A Fun Teamwork Experiment

I want to take four teams of four people and arrange them in groups. Each group gets an identical book of crossword puzzles (or maybe a web printed book of a dozen puzzles of varying difficulty).

• The first group divides the book in four pieces and each member does 1/4 of the book.
• The second group takes one page at a time. The first guy does as much as he can and passes it to the second, and so on.
• The third group divides the book in half parts and solves puzzles as pairs.
• The fourth group has no rules about how to divide and organize the work.

We would count finished puzzles once per minute per team. We would let the experiment continue until one of the teams finishes its set of puzzles.

Publish the findings, and publish notes on how each team felt about their work style, and what they think they would do differently.

That’s it. I would like to see how it comes out. If you have the time and enough people to try this, please follow-up with a comment here to tell me how it went. Better yet, write it up on your blog and send me a link. This could be a load of fun!