15-20 minutes

Ingredients:

Each table (with 5-6 students) has a plastic shoe-box containing enough supplies for 20 pinwheels (would need less most likely). Make sure that you make samples of what the pinwheels are supposed to look like for each group. HOWEVER, make sure that the sample pinwheels are not in the shoebox at first. The students should not even know they exist. Here’s the supplies in each box.

1. Straws
2. Paper fasteners
3. Paper copies of the pinwheel pattern to cut out
4. Scissors
5. Markers
6. Paper punch
7. Shoe-box size plastic containers (to hold the supplies at each table)

Recipe:

This is conducted in two rounds, with three slides (two slides in round 1, and one additional slide for round 2).

Round 1

Slide 1

Your job is to create as many pinwheels as you can in 5 minutes. Take a minute, and assign the following roles at each table:

• Cutter – owns the scissors and completes the cutting
• Decorator/Designer – owns the markers and creates the design for the pinwheel
• Hole Puncher & Paper Fastener – owns the hole puncher and the paper fasteners
• Folder – does any necessary manipulation or folding of the paper during the creation of the pinwheel
• Tester – tests the pinwheel when it has been finished. Verify that it has been decorated and that it at least moves a little when someone blows.
• Manager – responsible for telling each team member what to do. The manager will communicate the tasks to the team members. The team members are not allowed to see the instructions.

Slide 2

• At your table there is a box. Each box contains the instructions and the supplies.
• No one is allowed to step outside their role.
• The manager is the only one that can speak, by instructing the team members. Each team member is only allowed to speak to the manager.
• If the pinwheel fails testing, the tester must hand the pinwheel back to who they think caused the “bug”.

At this point, the teams DO NOT see the sample. They don’t even know a sample exists

Now, start the timer. After 5 minutes, they will likely create 0 pinwheels.

Round 2

Slide 1

• Manager, you are now a servant leader. Please do whatever it takes to help the team.
• Team members are allowed to help others out.
• You can cross role boundaries.
• Everyone can read the instructions. You can use the instructions as a guideline, but you can now be creative in how you create the pinwheels.
• First, take 2 minutes to discuss how you will work together to be more efficient. Then, you will have 5 minutes to create as many pinwheels as possible.

Here, the team goes through a time-boxed planning session of 2 minutes to figure out how to best make the pinwheels before the 5 minute pin-wheel making session. I also pull out the sample pinwheel, so the team can have a collective understanding of what the “vision” is.

During this second round, the teams made between 5-10 pinwheels. The ones who made less had issues with the “servant leader” concept, which made for a great discussion afterwords.

This is a bit of a pain in the butt to set up, but in the end, it is WELL worth it, and now I have the supplies for many classes to come!

Learning Points:

This exercise illustrates the following points.

• Cross functional team work
• Self organizing teams are more effective than those teams under a command-and-control regime
• Team members must be able to cross functional silos to be the most efficient
• Managers are the most effective when they are serving the team, not telling the team what to do
• Over-specialization causes bottle-necks (you’ll notice that some functions will be far ahead of others, such as the “cutters”, and others will be far behind, such as the designers)
• It’s important for the team to take time to retrospect and plan together

It is up to you whether you discuss after each round what was experienced. I only had the discussion at the end, and compared and contrasted the ways of working. I plan on introducing lean concepts in subsequent sessions, such as “eliminate waste”. The “cutters” tended to stack the papers and cut out lots of patterns, which introduced a lot of waste in the end, as the hole punchers, folders and designers couldn’t keep up. I may add a round 3 to illustrate this.

pinwheel_instructions_and_cutout.zip (93 KB)

This post was submitted by Andre Simones.