Before covid, I was doing a series of different exercises/activities/tools that I use with teams. Providing activities for the team shouldn’t be something that just forces people to do something for the sake of action. Instead, good activities help people start learning through experiencing and not being told. So this is adding on to a series of posts that highlight an exercise and how you might leverage it.
This exercise was primarily learned within the ORSC course program with CRR Global, called Appreciation Loop.
Facilitator Exercise Instructions (note: obviously feel free to put this into your own words):
- Provide attendees with initial instruction.
- Find a partner.
- Goal: Provide several appreciations
- Constraints: The only response can be “thank you.”.
- Process: The first person gives their partner an appreciation. The partner responds. Then that person gives teh first person an appreciation. The first person responds. Continue the back and forth (hence loop) of appreciation until the time is up.
- Optional: Find a new partner.
- I tend to let this exercise go for several minutes per pairing. You want people to get at least 4+ loops in before switching.
Key points/value often experienced from this exercise:
- More loops frequently leads to more genuine and specific feedback.
- After hearing several appreciations, people generally slowly allow that positivity in. Many people are quick to dismiss, invalidate, etc a quick appreciation as no big deal.
- How we really should be investing more time in appreciating others, and ourselves for that matter.
The amazing part of doing this exercise with a brief discussion of “what did you gain from that activity?” rarely leads me to making any of these key points. They do! In fact, frequently, I’ve had one key point to make, and yet so many other wonderful learnings came from the discussion…impacts to the team, experiments they could do, etc.
What key point would you leverage from this simple exercise?