Group

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Group

The participants come for the second day of their training. They are far less sure of themselves than they were on the first day. They discovered yesterday how easy it is to make of fool of oneself in front of the other participants.

The participants on the second day have begun finding out who they like and who they do not like.

They are more difficult to handle as they have understood that they are being observed. They observe one another to see what errors the others are doing. They try not to make errors themselves.

So as a Coordinator you give them a difficult task;

As the participants are sitting in the meeting room, you tell them that they are to group themselves. There are 10 packs of cards on the top of the tray and there are five desks in the room.

The task for the participants is

To group themselves;

To sit around the table;

To take a pack of cards;

To spread the cards at random face up on the table;

As from that moment participants are not allowed to use any intelligible language nor move more then one card at a time.

The task given to the group is to sort out the cards on the table into meaningsful groups, without saying a word to one another.

As a coordinator, what are you supposed to observe?

First the participants have a very difficult task, how shall they sort out themselves around the tables?

By the making of groups they are going to disclose who they like to be with and who they do not like to be with, and as they are rather clever, they know that this will be observed, so they will try to act contrarily to their instinct. Some participants will use a defensive strategy, waiting for group embryos to be formed to try and joint them, other will us an aggressive strategy and form the group, themselves being the Leader, or worse, the shadow leader. Most will use a random strategy, sitting on the chair nearest to themselves and letting others do the same.

Once they are seated, they discover that someone as to go and get the pack of cards. Is it good strategy to find out this need and simply walk up and grab the pack of cards or is it better to wait for the group to ask one of them to get the pack?

Most probably the one who has got the pack of cards will put them on the table and shuffle them.

Then the participants sit there and do not know what to do.

Should they push one red card to one side and hope that another participant will push one black card towards another side, thereby creating the embryo of a heap black cards and an embryo of red cards.

Yes, but suppose you moved the six of heart to the left and he moved the five of spade to the right, maybe the next participants will believe that the rule is to put together all spades, then all hearts, then all clovers.

And Next participants may believe that the rule of the game is to make two groups, one of even cards and one of odd cards.

Then it come to you again. If you do not agree with the way the cards have been assembled, are you going to try and correct what in your mind is an error or are you going to go along with the error and continue on your strategy, or yield to the others?

How long will it take the participants to understand the true rules, you told them not to speak in an intelligible language but did not forbid sounds, did you? Neither did you forbid the use of signs.

After the exercise, the most important moment is to let each group write down an analysis of what happened.

Preferably each group should have an observers that writes down what he has observed.

Then the results are discussed.

The whole exercise is meaningless if the participants cannot reach conclusions about

How should they work in conditions when language is not available and hierarchy is diffuse?

How should they identify the hostile emotions they are creating?

Next day you can use a more difficult variation of this exercise.

As coordinator, you tell the participants that they shall do the same exercise as yesterday, but that today the instructions are written on color cards that they will receive.

All participants are to collect a colour card and assemble according to the colour they have received and carry out the instruction written on the colour card.

Normally, on this occasion, the participants have understood that things will move much smoother if each group nominates one group coordinator.

But here comes the trick; the participants having received the instructions on the red card will most probably assume that all other red card participants have received the same instructions, they do not know that one of the red card has different instructions. So the participants with the red cards feel confident, and they start grouping the cards according to their symbol and the participants get more and more angry at one of the participants who do not appear to understand the rules of the games and is constantly spoiling the grouping.

As coordinator you can go one step further and give as instructions to one participants to spoil all grouping efforts.

This is a typical work situation, be it in a developing country or in any Office. Workers tend to believe that they all have the same goals and same rules, in fact, nobody has checked that the Office is really constructing the same object.

Temper will be difficult to control and when the participants control their temper, it will be at the cost of using hypocrisy. This should be used in next exercise; If the Coordinator runs the training days in a well controlled manner, one or more participants will have a nervous breakdown.