"Beautifully written and full of wisdom, The Ring in the Rubble is a gem." --Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager ® and Leading at a Higher Level
Team Building
Ring in the Rubble Free Team Building Activity
The people at Apple Computer are widely understood to be on the cutting edge of personal computer software and hardware. They are experts at finding the Ring before anyone else. However, it might surprise you to learn that the core of Apple’s most revolutionary contribution to computing—the Macintosh computer—was not developed by the good folks at Apple, it was developed at Xerox.
Management at Xerox shied away the massive change that was on the horizon when their R&D department developed the first Graphical User Interface (GUI) and computer mouse. The technology stagnated in their labs until Steve Jobs saw the Ring in the Xerox Rubble. He swooped up this technology and used it to change the face of the personal computer and thereby, the world!
The moral of this story is to encourage people to embrace change, not fear it. The Ring in the Rubble helps to teach you how. Below is a simple exercise that will help too. Gather your team and give it a try.
The Ring in the Rubble Team Building Exercise
- Identify your Rings
Get your team together and brainstorm a list of latent opportunities staring you in the face right now. The opportunities may be large, e.g. improving a flagship product line or creating a new one, or small, e.g. improving the break room appearance or building entrance area. Then, have everyone vote for their top three opportunities on the list that they are personally most jazzed to address. Vote again on those three. The opportunity with the most votes wins. - Define the Rubble
Now you have identified your Ring of Opportunity, generate a list of all the Rubble that is in the way of finding the Ring, e.g. ‘we don’t have the budget; corporate won’t let us; we don’t have the time;’ etc. Get them all out. - Start Digging
Now get a copy of The Ring in the Rubble and go through the tools one by one. Discuss how each one might be used to help you dig through the rubble identified in step 2. Encourage all kinds of ideas, from the simple to the outlandish. Have some fun. Foster discussion from different perspectives so that everyone can participate. For example, if sales are low, maybe you need to raise the price. Maybe this gives the marketing department the opportunity to retool the product as a premium luxury item, etc. Once you have identified tools you can use, assign SMART goals — specific, measurable, achieveable, realisitc, and time boxed — with a clear champion who is accountable for using each one to dig for the Ring. - Celebrate Success and Keep Digging
Determine milestones on your journey and celebrate when you reach them. But just because you found one ring does not mean there aren’t many more out there waiting to be found. Repeat the process. Keep on digging, keep having fun, and keep winning.