One Response

1. Hmmmmm
   I haven’t encountered the exact material you have, but have used Duplo (baby Lego) for similar purposes:

   Give two or more teams the exact same pieces of kit – the same number of bricks/squares, the same sizes and colours.

   Ask the teams to construct something, out of sight of each other, from the bricks (squares) within a fixed time.

   Once the items are built, ask one of the teams to describe to the other team their item (again, no visibility from either team), giving instructions on how to build it, again, fix a time limit.

   Generally both teams will get very frustrated with each other as they struggle to understand, and the finished construction will differ from the original in shape and colours.

   The exercise highlights how frustrated people can become when communication is unclear, and how easy it is to make erroneous assumptions. Very often one or other team will claim “but it’s obvious!” – highlighting that what is obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to others.

   An interesting variation is to nominate one person from each team as the ‘communicator’ – the sole conveyor of information between teams. This increases the frustration level for both teams and can be used to demonstrate the difficulties associated with communication bottlenecks in the workplace.

   ‘Little multi-coloured things’ have many different uses, but remember, although they can make for great ‘games’ you need to be very clear about what the objective of the activity is and the learning that you aim to draw out from it before starting, otherwise it can easily just become a fun distraction.

   Hope this helps.

   Claudine