All work and no Playmobil

Off-site. Kick-off. Team-building. Whatever they called it, I always had mixed emotions about these corporate events. On the one hand, you're given a "GET OUT OF OFFICE FREE" card. Sometimes covering a few days. If it was the annual sales kick-off, it sometimes involved a trip. Bermuda. Las Vegas. The Cape. Sure, a sales kick-off likely involved my trying to provide product information to a bunch of bleary-eyed salesfolks who'd been up partying until five minutes before my preso. Which was never much fun. And it was a bit of time away, and before the advent of email and laptops and mobil phones, you had no means to keeping up with your real work back at the ranch. So it was a break of sorts. 

On the other hand, any group event that dragged you out of the office was likely to involve some sort of ridiculous exercise or another. Naturally, much of the time at these meetings was spent writing stuff on flip charts - mission statements, vision statements, strategies, tactics, goals - only to see the flip charts rolled up tightly, secured with a couple of rubber bands, then hauled back to the office, where they sat in a corner somewhere until someone decided to toss them out or take them home and use as a DuraFlame substitute. 

But there was almost always something or other to get the creative juices going, or do some self- and/or team-exploration.

I went to one sales kick-off where we took a mini-personality test and were then grouped by color code. Not surprising, all the home office folks fell into peripheral categories: HR, was I recall, Orange; Finance was Green; and Product Management and anything to do with thinking and planning was Blue. I was part of Team Blue. The bulk of the attendees were sales people. And they all landed in the Red, or, as they announced, FLAMING RED category. With a few exceptions. We had one guy in the Blue section who was from sales, and was pissed off and miserable that he wasn't in FLAMING RED. Have at it, my friend. 

I'm not sure what identifying us by color coding was supposed to bring about - probably something having to do with 'it takes all kinds' - but all I remember is the FLAMING REDs jeering at the rest of us home office Orange, Green, Blue folks for being pussies. 

A year or so later - another company, another offsite - we took the Myers-Briggs personality assessments. I was an INTJ (borderline INTP). As very few people are INTJ's to begin with, and with INTJ's being something of a real rarity among women, this test confirmed what I had suspected all along: I'm an oddball. 

What else have I done at these events? Helped write and perform a company cheer (as part of a group that I can guarantee had zero experience with cheerleading). Sat back to back with a complete stranger to share innermost thoughts. (I cheated.) Escaped from an escape room (barely: I was teamed with two others and it turned out we were the biggest over-analytic wonks in the overall group, taking way too much time thinking things through while other teams just jumped into action). I tried (unsuccessfully) to build a helicopter out of Tinker Toys. (My team's rendering of a chopper was an abject failure. We were apparently the only team that didn't have the foresight to include a closet Leonardo.)

This Tinker Toy exercise came to mind when I read about Playmobil's efforts to get into the corporate market by bringing out a product called Playmobil Pro:

— “an innovative modelling system for professionals,” as the company had described it. The idea, apparently, was to bring Playmobil figures into offices so employees could creatively “role play” or “find new business solutions” or “visualize stakeholders” or “bring theoretical discussions to life.” According to the sales materials, the same toys you loved as a child now “can also be used by adults in the frame of a professional context to aid in prototyping, project management, creative workshops and much, much more.” The kit was developed in cooperation with such organizations as Deutsche Bank, Adidas, Daimler’s Joint Think Tank and the Barcelona School of Management. (Source: Washington Post)

Deutsche Bank? Do you suppose they suggested Playmobil figures who could do money laundering?

Anyway, in bringing out Playmobil Pro, Playmobil was trying to get a bit of Lego's piece of the action, as they've had a corporate system of their own for quite a while:

For at least two decades, Lego has been finding its way into corporate settings, and a whole methodology called Lego Serious Play has emerged. A corporate trainer, called a certified Lego Serious Play facilitator, brings a pile of Lego into a conference room and guides a team of employees through building exercises meant to spur new ideas and, according to the Lego website, “unlock imagination and innovation.”

Guess that Tinker Toy exercise I did twenty years ago was a knockoff. Maybe I would have done better with the helicopter if there'd been a Tinker Toy Serious Play faciltator there.

It should go without saying that, when I started reading about this, my eyes rolled into the back of my skull. 

But then...

Turns out that, unlike the Lego system, which I would have been wooden (plastic?) and terrible at, I rather liked the Playmobile Pro concept:

The Playmobil Pro kit has:

...drawers for figures, costumes, accessories, sticky notes and pens. Instead of the usual colorful Playmobil figures, the ones in the kit were completely white — without skin, hair, clothing colors or facial expressions. “The classic Playmobil figure has a smile, and maybe that’s not always great for business,” Seeger said. Earlier tests with an array of skin and hair colors had immediately seemed problematic for group dynamics across many different countries. “It quickly became apparent that plain white figures would distinguish Playmobil Pro,” he said. The kit comes with erasable pens that allow people to personalize the figures by drawing on them.

Plus costumes and accessories. And there's no trained facilitator making suggestions. It's more or less, a "here you go" approach, with folks using the figures to apply to whatever problem it is they're trying to solve.

Not that I have any desire to get back into a corporate setting, but take those characters and turn them into something? This is a writer's dream. 

And not that any of this - Lego abstractions or Playmobil little people - is necessarily going to make anyone anywhere make better business decisions. But as an off-site exercise, playing with Playmobil sounds like fun. Beats sitting back to back with a complete stranger and fibbing about deep, dark thoughts.