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Teams in Action: Meet Jaska, Mark, Paul and John
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In this abbreviated story, J.T. Bergqvist*, a senior
executive at Nokia Corporation, illustrates one of the
major organizational challenges which LEGO
SERIOUS PLAY is designed to successfully deal
with.
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All too often, teams work sub-optimally, resulting in:
1.Valuable knowledge remains untapped in team members.
2. The team makes poor decisions based on illusion rather than reality.
3. The team reacts to events unconsciously rather than consciously and with intention.
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Consider a project team consisting of Jaska, Mark,
Paula and John. They gather in a meeting room.
When
they interact their individual effects multiply. We can
illustrate the teams result from working together by
multiplication: 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 = 1.
In real life, however, things do not work that way.
Imagine a situation in which the first person to enter
the meeting is a 50-year-old Finnish engineer, Jaska.
Jaska is technically at the top of his game, but he’s
somewhat of an introvert and not comfortable with
spoken English.
As he comes in, he is
thinking about
32-year-old Mark, an Australian engineer. Like many
Aussies, Jaska has known, Mark is incredibly
self-assured and articulate - a tremendous man-of-
the-
world who believes he knows everything.
Jaska finds him arrogant. He never listens, particularly
to someone like Jaska, who is pretty awkward with
spoken English. These thoughts make Jaska’s
entrance rather subdued. He comes into the room
having lost some of his excitement and energy, with
the result that some 30 percent of his “edge”
vanishes. He enters the room as a 0.7
rather than the
1 he could have been.
Mark is approaching the room through another
corridor, already demoralized by his expectations of
this meeting. Finnish guys are such a depressive lot.
They may be pretty good technically, but you would
expect them to be able to say something without
having three beers first. I’m tired of sitting in saunas
all the time just to have a discussion, Mark thinks. Let
me try to be a little bit provocative today. Even so, by
the time he walks into the room, Mark has
shrunk
to a 0.5.
Next to enter is Paula. She is a financial controller,
who feels she always must act like a “tough broad”
and finds that irritating. Of course she can play that
part, but she does it at the cost of some of her
sensibilities. In truth she is the loving mother of two
fabulous children, but she can never talk about them
with these guys, who seem to be so tough and task-
oriented all the time. She enters the room as a
0.6.
The last to show up is John, a 54-year-old senior vice
president of marketing. He’s a bit weary already at the
prospect of meeting with these young and hungry
lions. They believe they command the world. He
himself is not quite as eager as he once was to board
the next plane to Hong Kong. He sighs, thinking: You
would expect there to be some respect for experience
in our company, and enters the room as a 0.8.
Each of the team members enters less than
1, and
their interaction can be summed up as follows:
0.7 x
0.5 x 0.6 x 0.8 = 0.2 - a far cry from the
1 x
1 x 1
x 1
=1 they could have achieved.
Instead imagine this:
How lucky it is that Mark could make it to the meeting,
Jaska thinks. Mark is so quick on his feet, and so
articulate. And because Mark knows Jaska isn’t all
that comfortable with the English language and with
situations in which he has to impress a lot of other
people, he tends to cover for Jaska, who is now able
to
enter the room as a 1.3.
For his part, Mark is thinking he’s lucky to have
Jaska’s technical expertise on his team. He’s shy and
even a bit innocent, Jaska is, but he has tremendous
integrity. And it feels great to be able to help him out in
the language department, Mark thinks. When I was
working in Australia, it never occurred to me that I was
particularly articulate, but it sure helps here. Mark’s
thoughts give him a boost of some 20 percent,
and he
enters the room as a 1.2.
Imagine if Paula and John also enter the room uplifted
by the projection they have of one another – adding
another, let’s say 30 and 40 percent. The team’s
interaction multiplies the effects: 1.3 x 1.2 x 1.3 x
1.4 =
2.83.
* SYSTEMS INTELLIGENCE, Discovering a hidden
competence in human action and organizational life.
2004 Raimo P. Hamalainen and Esa Saarinen.
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Robert Rasmussen & Associates LLC is a LEGO
SERIOUS PLAY Consultancy. We build answers in
real-
time for challenges related to Strategy, Innovation,
Identity, Team Building, Culture and Systems. We are
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