How to use Elephants and a bit of Lucid magic to break down walls with your team. 

I should start by confessing that I’m a huge Lucid Nerd, and while I’m lucky enough to spend 95% of my job working in Lucid I’ve also used it to: 

• Plan the construction budget for my new home,
• Design my yard’s drip line irrigation system, 
• Teach and facilitate university design thinking courses  
• and even project managed my own wedding

All using the power of Lucid’s Visual Collaboration Suite

So it probably comes as no surprise that when it comes to building a stronger team culture, we here at Lucid, use Lucid! One of my favorite ways that we do this is with Visual activities, a powerful and versatile visual based live-polling feature that allows each participant to individually rank and place a set of objects without seeing the rest of the groups placements and then reveal the results using plots charts to see where we all land. 

In the words of Lucid’s Chief Product Officer: “Visual activities give you a crystal ball into seeing the minds of your loudest and quietiest participants in an instance” 

That comes in handy when your team needs to do some self reflection and culture building. My favorite visual activity for this is the “Elephant in the Office” Activity.

(You can access it by selecting the rocket icon from you left hand tool bar and searching “elephant” in the search bar.) 

This particular activity allows the facilitator to place the names of team members on the sticky notes which can the be dragged and sorted by participants to match the person to the behavior they think would best match them in the event an elephant showed up in the office. In other words “How would Joseph react if an elephant showed up in the office?” 

The results of this outlandish scenario are often humorous and enlightening, it allows us to express our perceptions of teammates and see how they perceive us. And after we see the results the real team building can begin. To do this the facilitator gives time for each team member to reflect on where their name was placed by all the various team members. Some questions the facilitator can do to prime the conversation are: 
“How do you feel about these results?”
“Do these results reflect how you see yourself?”
“Why do you think people might have seen you this way?”

I vividly remember listening to a team member who was shocked to learn that most of the team thought she was a “Process Enforcer” when she had actually labeled herself as a “Questioner”. This unraveled a powerful conversation that allowed us (the rest of the team) to better understand her motivations and better support her in her day to day role. 

So give it a try next time you have a team meeting! It takes less then ten minutes and can start some valuable conversations that can build openness and some powerful self reflection.