5 ways to use a piece of paper to coach your team
I love using creative colourful materials. I also love the innovation that comes with restraint and limiting choices. Sometimes a piece of paper is all you need to use to creatively coach your team.
Nothing special, a page torn from a lined pad or slipped out of a printer or rescued from the recycling bin will do.
How can we use this most basic of resources, to coach a team or individual or even ourselves? Here are 5 ideas, all great in person or on zoom, that you can try with your team to get the creativity flowing and conversation started.
1. Evidence Fan
Fold up concertina style to create a zig zag. On one side of each ‘zig’ write down barriers to achieving a goal. On the ‘zag’ side write down all the personal qualities and experiences you and your team have that are useful in overcoming these types of barriers. When a barrier occurs, whip out your fan and remind the team of the personal qualities and experiences that they identified, that will mean they can overcome the barrier.
2. Paper Sculpture
When finding the right words to describe a concept or issue in the team is tough, give each person a sheet of paper and an instruction to create a sculpture that describes the issue. They can tear, wrap, bend, pleat, fold, scrunch, rip, curl, shred, or crinkle the paper but they cannot use any other materials. As each in turn to describe their sculpture and the concepts they were aiming to describe.
3. Insight Cone
When you want to share why you do what you do, try this. On one side of a piece of paper, write down the outcomes expected from the team. On the flipside write down your team values. Roll the paper to form a cone with the values on the inside (not too tightly, you want to see the inner words still). As a group, use the cone in a conversation to explore how inner values connect to outer expectations. For example, if ‘flexibility’ is a value and ‘consistency of results’ is an expected outcome, a discussion about shared responsibility might be insightful.
4. Planning Fortune Teller
When you want to plan creatively, try this. Follow these instructions to make a planning fortune teller https://www.brilliantthing.co.uk/guides
5. Function Tree
When you want to work out the real purpose of something you do, try this. Everyone folds and tears their paper into 6 pieces of fairly equal size. On one piece write down the subject of your discussion (maybe ‘Team Meetings’) -this is the top of your tree. Each person then writes down what the function of this is, using different pieces of paper for each idea. Place these under below the first piece, stacking any similar ideas. The for each of these ideas, ask ‘what is the function of…?’placing and stacking ideas below each piece of paper, creating a ‘tree’ of functions- you may need more paper! Notice how the original function of the subject changes as you continue. Your tree is completed when everyone agrees they have found the true function.
Now, could that function be completed in a different, better way?
If you’d like to explore creative facilitation for your team, find out more about my services here
