Facilitators: Harold Nelson & Robert Sandusky

This workshop adopted a sequence of systemically integrated exercises to simulate the different transformational states a group of individuals experience as they transition from being a gathering of individuals to being a cohesive group, to being a productive team, to becoming a high-performance design team. Participants experienced the essence of such transformation along with an intellectual framework tying the experiences into a coherent systemic whole.

Participants were presented with a series of guiding schema for the overall workshop and for each of three exercises. The exercises were a combination of individual and group work. The exercise was critiqued on how well participants thought they did meeting the objective of the exercise, which was to experience a change in interrelationships of an emerging systemic design team. The workshop was focused on creating an experience of three significant transformations in the evolution of a design team. It also included each individual reporting out reflectively the essence of their experiences—i.e. what would each participant take away from having had such experiences with others?