At the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education, the center I work for, we've run a year-long workshop series on teams. From team formation to assignment design to facilitation to assessment, we've covered dimensions of teams that we thought might be of interest to our faculty within the college. Along the way, we've tried to improve our own team performance, and I can say that as a group we do seem to be more aware of and attentive to the characteristics that foster high performance in a team.
One of our new projects for next year is a focus on innovation & creativity in engineering. The goal of that effort is the help faculty incorporate activities in their classes that challenge engineers to be more creative in their thinking. We will again be taking a multi-pronged approach to addressing these ideas, but one strategy we've settled on is a "working conference" that would include outside experts in innovation and creativity, both from within and outside of the engineering disciplines.
As a part of our planning for this event, we were all asked to come up with a list of possible participants. Even though some of our ideas are probably a little far-fetched and ambitious, it's been fun to share papers, videos and presentation slides of possible invitees with my colleagues. Somewhere along the way, a friend alerted me to the Ted Talk by Tom Wujec titled "Build a tower, build a team." I thought it was an entertaining and informative take on some of the issues involved in team dynamics, incentives, and innovative thinking. If you like it, you can check out the Ted talks of Dan Pink or Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi for related ideas about the interconnected nature of incentives, creativity & performance.
One of our new projects for next year is a focus on innovation & creativity in engineering. The goal of that effort is the help faculty incorporate activities in their classes that challenge engineers to be more creative in their thinking. We will again be taking a multi-pronged approach to addressing these ideas, but one strategy we've settled on is a "working conference" that would include outside experts in innovation and creativity, both from within and outside of the engineering disciplines.
As a part of our planning for this event, we were all asked to come up with a list of possible participants. Even though some of our ideas are probably a little far-fetched and ambitious, it's been fun to share papers, videos and presentation slides of possible invitees with my colleagues. Somewhere along the way, a friend alerted me to the Ted Talk by Tom Wujec titled "Build a tower, build a team." I thought it was an entertaining and informative take on some of the issues involved in team dynamics, incentives, and innovative thinking. If you like it, you can check out the Ted talks of Dan Pink or Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi for related ideas about the interconnected nature of incentives, creativity & performance.
Gary,
It appears I'm usually one step behind you. I just purchased material to conduct the marshmellow challenge for a workshop with teams of faculty who are designing online and hybrid courses. I'm going to use the activity as an icebreaker and to discuss the course design process. Fingers crossed.
Marshmellow Challenge
It also reminded me of a game my faculty advisor "invented" for his kids. It was called hide the anchovy. Very simple. Get as many marshmellows as children, put a anchovy in one marshmellow and place all the marshmellows in a bag. Have the children blindly select a marshmellow and eat it immediately. Objective is to trick all the other kids, you win if you guess who ate the anchovy or no one guesses you at it. I'm guessing this one would not go over as well as the marshmellow in a workshop.
Hey Wayne,
Thanks so much for the comment. My apologies for the delay, I didn't realize that my settings were such that I had to approve your note.
By now you've administered the challenge, and I would love to hear the results!