We did a team-building/introduction exercise during the big meeting today. The project manager stuck the names of various “famous people, fictional or real, alive or dead” on each of our backs, and, through yes-and-no questions, we were supposed to figure out who we were.
I was more than a bit dismayed when it turned out that “I” was a music personality. My experience with these sorts of things is that I end up with either a pop music star I’ve never heard of — or, more likely, have heard of, but couldn’t associate with a given tune for love or money — or else a sports figure that I recognize the name of but whom I could never offer up as an answer if my life depended on it.
I was a bit further hampered in the exercise by people giving me wrong answers, to wit, two people telling me that I was, though dead, not associated with the 20th Century.
It turned out I was John Lennon, who was quite associated with the 20th Century.
My project-related observations:
- If people are telling you things that don’t make sense, keep asking questions.
- The answerer and the answered may have different interpretations of the answer.
- Not all data is equally reliable.
I so sincerely hate it when a company I’m working for tries to get us to participate in one of those inane team building exercises. I’m already relatively proficient at working as part of a team and all these exercises do is expose — as in your case — who the idiots on the team happen to be.
I don’t know, perhaps its beneficial to some of the folks who participate that happen to be particularly clueless, but it just drives me up the wall.
I actually don’t mind it all that much. Mixers like that can be fun, and unlike most such exercises, the names were all pretty straightforward. We also did it mid-morning, so it wasn’t “Oh, I don’t know any of these people and it’s way too early and they want me to do what?“
My mom did that at one of my birthday parties back in the early 70s. She picked one I should have gotten, had I received correct answers. Mister Spock is not a “monster”!
I talked with one person, who was “Mother Teresa” who had been identified to him (by three people) as alive, female, and American. WTF?