Monday, December 12th, 2011

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First Day of Vintage Advantage

Today was a short day. We only went five hours instead of the customary six. Still, there was a lot going on in those five hours.

1. Gifts and tools – when we arrived we were each given a large binder to keep our paperwork in. Each binder also contained an 8GB thumb drive and a day-timer for 2012.
2. The first section of the day was taken up with the paperwork necessary for registration and for setting up our bank accounts so we could get paid. Since this is a government funded program, there were a lot of papers to fill out and explain. Once that was out of the way we moved on to the exercises for the day.
3. Exercise one was introductions, but with a twist. Instead of going around the table and having each person introduce themselves, which I personally hate with a deep, purple passion, we were asked to interview the person next to us and introduce them. A page of questions was provided so that we all used the same framework for the interview. I think the point of doing it this way was to begin the process of getting us used to interviewing people and to make it easier for us to speak in public. Because we weren’t talking about ourselves it allayed some of the anxiety we might have felt about speaking to the group.
4. Next up was an exercise to introduce brain-storming. We broke up into three small groups. Each group was given a basket of something. My group’s basket contained a bunch of Fir cones. We had to come up with as many novel uses for the contents of the basket as we could in ten minutes. Good exercise because we had to really strain to think outside the box. Our group had a bit of a tough time because our recorder wanted to disqualify some ideas. We were fine once we convinced them that all ideas should be recorded.
5. After lunch we used our brain-storming skills to develop and adopt a set of guidelines for group interaction. That will act like our constitution for the duration of the program.
6. Then came an exercise called scotomas. That’s a medical term, apparently, that is used to denote blind spots in the eye. We were each given a card with a phrase on it. The task was to count the number of times the letter F appeared in the phrase. This seems like a simple task, but nobody got the number right the first time through. The point of the exercise was that, once we had come up with a number we tended to stick with it. Our belief in our first count created a psychological blind spot. This idea was extended to the ways we construct our own outcomes based on the presuppositions that we have, and also how our preconceptions can be passed on to other people.
7. The final activity was watching a video about the book Who Moved the Cheese? The obvious point was that change is constant, whether we like it or not. Worrying about how things should be, feeling sorry for ourselves or railing against fate doesn’t do any good. The goal is to embrace change and move with it. My favorite line in the movie was Smell the cheese often so you’ll know when its getting stale.

That was the end of the first day. One of the things that wasn’t an exercise, but that emerged over the course of the day, was the criteria they used in selecting the participants for this iteration of the program.

Around fifty people applied for the program in the beginning. The narrowed the list to twenty-eight who were invited to an information session. During that session we learned a little bit about the program and played a couple of group games that called for collaboration and creativity. Then there was a final interview process. The final result of all this was that eleven people were invited to take part.

It turns out that that information session was very important. A lot of people got cut because of how they acted during that session. They were looking for people who would take part and contribute without being abrasive, interrupting a lot or starting side conversations. So they were playing one game while we thought we were doing something entirely different. This makes sense, really, because the whole program is based on creating a powerful group dynamic of mutual support, so anybody who didn’t seem to play well with others essentially kicked themselves out of the running without even knowing it. Very interesting.

Tomorrow we have some outside trainers coming in to teach a workshop on personality assessment, the point being to help us discover what kind of environments and activities would be best suited to our way of being in the world. Should be fun.

Category: Daily Rant