Persistence
The first day of training for a new summer camp season inevitably means team-building exercises.
One of today's exercises involved trying to guide a marble through several lengths of open PVC pipe into a box, without touching the marble at all. We had to do this as a team by creating a sort of pipe brigade, passing the marble off to the next person and then running to claim a space at the end of the line.
This is not an easy task by any means--as befits a team-building exercise, it requires cooperation, coupled with a lot of precision with the marble. But, in the end, you can show your ability to work as a team whether you get the marble into its box or not. So long as you show outward signs of collaboration and thinking through the problem, that would be good enough for me.
Not good enough for our facilitator, apparently. We went through at least ten repetitions of this exercise, in the 1 PM Philadelphia summer heat. They progression from chaotic running from one end to the other to a more fine-tuned progression, with people deliberately slowing the marble and waiting for the line to form up, was noticeable. And yet we weren't going to be allowed to stop until that marble reached its box, effort be damned. Finally the facilitator let us take a water break--when we got back, we got the marble about three quarters of the way down the line, farther than ever before, and decided to call it a day. I got the distinct feeling that our facilitator was disappointed.
There are of course, situations where persistence is absolutely worth it. But one of the flaws of "team building" types of exercises, as I see them, is that they encourage the idea that persistence is ALWAYS the best approach. Getting the marble in the box in my exercise earlier today wouldn't have been particularly meaningful, except to say that my team did it--the point is in the process, not the end goal.
It's hard to shake the idea that being more persistent and working harder must automatically bring you good things--hell, it's built right into the story of the American Dream. But the problem with all of these kinds of narratives is that they don't drive home the lesson that learning when to be satisfied with ENOUGH of a good thing is an equally valid, if not more useful, skill.
Take this sort persistence orientation even farther, and you start to see how it could lead to really destructive thought patterns. "Oh, if only I work harder I can make the other person/group see me as a better/more competent person, and then our relationship will be just peachy"--that's a classic abuser/victim dynamic. I'm not saying that team building exercises and the like are the sole cause of abuse, of course. But surely the fact that there are a lot of really warped beliefs about the value of hard work in US society can't be helping there.
We're supposed to do exercises like this with our kids during the week. I wish we could just do the name games and leave it at that.
PS--Here is a really great piece of writing with some similar ideas.
One of today's exercises involved trying to guide a marble through several lengths of open PVC pipe into a box, without touching the marble at all. We had to do this as a team by creating a sort of pipe brigade, passing the marble off to the next person and then running to claim a space at the end of the line.
This is not an easy task by any means--as befits a team-building exercise, it requires cooperation, coupled with a lot of precision with the marble. But, in the end, you can show your ability to work as a team whether you get the marble into its box or not. So long as you show outward signs of collaboration and thinking through the problem, that would be good enough for me.
Not good enough for our facilitator, apparently. We went through at least ten repetitions of this exercise, in the 1 PM Philadelphia summer heat. They progression from chaotic running from one end to the other to a more fine-tuned progression, with people deliberately slowing the marble and waiting for the line to form up, was noticeable. And yet we weren't going to be allowed to stop until that marble reached its box, effort be damned. Finally the facilitator let us take a water break--when we got back, we got the marble about three quarters of the way down the line, farther than ever before, and decided to call it a day. I got the distinct feeling that our facilitator was disappointed.
There are of course, situations where persistence is absolutely worth it. But one of the flaws of "team building" types of exercises, as I see them, is that they encourage the idea that persistence is ALWAYS the best approach. Getting the marble in the box in my exercise earlier today wouldn't have been particularly meaningful, except to say that my team did it--the point is in the process, not the end goal.
It's hard to shake the idea that being more persistent and working harder must automatically bring you good things--hell, it's built right into the story of the American Dream. But the problem with all of these kinds of narratives is that they don't drive home the lesson that learning when to be satisfied with ENOUGH of a good thing is an equally valid, if not more useful, skill.
Take this sort persistence orientation even farther, and you start to see how it could lead to really destructive thought patterns. "Oh, if only I work harder I can make the other person/group see me as a better/more competent person, and then our relationship will be just peachy"--that's a classic abuser/victim dynamic. I'm not saying that team building exercises and the like are the sole cause of abuse, of course. But surely the fact that there are a lot of really warped beliefs about the value of hard work in US society can't be helping there.
We're supposed to do exercises like this with our kids during the week. I wish we could just do the name games and leave it at that.
PS--Here is a really great piece of writing with some similar ideas.