Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Towers
This afternoon, we had our second class in the You Too Can Be A Leader! Leadership Training Seminar. (Not the actual name, but it could be.) As best I can tell, the theme today had something to do with a triangle. How you need three things to be an effective leader. Damned if I can remember what they are, but I do remember the activity with which we ended the afternoon: in groups of five or six, we had to build a tower.
We were given a large sheet of paper, scissors, masking tape, three styrofoam cups, three styrofoam plates, a few 3×5 cards, three sticks, and a marking pen. For the first ten minutes we had to plan our approach but we could not touch the materials. Then we were given eight minutes to build the thing.
Turns out, surprise surprise, that this is a well known technique for teaching team leadership skills. Our instructor followed the description given in that link closely, down to the reshuffling of members midway through the planning process.
I should have taken charge of my group but I didn’t, mostly because I have a tendency to ham things up and I had already made a spectacle of myself this afternoon*. Instead, I volunteered the biggest guy in our group, on the basis of him being the biggest guy in our group. And he got caught up in a design concept which I thought was inferior to the one I thought of (tripod base topped by a cylindrical tower). But then, I thought, how difficult can this be? I figured his design (much narrower tripod base topped by a cylindrical tower) would do fine. And, since it conserved materials, it would be a taller tower than mine, thus garnering extra brownie points.
Well, ours toppled. Turns out paper really does have mass, who’d have thunk. The win condition was: five feet tall at a minimum and able to withstand our instructor blowing on it. Ours was six feet easy, but it crumpled with a stiff blow. By which we all learned that it never pays to be an overachiever, particularly when surrounded by blowhards.
The other interesting activity this afternoon went like this: the instructor flashed eight words at us for five seconds, and then we had to write down what we could remember. I got seven of the eight. The eight words were all related: something like tired, bed, dream, night, and so forth. The point of the exercise was that many people came up with the word “sleep” in their lists, even though “sleep” was not one of the original words.
I did not come up with “sleep.” In fact, when the instructor said, “Show of hands, how many remembered ‘sleep,'” I blurted out, “That WASN’T one of the original words!” And then he seemed to be saying that coming up with “sleep” was a good thing, like that meant you were some kind of big picture guy. Right. I happen to think that recalling seven of eight words when you’ve only been given five seconds to look is a pretty damn impressive bit of memory, though nothing so impressive as what contestants do in the World Memory Games.
No, I’m really not sure what that activity was all about.
Next up, no doubt: we have to fall backward and trust that the others will catch us.
D.
*I really must learn that the phrase “try not to be a total douche” is not polite in mixed company.
Is “try not to be a total douche” still considered bad form? I was talking yesterday with a very polite Syrian colleague and said “screwed up” and felt a twinge of having gone too far. I don’t enjoin people to avoid “doucheness”, but rather “pussyhood”. But then my use of colorful language is such that one of my former colleagues at State asked me how long I was in the Navy. I was flattered.
try not to be a total douche
I don’t use this one – although I reserve the term douchebag for men who talk about their iPhones and anybody who drives anything made by Hummer.
I say fuck, shit, bastard, piss, ass a lot, but I largely avoid using feminine words as derogatives/intensives, at least partly because I really like cunts and don’t see why calling someone one would be an insult.
Kira, Dean’s argument plainly demonstrates the inadequacy of “pussyhood” as a pejorative.