Purpose

We used various collaborative exercises during the OpenGov Community Summits from 2009-2011.  The purposes of the exercises were the following:

1. Serve as an icebreaker by giving strangers who did not know each other a chance to introduce,
2. Causing chance interactions between people that otherwise would not have met,
3. Help get participants understand collaborative dynamics better by doing something that is collaborative,
4. Raise the energy level of the group by doing something fun, and
5. Stimulate new thinking by creating an environment that is very different from the way they are used to at work.

Key Elements

• None of the participants know what the exercise is before they arrive.
• The organizer hands out one of the instructions/hints to a handful of individual of participants and mentions to the audience that they will receive the instructions from each other.  None of these people with instructions/hints are permitted to address groups of more than 10 people so that we can study how the information spread across the group (rather than having it broadcast to everyone at once).  To add some fun and complexity, you can include contradictory hints/instructions such as the following:
• "Hint #1: the lower numbers are in the front of the room."
• "Hint #2: the higher numbers are in the front of the room."
• "Hint #3: hint #2 is wrong." 
• Each of the exercises is a problem solving exercise.  Participants are informed how the exercise will work in the morning and they finish solving the exercise after returning from breakout groups in the afternoon or the whole exercise can take 15-20 minutes in the morning.
• At the completion of each exercise, the organizer leads participants through a discussion to evaluate how well the group did in solving the problem.   After receiving the answer from the group, the organizer can ask questions such as the following:
• How were the instructions communicated across the group?
• Was there any misinformation?  How did it get resolved? 
• How did the group determine what would be an effective method for solving this problem?
• What can we learn about collective intelligence from how the group solved this problem. 
• What were the incentives for people to solve the problem? (The discussion of incentives is a key point, because the government employees in attendance are used to designing participatory processes with the public rather than participating in them; being a participant in this exercise is an opportunity for them to better understand the perspective of citizens in their processes.)  Why were some people more motivated to solve the problem than others?
• What lessons can apply here to your work?
• Which rules in the exercise got broken?  Why?  What does that tell us about rules at work?

Example Collaborative Exercises 

• Determining the Highest and Lowest Matching Pairs of Numbers: Tape index cards to the bottom of all participants' chairs.  Some cards have a twin number on another card in the room, but most do not.  The group must find a way to figure out which pair is highest and which is lowest.  An example hint you can give the participants include how many pairs their are.
• Unscrambling Letters to Spell a Word: Everyone has a letter on an index card or PostIt and some of the letters will be used to spell out a word.  Different rules can be applied to figure out which letters are part of the word and which are not; for example, any letter that is on exactly three index cards will not be used; all other cards will be used as part of the answer.  An example hint you can give the participants is the final number of letters in the word that will be unscrambled.
• Determining the Average of Numbers on all Index Cards: Tape index cards to the bottom of all participants' chairs or hand them out.  Start with a non-obvious number 136 and use a pattern that increases by three.  Whatever the pattern is, the average is going to be the average of the highest and lowest numbers; usually someone in the audience will figure this out.  An example hint you can give the participants is that the pattern increases by three or that the lower numbers are at the front of the room.
• Incentivized Balloon Trading: Give everyone an envelope with two colored balloons.  Post a point system on the wall such as Red = 1, Orange = 2, Yellow = 3, Blue = 4, Green =5, Purple = 6 (or to add complexity, make pieces of the point system hints that you give to a handful of individuals and see whether they share that information when they are responsible for informing the group).  If someone gets a pair of the same color, they can triple the point total of each of their individual balloons.  The winner is the one with the highest number of points.  The purpose is to demonstrate that if you incentivize an activity, it happens.  You can run a second iteration of this exercise after people have traded to get pairs and tell them that the new goal is to have the lowest point total as a group and that their individual point totals do not matter; very quickly, people should realize that they need to help each other out and one person must trade a balloon with each of the people that has a pair.  Discussion points include the difference dynamics between both iterations; in the first iteration everyone was competing, and in the second iteration only the group's success mattered.