are long, uncomfortable pauses as everyone waits for someone else to say something?

We usually blame this phenomena on our inability to see the rest of the group, and online conferencing tools usually try to compensate for this by giving participants the ability to virtually raise their hands. I don’t think this is a bad feature, but the reality is that it’s a crutch that masks the larger problem. As the counting exercise demonstrates, our ability to see may actually prevent us from being in sync with others. What we really need is to be more mindful of others, and being more mindful does not necessarily require new technology.

When I think about high-performance collaboration, I immediately think of great musicians. Great musicians are mindful of both their own playing and of the playing around them. They get this way by practicing. Imagine what we could achieve if we did the same?

Categories: Stories