Materials
Blank paper, a pen or pencil for each pair
Exercise
– Ask participants to find a partner. Explain that this activity works best if their partners are people they don’t know. Give each pair one sheet of paper and one pencil.
– Inform participants that, without talking, each two-person team is to cooperatively draw a house. Both people on each team must hold the pencil during the entire activity. After two or three minutes, ask the teams to stop. They can show their house to those near them or hold them up for the group to see.
There are usually three types of houses that are drawn:
- “Primary school” houses, where either both people visualized the
house in the same way or one person drew and the other was a
“hitchhiker”
- Houses that look like two houses, where one person started to feel
guilty about taking control and let the other person complete the
drawing
- Drawings that don’t resemble houses at all but rather aimlessly
wandering lines, where each person tried to help the other; either no
one took control or both people were competing and neither would
give up control
– Encourage different teams to share what the experience was like for them.
– Explore the individualism/group and hierarchy/equity value orientations.
Debriefing Questions
- What values might influence the different experiences?
- What differences in task and relationship orientations did you
discover?
- How might the spirit of cooperation or competition affect
performance?
- How might misunderstandings arise between those having the
individualist and group orientations? Between the hierarchy and equity
orientations?
- How might this apply to real-life situations?
- How might culture influence behavior (visualization of “house,”
task/relationship orientation, etc.)?
