January 2005

Dr. Clue Teambuilding Newsletter, Volume 3, Issue 1
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Dr. Clue: Solving the Puzzles of Teamwork

This Issue:

1. Dr. Clue Central
2. Teambuilding Ice Breaker: "Get Out Your Rolodex"
3. Feature Article: "The 2004 Red Sox: A Case for Team Optimism"
4. Puzzle: "Two For the Road"
5. Dr. Clue News
6. Link Swap
7. Reader Contributions

Dr. Clue Central

Welcome again to the Dr. Clue Teambuilding Newsletter. A happy 2005 to you all!

In this issue, we've got an icebreaker that is sure to have your number; an article that's ties optimism to team performance, and two puzzles to confound and delight. Enjoy!

Dave Blum
Editor, the Dr. Clue Teambuilding Newsletter

Teambuilding Icebreaker
"Get Out Your Rolodex"

Set Up: None.

Process: In advance, ask participants to bring their personal "phone logs", whether they keep an actual book to store their numbers or simply use a cell phone or PDA. Then, dividing people into groups of 3-5, ask each person to share with their teammates three contacts which have a story or personal significance for them. For example, one person might share the name of a pizza restaurant that he frequents once or twice a week because it reminds him of his youth in New York. Another person might offer the name of an old friend whom she hasn't spoken with for five years but still feels close to. Allow 5-10 minutes for the small-group activity then bring everyone back to the larger group for further sharing and discussion.

Discussion Questions: What was the most interesting story you learned about anyone in the group? Were there any similarities in the types of contacts people spoke about? What emotions came up for you as you shared your own stories? Based on this activity, is there anyone whom you might just call up tomorrow?

The Point: Although it's true that we are what eat, it can also be said that we are who we know. We can learn so much about people from the names they keep on their contact list: that car mechanic who has 1000 times saved your vehicle from a premature death; that ex-girlfriend whom you hope to reunite again with sometime in the future; that travel agent you met on a plane who promised you a cut-rate flight to Australia. Our contacts - those whom we keep, those whom we delete - tell the story of our livesŠand offer an easy, non-threatening way to share with others a little more about ourselves.

(Thanks for this one to trainer John Brennan of Denver, CO)

Dr. Clue is the premier designer of corporate teambuilding treasure hunts, nationwide. We start with the cool, historical neighborhood of your choice, near your office or conference locale. We then scout the area to find its fascinating, hidden treasures; we write fun and challenging puzzle-based clues to lead you to each mystery location; and we bring it all alive as a half-day, interactive, "living board game" with an emphasis on teambuilding in business. To read about our hunt packages, click here. To see a list of our current treasure hunt locations, click here.

Feature Article:
"The 2004 Red Sox: A Case for Team Optimism"

Here's to the Boston Red Sox! "The Curse" is over; the monkey is off their backs. For 86 years, Beantown fans have been waiting for this moment‹to hold up a champagne glass and, at last, proclaim, "Our Boston Red Sox are World Champions!"

A Californian, myself, I've never really taken much interest in East Coast baseball. It's always seemed to me a Hatfield-and-McCoy sort of thing, Boston against New York in an endless, petty feud. But the phenomenon of "the curse" I find interesting. As the story goes, the Bosox, in 1920, sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for a song and a dance ($125,000 actually) and, despite a few noteworthy close calls, never won another championship. It's classic baseball lore, right up there with the Chicago Cubs and the infamous goat. Given their more than 80 years of disappointment and futility, I couldn't help wondering (as a teambuilder), what made this Boston team different? Just how did the 2004 version of the Red Sox pull it together where so many past teams had failed - and in the most dire of circumstances to boot, down 0 games to 3 against the dreaded Yankees in the American League Championship Series (ALCS)? And perhaps most interestingly, what might we all learn from this year's Red Sox about high performance team building in times of adversity?

It seems to me that a key factor is optimism.

Consider these three quotes from Red Sox team members during the ALCS:

1. "We'll play, even when we're down 6-0. We weren't really (mentally) down at any time. We know we can do it - it's just a matter of doing it."
   -Boston Manager Terry Francona (after Game 1, a 10-7 slugfest)
2. "We've also got to give Mussina credit and Lieber pitched good, too. We've got to move on."
   -Hitting coach Ron Jackson (speaking about the Yankees starting pitchers)
3. "Last year was last year."
   -Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield (when asked about his performance in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS when he gave up a leadoff homer in the 11th inning to deliver the Yankees a 6-5 win.)

(All quotes taken from articles in the Boston Herald, October 12th -21st, 2004)

Clearly, no one on the Red Sox seemed to be getting down; no one was pointing fingers at each other. Clearly, the Red Sox believed that they could come back and win the series! But is mere belief enough to turn around a sinking ship? Surely the Yankees, with their long history of success against Boston, also believed they could take a fourth win and close out the series. There had to be more to it.

For a more in-depth look at the mechanism of optimism, I consulted one of my favorite books, Dr. Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism (1990). According to Seligman, optimism has enormous power to achieve positive results.

Writes Seligman:

He adds:

Optimists seem to have a very different outlook from pessimists. But where does it come from? Is optimism inherited or learned? Is it nature or nurture? And perhaps most significantly, is there anything a pessimist can do to become an optimist?

Seligman theorizes that the hallmark of whether you are an optimist or a pessimist is your explanatory style. Explanatory style is the way you explain bad events to yourself. It is a habit from childhood, an automatic response that directly effects your emotions. Seligman breaks it down into the following three dimensions:

• Permanence
• Personalization
• Pervasiveness

1) Permanence: "People who give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent: The bad events will persist, will always be there to affect their lives" (Seligman, pg. 44). A characteristic of this permanent, pessimistic style is the use of the words "always" and "never". By contrast, optimists tend to use the words "sometimes" and "lately". They believe that most causes are temporary and transient.

2) Pervasiveness: "Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it‹their job, for example, or their love life‹is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels" (Seligman, pg. 46). These catastrophizers tend to employ a pervasive, pessimistic style. They make broad, universal explanations for their failures, giving up on everything when adversity strikes in one area. Optimists, on the other hand, believe that bad events have specific, stand-alone causes which will not, necessarily, spill into the other events of their lives.

3) Personalization: When bad things happen, pessimists tend to blame themselves rather than others. "They think they are worthless, talentless, and unlovable" (Seligman, pg. 49). Pessimists personalize negative events; by contrast, optimists are able to look at the bigger picture, noticing all the various external causes that may have contributed to the current misfortune. They acknowledge their own culpability, to be sure, but also seek to identify outside factors. Optimists are much easier on themselves than pessimists.

Let's return, now, to the earlier Red Sox quotes, employing Seligman's perspective:

1) Francona: "We'll play, even when we're down 6-0. We weren't really (mentally) down at any time. We know we can do it - it's just a matter of doing it."

2) Jackson: "We've also got to give Mussina credit and Lieber pitched good, too. We've got to move on."

3) Wakefield: "Last year was last year."

It would, of course, be highly revealing to do an exhaustive study of the explanatory style employed by past Red Sox teams, comparing the 2004 Sox with their predecessors - a research task, alas, beyond the scope of this brief article. Nevertheless, I believe it's safe to conclude that, for whatever reason, this year's Boston team was a singularly optimistic bunch. Even in the direst of circumstances, they explained their situation in external, temporary and specific language. To assert that their optimism caused them to win the championship might be overstating the case. Still, I think it's evident that their optimistic explanatory style had a strong positive impact on their overall resiliency and eventual success.

So, what can team leaders, in business and elsewhere, learn from 2004 Red Sox?

We can start, I think, by tuning in to the language our team participants are using. Are people, for example, employing such phrases as:

• "This will never work." "They always beat us, and they always will." (Permanent)
  
  
• "Fighting back is useless." "We're just no good." (Pervasive)
  
  
• "I'm stupid." "I have no talent at this task." (Personal)
  
  

If so, then they're probably caught in a pessimistic cycle. As leaders, our job is to help our people transform their pessimistic explanations into more optimistic language, such as:

• "This didn't work this time, but it might next time ifŠ" "They've beaten us so far becauseŠ" (Temporary)
  
  
• "Fighting against these particular guys might be useless, however...." "In this case, we're not doing very well, butŠ" (Specific)
  
  
• "They were pretty smart, yetŠ" "This task was pretty darn difficult, however..." (External)
  
  

Transforming a team from a group of pessimists to a gang of optimists is a slow and arduous process. The team leader can only do so much modeling. In the end, it's up to the participants to first recognize their own pessimistic explanatory style and then to want to change it. Change, as we all know, is hard. But the potential benefits are huge, both in a team sense as well as for our individual lives. And who knows: with enough awareness and effort, you might just break your organization's own "curse" cycle.

What does a teambuilding treasure hunt look, feel and sound like?
Watch our 2-Minute Video and find out. click here.

Puzzle

Answer to Last week's puzzling paradoxes
The answers to each "triplet" were as follows:

1) None. Moses wasn't on the ark. 2) There were two possible answers to this one: a. "in the ground"; b. "they survived, so they wouldn't get buried. 3) Because people in B.C. wouldn't actually know they were "before Christ". Stamping their coins with "BC" would require an extremely prescient oracle or a time machine. 4) If he has a widow, it means he's dead. Not too many cultures allow dead people to remarry. 5) A polar bear, up in the North Pole. 6) The match is where all heat would start from. 7) Two. 8) The meat, of course. 9) All of them!

DR. CLUE HONOR ROLL