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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Remember as Much as You Can

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Remember as Much as You Can

As an effective workshop/seminar leader you need an effective management exercise or game as an opener. "Remember as Much as You Can" fills up this need pretty well. You can use this individual and group exercise in your sessions or modules on personal/professional effectiveness enhancement, observation skills, team work, team building, strategy formulation, communication, synergy, time management etc.

Tell the participants of your workshop/seminar that each of them should give you one item that they have with them. It could be anything. They will receive that item back in their possession after the exercise is over. Preferably it should be an inexpensive item. Go to each one of them personally and collect the item. Make sure that you pick up from each one of them a unique item such that no item is duplicated. Advice the participants that they better remember the item they are handing over to you in order to retrieve their item after the exercise is finished.

This way you would have collected the number of unique items that will equal the number of participants. If the number of participants are less, add a few items from your side to make the total number of items equal to around 25 to 30 or so.

Place all of these items haphazardly on a table in the seminar room. Make sure to keep the items separated from each other so that these can be seen clearly.

Ask the participants to come near the table and observe the items paced on the table. They should observe and remember as many items as they can. Give them one minute to observe. Then they should revert to their seating place. Let them write down the names of the items they observed and remembered in their writing pads. Let them also make a count of it. They should turn over the page on which they wrote and open a fresh page in their note pad. They will not refer the earlier page until told to do so.

Now divide the participants randomly into a few groups; each group consisting of around 5 participants. Members of each group will sit together in a circle. Ask them they they will have to carry out the same exercise as a group. Each group should try to maximize its total number of observations. Before starting the exercise in groups, members in each group can have an internal meeting and discussion on how they wish to maximize their observations as a group.

Allow members of each group to go near the table group by group and make the observations for one minute and then return to their seating place. After coming back to their seats each member can write down the items seen and remembered by him on a fresh sheet of paper in his note pad. Later on they can pool up their individual item lists and make one common long list of all the combined observations in each group. Each group will count the total number of items they observed and put down that number on the paper.

Now ask each person the count of observations they made when they had carried out this exercise individually. Also ask each group to tell you the number of total observations they made during group working.

Invariably it will be seen that when participants worked as groups they performed much better together as compared to when they did the exercise individually.

Initiate a discussion and allow the participants to talk. The discussion will help clarify the issues and concepts related to observation skills, memory power, strategy formulation, team work, team building and synergy. Part of the discussion may also touch some aspects of time management.

Close the session with your observations, comments and any additional theoretical inputs you wish to give.

Get Hold of the Related Books
You can order the following books on "management games and icebreakers" as printed books and eBooks from Amazon online:
  1. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
  2. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers (Volume 2)
  3. Classic Team Building Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
  4. 101 Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers

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