Group Genius

"It'll never work," says one older gentleman as his group struggles with a handmade spring mechanism. Finally, he can hold back no longer. "Let me do that! Outta my way." At 10:30 that evening, to great cheering and laughter, the toys are rolled out.

As with every other DesignShop phase, Inventions operates on several levels. There is huge parallel processing, with each team member working on a different aspect of the toy. As the evening progresses, players gain a startling new perspective on their colleagues. The exercise also provides a refreshing view of collaboration. The AM executives begin to experience work as fun, and this becomes another possibility, something to draw on when they're back at "real" work. And finally, there's the feeling of creative success, something many have never felt before.

Wednesday. 7:06 AM. Map day. Participants sip coffee and munch bagels, powering up for the final push, the Act that comes after Scan and Focus. One by one, they lay out their new takes on the company's vision, its mission, and its strategy, including 30-day, 90-day, 6-month, and 12-month goals. This raw material is then sifted through collectively -- debated, taken apart, and reassembled -- until there is complete agreement over what will go on the Annotated Network Diagram, the ANDMap. The ANDMap is a corporate schematic and action plan, a blueprint showing exactly where the company is going, project by project, decision point by decision point, benchmark by benchmark.

Now there is tentativeness in the room. The group has been together less than 50 hours, and here they are trying to set goals that will have implications for two, three, and four years. What they're really feeling, for the first time, is the tension between talking and doing, between Focus and Act. To act is to test, and to test is, possibly, to fail. But it is also to learn, to put more feedback into the process. As Matt, the former architect and contractor, puts it, "You start building when you can't learn any more from the drawings."

Despite such tentativeness, ANDMaps are surprisingly potent documents. Forged in such a high-energy collective process, they accurately reflect the management team's sense of the company and its direction; equally important, they forge a tacit agreement that these goals are correct, worthy, and appropriately ambitious. Most companies emerge from the MGT experience with a set of goals far larger than any they had when they began: One-year plans to take the company public or execute a leveraged buyout. Two-year plans to persuade Congress to change a critical law. Three-year plans to quadruple earnings. Indeed, although the Taylors can see a time when they'll leave DesignShop facilitation to colleagues and move on to new paradigm-shifting projects, they can't imagine losing their appetite for the gusto of such plans.

Noon. the DesignShop is over. MGT's staff members scramble to finish documenting AM Cosmetics's DesignShop product -- a detailed blueprint of where the company will be in three months, six months, one year -- and how they will get there. Participants, still buzzed from the 50-hour ride, gather in a circle of chairs to share their impressions. "I like what I see here," says one veteran manager. "I wish this could have happened to me 20 years sooner."

Paul Roberts (prroberts79@aol.com) is a Seattle-based writer.