Preparation
- Have a room with enough space for the size of your group. The team members need to be able to line up.
Check-In (5 minutes)
- Welcome the team and use a check-in question to help everyone become present. (Proposal: What’s the most unusual thing you are wearing today)
- Introduce the workshop’s goal and overview.
Goal: Improve how we pay attention to other team members.
Overview: It’s a fun game in which we’ll look at each other closely.
Step 1 (5 minutes): Set up & instructions
- Divide the team into two equal groups.
- Both groups should line up in a row opposite each other. Everyone should be able to see the other row well.
- Explain the procedure from step 2.
Step 2 (25 minutes): Two rounds of the exercise
- One group starts: The team that goes first has one minute to study the other team and then turns around.
- The opposite row then changes ten things about themselves (swapping jewelry, untying shoes, untucking shirt, changing order etc.) in a given timeframe (e.g. 1 min) and without speaking.
- As a facilitator, keep track of the changes the team made.
- When the time is up, the first group turns around again and has to figure out the changes within a time limit of 10 minutes.
- Once the time window of 10 minutes has passed or when all changes have been discovered, switch roles and let the other team have its turn.
Step 3 (5 minutes/person)
- Let each person share how they tried to memorize the status quo
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You can use the following guiding questions:
What was especially easy for you to remember?
What was particularly difficult to remember?
Which strategy did you apply to observe more closely?
Ending & Check-out (10 minutes)
- Summarize the different approaches of the team.
- Explain how being aware about the others in the daily work increases empathy, creates a sense of caring which is a prerequisite for commitment. (see example below)
- As a check-out, ask everyone to share in which situations they’d like to become “more aware of others in the future”.
Proposed explanation
“Commitment can only happen when a person feels comfortable in their environment. To create a comfortable environment, we need to develop an understanding of each other on a daily basis. The training of attention and perception of others is meant to be a basis for the creation and maintenance of commitment.”
