This game is great for a team which is currently going through a lot of change, or you can adapt the debrief to talk about the impact of change on customers.
Ask your team to get into pairs and explain they will be taking part in an experiment about change.
Ask one person in each pair to study their partner closely. Then, tell the partner that they will need to change three things about their appearance. Give them a moment to think what they might change. Once ready, ask the observer in the pair to turn around so they cannot see their partner, and ask the partner to make the changes. Give them thirty seconds to do this.
Once changes have been made, ask the observer to guess what changed.
Ask partners to switch roles and repeat the experiment again.
Repeat the activity as many times as is needed, upping the difficulty as you go. Increase the changes to five. You could even reduce the time to make changes from 30 to 20 seconds or even less.
The changes will get more and more outlandish as the activity repeats – expect to see people removing shoes, changing their hairstyles, or even wearing coats backwards!
When participants start to protest about the amount of changes, stop and move to discussion.
Good questions to ask the team are:
- How did that activity feel? Why?
- Why don’t some people like change?
- What could have been done differently to help make the changes in this activity easier to handle?
