Tearing Down To Build Up

How do you get 100 driven, motivated, energized leaders, all with their own ideas, moving in the same direction? You send ‘em to boot camp and hand ‘em over to the drill sergeant.

That’s exactly what happened to us at InOneWeekend. Pretty much everyone has experienced creative brainstorming sessions that generate ideas where “no idea is a wrong idea.” Well, I’ll tell you that you can have wrong ideas and wrong approaches. And our drill sergeant made that clear within the first five minutes. No, scratch that. Within the first 60 seconds.

All we had to do was distribute some index cards among us. In 60 seconds. That’s it. And we got 10 points for doing so. There were four stacks of cards sitting on the table at the front of the room. Just get up out of our seats, pick up the cards, and start spreading them around. Make sure everyone got one. 60 seconds. 10 points. The clock started. We all – every last one of us – just sat there. For the first 10 seconds you could hear a pin drop outside of our facilitator yelling, “you can start now,” a couple of times. Our minds were not free. And all the “leaders” in the room were followers.

Here we were at an entrepreneurship event and we were waiting for someone to tell us what to do. Sheesh. The odds of a successful weekend plummeted. At least as we sat there individually in our seats.

Jeff Stamp facilitated the creative session and idea generation event. Jeff, an inventor and entrepreneur himself, taught entrepreneurship at the college level, a concept I always thought strange. I mean, how do you teach something that seems to need to be a part of a person’s character? This guy changed my mind by minute two.

Why did we just sit there? Well, Jeff had flashed a slide that said the person sitting in the third seat from the left in the third row needed to accomplish the task. Then another slide flashed that said to distribute the green cards, of which there were not enough to go around. We all waited for the third person from the left in the third row to figure out who he was. Fair enough – if you’re waiting for somebody else to change the world. The only task was to distribute the cards. The finish line to win the points was 60 seconds.

Distribute cards. 60 seconds. 10 points. Everything else should have been irrelevant. The third person from the left in the third row could have been any one of us depending on our frame of reference. And who cares what color the cards were.

Not only did Jeff break us down and create a bunch of followers out of a bunch of leaders, essentially putting us in our places, he then put the pieces back together and had us functioning in teams where the parts added up to much more than the whole. We were excited, bonded, with no more pride I might add, and generating an amazing number of great ideas.

Oh, there were those who tried to hold on to their egos, and, oh, were they shut down.

“But here is the problem with this approach…”

“NO PROBLEMS, JUST SOLUTIONS.”

“But I think…”

“NO TIME. MOVE ON.”

“But…but…”

We all moved on.

There would be no subversion of the team to anyone’s ego or agenda. A couple of hours later we had our concept in an online scrapbooking web site. We continued to break into different groups to brainstorm, rank, and share features, as our distributed groups collaborated using a Google Docs spreadsheet. We functioned as a team. And the team became “our” team as it strengthened through the weekend.

Amazing.

- Andy