This exercise was co-created as part of a collaboration day between myself and Paul Goddard

Timing:

30-45 minutes

Materials:

Thought-provoking video and the AV equipment to play it to the team

Instructions:

  1. The idea of this “game” is to play the team a short, thought-provoking video and ask the team to reflect on it in their context. Excellent as a retrospective technique. One of our favourite debriefing templates for this exercise is the “What? So What? Now What?” template:
  2. First asking the team “What?” – what was the video about? What was the message?
  3. Then asking the team “So What?” – how is that relevant to them as a team or the organisation or them individually?
  4. Then finally asking them “Now What?” – what do they think they could or should do based on what they have seen, heard and discussed?
  5. TED.com is a great source of short, though-provoking videos to begin with but you could pick a clip from an episode of The Simpsons or a movie, or even a random Youtube clip. Sometimes the content isn’t important so long as the team use it as an opportunity or frame to reflect

Learning Points: 

  • Obviously the learning points are highly dependent upon the video you choose and the area(s) of reflection the team choose to look at
  • The main, high-level, learning points are around the importance of reflection and the power of abstraction and re-framing (taking something apparently random/unrelated/irrelevant and applying it to their situation)

Variations:

  1. Try an article or a blog post instead of a video