The Stylophone Episode

Of course, the kind of 'extreme' group behaviour discussed here leads to 'extreme' individual behaviour. For example, a manager who was working for me at the time was once delighted at finding a Stylaphone for sale in a junk shop. For those of you who have never heard of a Stylaphone, here's an advert for one from the 1970's;
It looks strange, but wait until you have heard it! For a musical instrument it sounded like the groundhog's squeal coming through the world's cheapest and smallest loudspeaker. It was first of all used to entertain the rest of the department, and then used to play a tune on the telephone while people were holding, and then we talked about wiring it up to a 500 watt amplifier and playing rock'n'roll songs on it. We never did wire it up of course, but you get the most fun out of what you imagine rather than what you do. As a special treat to you, I did wire a Stylaphone up to a big amplifier, you cannot hear it, but I'm sure you can imagine what it looked like.

And then.....

We rigged up a 'wah wah' pedal between the Stylaphone and the amp and played 'the Star Spangled Banner' a la Hendrix!

Other Celebtration Opportunities

When I talked about this in a presentation in Europe an American who was in the audience came to talk to me afterwards, she said that I had a cheek taking her national heritage in vain .... but that it was a good idea and she was going to do the same .... and good I tell her about some peculiar English holidays or celebrations. So, somewhere in Florida is a development team who celebrate, among other things, Guy Fawkes night on the 5th November every year! (Guy Fawkes was an English conspirator who, in 1605, was arrested along with a group of others for attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament using barrels of gunpowder in the cellars.)

I suspect that you could celebrate something from around the world on every single day of the year, of course the real trick is to celebrate only those events which have a ridiculous air about them, anyway, here are some to be going on with;

- the first business day in a new year is a holiday in Italy, UK, Ireland and Australia except for the state of Victoria. Why not in Victoria?
- 15 January is 'Adults' day in Japan.
- 26 January is 'Australia Day' in Australia!
- 15 March is the Anniversary of the Revolution of 1848 in Hungary.
- 4 April is Cold Food day in Korea.
- 15 September is Respect for the Aged Day in Japan.
- 27 September is the French Speaking Community Day in Belgium.
- 8 April is the Birthday of Buddha in Japan.
- 18 May is the Birthday of Buddha in China and Korea.
- 25 May is the Birthday of Buddha in Tibet, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.

Wait a minute, what is going on here? Who is this guy, and why does he have so many birthdays?

More on Groundhogs (by any other name)

Bear in mind this was before the film Groundhog Day and we had never heard of a groundhog so we looked it up in the dictionary;


ground·hog also ground hog
play_w("G0282800")
(groundhôg, -hg)
n.
See woodchuck. See Regional Note at woodchuck.
hm();Sources=Sources 2;
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
ThesaurusLegend: Synonyms Related Words Antonyms
Noun
1.
groundhog - reddish brown North American marmot
Marmota monax, woodchuck
marmot - stocky coarse-furred burrowing rodent with a short bushy tail found throughout the northern hemisphere; hibernates in winter

We thought the 'see woodchuck' interesting as we had never heard of those either;

wood·chuck
play_w("W0209100")
(wdchk)
n.
A common burrowing rodent (Marmota monax) of northern and eastern North America, having a short-legged, heavy-set body and grizzled brownish fur. Also called groundhog; also called regionally whistle pig.
[By folk etymology, probably of New England Algonquian origin.]
Regional Note: The woodchuck goes by several names in the United States. The most famous of these is groundhog, under which name all the legends about the animal's hibernation have accrued. In the Appalachian Mountains the woodchuck is known as a whistle pig. The word woodchuck is probably a folk etymology of a New England Algonquian wordthat is, English-speaking settlers "translated" the Indian word into a compound of two words that made sense to them in light of the animal's habitat.

Groundhog Day

In another example of celebrating, one of the people in the team had been sent an American calendar which every day would normally give you some very sombre advice on how to conduct your life, and these would be eagerly awaited by the rest of the group as they were read out each day. What this calendar also gave us was the opportunity to celebrate some American events such as Presidents Day and .........

Celebrations!

An important part of team building is the liberal use of celebrations. We would use any excuse whatsoever in order to celebrate. For example we would celebrate every time we had completed the coding of another fifty screens. We tried many different ways of celebrating, we would have a drink, or a meal, or a quiz, or play indoor cricket, or ten pin bowling. The bowling is worth exploring;

The first time we went as a team for a celebratory bowling game we had two games each and then a burger and fries. Whilst we were eating and laughing at some of the incredible ineptitude we had just witnessed we were approached by a bowling team who were playing in a league match. Their opponents had not turned up and although they would win simply by playing on their own they did not want to play against an empty lane. It was for this reason that six of us acted as 'stand-ins' for the missing team. We lost of course but had a great time, especially as we were playing under our 'assumed' names of the missing players. Great cheers went up as we played with chants being taken by our supporters for the names that were showing on the computer screen of the scoring system. Unbelievably, we were asked if we would like to enter a team in the local bowling league, which we did.

War Games

I risk being politically incorrect, or is it itcorrect, yet again. One of the ways we have 'celebrated' is by having a war game. The first time I tried this was outdoors with paint balls and on this occasion my ex-wife joined me (she wasn’t ‘ex’ at the time) and managed to embarrass me, and the team she was on, by deciding that the paint balls hurt so much that when one of the opposing team pointed their gun at her she would immediately surrender!

On another occasion we played indoors (without my wife needless to say) using laser guns. On this occasion we had to decide how we were going to split up the teams. Eventually we decided that we would have a 'Yorkshire versus The Rest Of The World' match (Yorkshire is on of the Counties of England, it fact it is the largest County in England). An interesting result of this particular war game was that when we analysed the results we found that not only had I been a favourite target with the opposition but I had also been shot in the back by members of my own side, teamwork indeed!

PS For those of you who dont know where Yorkshire is - see below;

Even in your worst nightmares!

Good teams can survive almost any amount of management's incompetence and will probably make their feeling known at some point. Indeed, the only way to stop a really dedicated team from being successful is to either disband them or stop the project altogether. Here is an example I once saw; The team in question were itching to get on with their job but felt they were being hampered by their bosses, and in particular a great deal of unnecessary politicking. They therefore an indicator on the wall with these titles;

CHANGE PLATFORM
CHANGE LANGUAGE
CHANGE LOCATION
CHANGE SUPPLIER
CHANGE METHODOLOGY
CHANGE SPECIFICATION


They would spin an arrow on a regular basis and the message quickly went round that they wanted to get on with the job if only people would stop changing the rules of the game.

Can we help build teams?

There is a problem with building teams, or even waiting for teams to build themselves. The problem is that it takes quite a lot of time and luck in order for a team to form. So, is it possible to help the process of building teams? Is it possible not to have to rely so much on the time and luck that it normally takes?

Yes it is!

You can help the process of creating a team by making sure they have the opportunity to have some fun.

Work should be more fun than having fun

Work should be fun. There is no reason for it not to be, especially systems development which can be as near to pure fun as it is possible to get without breaking the law.
Of course, you will always get the good old insecure management response that we are paying these people to work and not to have fun. When you hear this said then point out that when people are having fun they work - better, harder, and for longer.
If the team has fun, if the team can laugh together, then they will be having those shared experiences that I said were one of the key characteristics of teams. So, how can you make sure the team has fun? Remember, you are building something unique so it cannot be something you can 'buy' of off a shelf. Try to find the humour in everything that happens, you can do this by exaggerating everyday events, and by taking things to their absolute extreme. What do I mean? The best way of understanding what I mean is to look at some examples of the things I have either done or have seen other people do.

Naming Convention

A very simple idea that we used in building teams is to put the team members names through as many spelling checkers as possible. You will not find a funny name for everyone but you may well find one or two interesting ones. For example;

Nuclear Carrot
and
Terrible Torpedo (that's me by the way)

The best results are obtained by the use of the older and poorer examples of spelling checkers, but it is worth a try.