That's when the "troublemakers," as they came to be called, started flying high. This team insisted that it lacked no skills. Team members listed everything from technical savvy, to packaging design, to project priority setting, even to psychic abilities. But their confidence was starting to disturb some of the others -- and finally long-buried tensions exploded. There was crying, pouting, yelling, finger pointing, and even some door slamming.

"Our team truly felt that it could dream up and make anything happen," explains Jeff Leppla, one of P&G's project leaders and also a hair-on-fire troublemaker. "And if we didn't know how to do something ourselves, we knew others who could help us. We could get funding, write business plans, conduct market research, and come up with product, packaging, and process design. All we needed was a lawyer. But I realized that our confidence provoked an enormous defensiveness from the rest of the group. I see now that we must have come across as a bunch of know-it-alls."

It was a major blowout that served as a perfect lesson -- one that Smith could not have planned better himself. In fact, it granted department head Cathy Pagliaro one of her biggest take-aways. "The 'troublemakers' had no idea how they were being perceived," she says. "And the rest of the group was pissed off because they felt unvalued, cut off, and unappreciated. This stuff happens all the time in the real world of work. For me, there was no clearer way to demonstrate the power of differences among teams. And once you understand that power, you can leverage it when forming teams or tackling a problem. When you experience it as we did, it drives the lesson home as no lecture ever could."

Anna Muoio (amuoio@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company associate editor. Contact Rolf Smith (thinking@onramp.net) or Mike Donahue (summits@earthnet.net) by email. Learn more about the Virtual Thinking Expedition Co. on the Web (www.thinking-expedition.com).

Sidebar: Monday-Morning Creativity

For some fire-in-the-belly change agents, returning to the daily grind of work after the thrills of a Thinking Expedition can be too much to bear. "We lose some people during reentry," concedes Rolf Smith. "They want to change everything right away." Smith calls this impulse the "shiny-bead syndrome." Here are his cures.

To move 'em, "ootch" 'em.

Real change does not happen fast. Smith advises "ootching" people by starting small. "It's important to help people pinpoint how they could perform one low-level function better," he says. "Then they'll say, 'That's neat. What else can you do?' "

Meetings matter.

Running a good meeting is a skill that few businesspeople have mastered. But in the real world, most ideas get hatched at meetings. Smith has perfected the art of the five-minute meeting. He believes that the crux of a meeting can be boiled down to five basic questions: What's the most interesting idea or subject in front of us? What are the most crucial issues facing us? What are the most pressing challenges you, as an individual, face? What opportunities do these ideas, issues, and challenges present? What actions can we take now? The guide passes out blue slips, asks one question at a time, and allows 45 seconds for a response.

Talk less, listen more.

"Sometimes it's hard to get people to listen to one another, especially when they feel that the person talking is terminally stupid," says Smith. How can you listen better? Play a game. Smith pairs people up to play a game called "Do You Mean?" It goes like this: One person says something. The person who's listening rephrases that statement by asking, "Do you mean ... ?" The other person then responds with a simple yes or no. As the listener, you win the game by listening to a statement and accurately rephrasing it three different ways.