Escape Room — Teaming With Ideas — Carlos Valdes-Dapena

Micro-behaviors Can Determine Team Effectiveness

Bobby Parmar, U Va professor and team behavior researcher, discusses results from his escape room study. “Teams relate through behaviors, even micro-behaviors. How a team communicates is highly predictive of their success. For example, one of the things that we find is the amount of humor, laughter on a team is highly predictive of the number of hypotheses that a team throws out when they're solving these puzzles. Laughter is one potential way of getting to psychological safety, but there's lots of ways of getting it. Psychological safety, being inclusive, being trusting, having integrity: all of those things are mechanisms by which we can draw others out and say, "your ideas matter. And I want to hear from you how to make things better.

“We found that people who spoke with certainty, struggled in the escape room. Even a little bit of certainty from someone made it a lot harder for me to say, ‘Nope, that didn't work’ because it feels like I'm judging that individual or I'm going to cause a negative emotion in that individual. And that makes it harder for the team to provide that disconfirming data and makes it difficult for the team to be effective.”

Team Building: It’s About the Debrief

If we think about transformations in companies or in societies or NGOs wherever, it's always a group of people that get together and make magic to change what exists today.

The second belief that I hold, and maybe this fits into the contrarian point of view, is that today I think we in companies are wasting a lot of money when we try to support and kind of generate team effectiveness. By and large, I would argue traditional team building exercises don't necessarily build a more effective team unless the team actually sits down and has a meaningful debrief about that experience.

Team LeadershipCarlos Valdes-DapenaNovember 16, 2020Structural team building, Peter Block, Escape Room, Life TimelineComment

Human Being vs. Human Doing with Sam McKee

I notice is the erosion between work and personal life, and the exhaustion people have by being promoted sometimes to school principal of their own home school that they never wanted, to being a teacher of their children, to just the ceaseless connectivity. managing energy for people and that human connection is so important. I think people not feeling part of a team, being distracted, distanced, not as much huddling around a coffee machine, no natural points of intersection. How do we proactively bring people together in a way of building the team where it's not just another Zoom meeting with more Zoom marathons and Zoom fatigue but it really creates a connection and clarity, so that we are tracking on what matters most while not burning ourselves out or getting two disconnected running or swimming in our own lanes?

It's that idea that we care about you as a human being not just a human doing.