Tactic 19 Presenting Your Work

One of the difficulties of group-working is how rapidly people cluster around a solution. Often they’ll disagree vehemently about the details, but agree about the broad framework. This agreement helps you make rapid progress together, but makes it harder to view a potential solution from a more critical perspetive.

Break your team in two parts: one ‘takes’ a ‘blue pill’ and the other a ‘red pill’. From the point of ‘taking’ the pill, that team has to play a role. The blue pill team have to produce a presentation about all the strengths of the solution. The red pill team have to produce a presentation about the weaknesses and risks of the solution. They should present their findings to each other and engage in ‘robust’ debate. If possible, ask someone independent to judge which team wins.

Use the findings of both teams to re-asssess your proposal:

  • where might it fall short?
  • where does it not work?
  • what needs to be improved?
Written on February 8, 2017


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