Day Six: Murder Mystery

The highlight of today was a process that examined power dynamics in work groups. Professor Deb Gruenfeld is a social psychologist whose research and teaching looks at individual and organisational behaviour and how they impact on each other. To examine this we were asked to participate in solving a murder mystery.

Group Composition, Information Sharing and Decision Outcomes
We are all handed a package which gives us the original newspaper article (we are told the case is based on a true murder), the interviews taken from the four suspects, and maps of the house and surrounding area. We are then given 15 minutes to read all the information and form an opinion. On completion, there is a show of hands in favour of the particular person we think dunnit!

Now numerous participants on the course are attorneys, which I thought gave them an advantage! (In fact, as an aside, it is utterly invigorating to be part of a group who do extraordinary work to make the world a better place and in many ways are succeeding. More on them later...) But the room is totally - almost evenly - divided between all four suspects!

We are then asked to split into teams of three (of our own choice) and then asked to solve the mystery and come up with the name of one person only that we believe is the murderer. For this we have about 45 minutes. We have to come to consensus.

I partnered with the person sitting next to me, Rea, who runs Urban League of Greater Cincinnati, an organisation that promotes economic self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship and effective leadership in areas of employment, youth and family development; and Mark Deil from the Children's Health Initiative, who works to improve the health of children in the Napa Valley through enrolment in subsidised insurance programs. We each thought it was a different suspect who murdered our victim. And so the fun began!!

Now, because I am going to do this exercise with staff on my return I am not going to announce the verdict here. What I can reveal is this game lead into a fascinating exploration of influences that shape our decision-making.

After dinner each evening, we have study group. This is where we debrief the day's topics and discuss the next set of questions and form some thinking around the material to be presented the following day. Tomorrow's focus: how to change things when change is hard. I suspect the afternoon's exercise had some influence on us because the quality of discussion shifted from sharing anecdotal information we have in common to offering unique insights into the difficulties of running our organisations that is not widely discussed.