Management Exercise: Mind Share

Purpose

This energetic exercise can be used as a brainstorming and data-collection activity for team members. It helps individuals to express themselves around a predefined set of questions. This can also help the management and the team to better understand each other. A great advantage of this exercise is that everyone can equally contribute without fearing ridicule or judgement.

You can easily customise this exercise by adjusting the set of questions provided to them and bias the exercise towards a direction of your choice. This exercise is ideal for delegates who work closely together as part of a team.

Objective

Visit several stations, answer the questions and move on to other stations to answer more.

What You Need

• Flipcharts. You need to prepare these in advance by writing a question on each flipchart. It is your choice what to include, though you can aim for a mixture of serious and light-hearted questions to keep the exercise engaging. Here is a set of examples:
  • Which restaurant is ideal for our Christmas party?
  • What is the best way to increase the yearly sales by at least 30%?
  • What is the best movie of all time?
  • What is the best way to cut our spending budget by 20%?
  • What is the best fiction of all time?
  • What is your favourite hobby?
  • What type of training is ideal for the team?
  • What is the best way to reward the team at the end of the year if it meets its targets?
  • What is your ideal holiday destination?
  • State one thing that you like the management to do differently?
  • State one thing you wanted changed in the office environment, furniture, etc.
• Aim to have as many flipcharts as the number of delegates to keep everyone fully engaged.

Setup

• Hang the flipcharts on the walls around the training room.
• Explain that each person should visit each flipchart and answer the question by writing a short statement on the flipchart.
• Delegates should then move to another flipchart not used by others.
• Delegates should continue until many answers are collected or that everyone has answered all questions.
• Allocate about 10 minutes for this part. Adjust the time so that it becomes a fast-paced exercise. As a rule of thumb, allocate 1 minute per question.
• Now get everyone to go back to the flipchart and review the answers written by others.
• Follow with a brainstorming discussion while everyone is standing and reviewing the answers written on the flipcharts.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 5 minutes

Activity: 10 minutes

Group Feedback: 10 minutes

Discussion

Was it easy to answer the questions? Did you see answers to questions that you did not consider before? What were the most inspiring answers? What did you learn about your team during this session? Were there team members who had the same interests as you in hobbies/books/movies?

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