From Matt
The other day, I prepared a team building exercise for one of my French language assignments called an exposé. We can choose any topic for our exposé, but we need to talk for 10-15 minutes in French without relying on notes and we are graded on how well we involve the class. The night before, I decided to do a practice run with the family to work out any bugs. The basic idea of the exercise was for the group to move a ping-pong ball suspended on the end of a small pipe from one place to another by only using the strings which are attached to the pipe. (It’s hard to explain without a photo, so we included a shot to help you visualize it). I had done this same exercise many times before in my training days with DELTA, but trying to facilitate a group activity in another language posed quite a challenge. So I thought that organizing a mock exercise with the family would really prepare me for anticipating and responding to spontaneous comments and offering explanations that would need to be translated.
Our two older children, Jacob (10) and Clarisa (9), Nicole and I were in the living room of our apartment. I explained the goals of the exercise, as well as the rules and expectations. One of which is that there is a limit to the amount of times a team can drop the ball before they have essentially “failed”. In the game, the ball is a symbol of our mission. Though there are many tasks to accomplish along the way, only by working together and keeping our eyes on the goal, can we complete God’s purpose and will for our lives. The last thing that I stressed to the kids was, “Now, remember, don’t drop the ball!”
Before we even got the ball off the ground, Clarisa had tied her strings together in a knot and was fumbling around doing her own thing. Instead of listening to the rules, she had embarked on a creative project of her own design. I scolded her for not listening and our competitive son, Jacob, chimed in and sure enough one family member had resigned in tears. We took a few minutes to regroup, Nicole helped to referee the rival siblings and calm their goal-oriented father. On the second attempt, we actually lifted the strings in unison and maintained balance for a moment until it tumbled again onto the floor. Before our third attempt, we designated Jacob to be the leader and asked him to come up with a strategy to help us work better together. We started over again, this time following the leader’s directions, listening to one another, and implementing a common strategy. We moved the ball to the other side of the room and placed it down on our dining room table – so we actually achieved our goal!
We discussed a few of the insights we gleaned from this group activity and discovered a few things about our family: (1) we need to communicate and listen to one another, (2) we need to control our competitive goal-oriented personalities and to be careful with our words when family members drop the ball, (3) we need to have a plan and stick to it and (4) every family member plays an important part but we need to stay focused until we’ve completed the task at hand. In the end, the family learned how to better work as a team. Even though we had a bumpy start, we finished well.
It was amazing to see how in just a few minutes, through a simple team building activity; some of our common weaknesses and sources of tension were exposed. I had facilitated this same exercise for mission groups all over the United States, but never had seen it play out in my own living room. God used the exposé assignment to expose some areas of growth for our family to help us know how to complete His greater assignment here in Paris and beyond.