Client Scenario: After three disappointing fiscal quarters, a telecommunications firm begins analyzing internal issues related to its performance. This analysis identifies “communication” as a recurring challenge throughout the Northeast region. Specifically, several barriers to communication seem to exist: the region has “legacy” employees from three now-merged competitors, the region is organized into “field” and “headquarters” staff who see themselves as completely different entities, and the region is further divided into districts that compete around various performance measures.

We were able to take advantage of an already-scheduled conference to bring the region’s senior managers together. Warned that the previous four years of mergers and re-organizations had left this group cynical about anything “HR,” we opened our session with a sixty minute exercise. Splitting the managers into four teams, we gave each team a written briefing and a walkie-talkie. The briefing explained that each team had sixty minutes to complete a circuit of four exercises. The walkie-talkie, we told them, was to contact us if they got lost making their way from one station to the other.

After twenty minutes or so, three of the four teams began to realize they would not be able to finish all four exercises in the time allotted. Two of these groups then used their walkie-talkies to request extra time. Hearing each other (and also hearing their requests denied) these groups began talking to each other….and quickly realized that the four teams were doing the same four exercises in different orders.

After a few minutes of internal debate, one group proposed a trade: they would share the “secret” of the first puzzle if someone would reveal the solution to the challenge they were just beginning. After five minutes, however, negotiations broke off. Each group insisted that the other “go first.”

Before long, however, the third team entered the conversation and without negotiating simply explained how to solve the two initiatives it had already completed and described shortcuts for reaching the locations of those initiatives. Quickly the first two teams joined in with their own information. The fourth team, however, had long since turned their radio off, not wanting to be “distracted” by all the background .

The final outcome? Teams One and Three finished on time, assisted not only by the radio communication but by actually swapping team members back and forth to personally demonstrate what they’d learned. The second team bogged down in a debate around whether they should sabotage the other groups by providing misinformation. The fourth, working independently, finished only two of the four exercises.

More important, however, was the conversation that followed. As we returned to the conference room, no fewer than six managers hollered that the exercise “was exactly like work.” After several minutes of comparing the communications challenges from the activity to those present in their organization, the group dug into a day-and-a-half session outlining workplace barriers to communication and planning ways to eliminate them.

“This was the conversation we’ve needed to have for six months,” remarked one senior manager as the conference adjourned.