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Art in the Round – Hone and Share Your Collaboration Skills

Collaboration powers our innovation, creativity, and success. Hopefully you’ve seen this in action with design thinking activities or co-creation workshops. It might have been by jotting concepts on post-it notes furiously in Crazy Eights, or sharing whiteboard markers while sketching concepts.

These events can be stressful, though, putting us into a performance mindset as we strive to show our best collaboration. We need opportunities to also grow these collaboration skills in a safe space. We need to exercise the give-and-take of watching our ideas soar, evolve, or crash. Art in the Round is a great activity to practice collaboration while also nourishing relationships with the kids in your life. Who knows, those kids may in turn be building amazing collaboration skills to be the Product Managers of tomorrow!

Art in the Round is a fun, easy way to co-create artwork. Gather your kid(s) and:

  1. Choose a theme for your art, like cakes or turkeys
  2. Give each participant a big piece of paper and a shared pool of art supplies
  3. Choose a fun album or playlist, and start it playing

And you’ll end up with great art like this:

Example of Art in the Round

(note, I may be biased as my six-year-old daughter and I made these)

As the first song plays, each person will start their picture however they choose. There are no artistic rules to Art in the Round. Hopefully your song will be about two to four minutes, giving a great amount of time to make progress but not too much. I usually play something chill, like Emancipator or Thievery Corporation. When the song hits the final note, everyone passes their paper to the person to their left. If they’re halfway through a line, drop the marker! These are some of the best moments to see what someone else does with your art. The next artist will add to the art for another song. If you’re a group of two, you pass the papers back and forth to each other. Continue until the art is looking great or for a predefined number of passes.

Art in the Round is going to help you grow and share your collaboration in several ways:

  1. You’ll practice drawing, which is always great for visually communicating your ideas
  2. You’ll experience the feelings of having others take your idea and make it what you weren’t expecting, perhaps ruining it in your opinion
  3. You’ll see how childlike curiosity and innocence lead to art that you couldn’t make yourself. You’ll witness diverse views making better and bigger ideas!

Along with growing yourself, you’ll be helping your daughters/sons, nieces/nephews, or kid friends learn how to better share, exchange ideas, and co-create. Skills that will make you and them both successful at life!

If you try it out, I’d love to see your art in the comments!

Further Learning

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Save Your Feet! Reclaim Your Focus with LEGO Permits

Work is messy. Requests, tasks, and inspiration come flying at us every minute. Soon we feel like we’re in the middle of a kids’ room. Don’t look now, but you’re about to step on a LEGO!

Yes, that is a Halloween pumpkin on the floor

We need to conquer the mess, to reclaim our life and to make serious progress on the builds that matter most. We need to limit our work in process (WIP) to spend more time creating and less time pulling LEGOs from our feet. How can we get there? How can we maintain focus on our priorities day after day?

Let’s try a simple tool – LEGO construction permits. We’ll first make a physical set of permits to define and enforce a limit to our work in process (a WIP Limit). We’ll only work on an idea, issue, or interrupt if we permit ourselves to do so. Make them as fun, simple, or creative as you wish:

3 permits = WIP Limit of 3

And start cleaning your messy room, assigning a permit for each work in process:

The LEGOs cover the permit, but it’s in there

If something doesn’t get a permit, it goes back in the box for another day. Maybe it will get a permit later, maybe never. Soon you’ll go from playroom overload to sanity:

Room to breath

So try it today! Make a set of physical permits and restrict yourself to only work on what has a permit. Start with physical permits over digital because they’ll:

  • Give you more flexibility to tune your process
  • Nag you as a persistent reminder
  • Bring fun to work!

Limit your work in process to give focus to what matters, making real progress and a real impact.

Bring this tool to your kids too! All photos are from my son cleaning his LEGOs. We ignited the conversation with observing those paper permits in windows around town. We then flowed to a conversation on why we have city councils and planning boards in the first place. We finally brought it home by using permits as an engaging way to clean his room. Have fun making the permits with your kids too out of whatever they want, even out of LEGOs. Don’t have too much fun, though, as you’ll have to remember to stop at your limit number.

When you make your permits, we’d love to hear what you used or, better yet, see a photo in the comments!

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Engineering Ants – For the Youngest PM

It’s surprisingly hard to tell my kids what I do at work all day. Product Management is awesome, and I want that excitement to come through, but at ages 8, 4, and 1 it can either be too nebulous (“I help people by building great products for them”) or too exact (“I understand customers to build a vision and strategy for a product”). Recently, though, my family found an awesome board game that not only helps explain Product Management, but brings Product Management skills right into our house!

Engineering Ants is a cooperative board game from Peacable Kingdom. We love the cooperative games from Peacable Kingdom as they get us all working to win together. In this game, we’re presented with a set of random challenges that your ants must overcome, like escaping a wild bear or getting through sticky mud, with a set of cardboard widgets to connect to together to build solutions. The widgets are things such as batteries, sails, wheels, rope, and chairs. As a team you build a solution, and when you all agree it’s a great answer to the challenge, you move to the next one.

Right away the premise of this game teaches the collaboration and co-creation that are vital to Product Management. With this game you can show your family that being a Product Manager means taking a vague challenge and working with others to build a prototype or solution! The rules of the game are vague, which also means you can bring your Product Management toolbox of choice to demonstrate to your kids what you do all day. For instance, we’ve started using these house rules:

  • The challenges are vague, like simply stating a fallen tree is in the way of your ants. The player that reaches the obstacle must define the challenge and answer any questions the other players might have to help build the answer. This reflects how Product Managers may have to research a problem before helping others create a solution.
  • The first player picks two widgets to connect to start a solution, then passes it to the next player to add another, and so on until everyone has added a piece. This lets the solution evolve with each player getting to put their thumbprint on it, and echoes design thinking workshops of co-creation and ensuring everyone has a voice.
  • Once everyone has put a piece on the solution, we give a fist-to-five vote. If anyone is a 2 or under, they talk through their concerns and we alter our design. My 4-year old thinks this is a game just in itself, and is always very excited to give her vote! This is another great tool for Product Managers to judge alignment of a team around a solution.

The whole family has been loving Engineering Ants, and if you have young kids  that want to know more about your job or you want to get them started on the path to Product Management early, I recommend you check it out too!

For other ways to involve your kids in Product Management, check out my post on the book Hamburger Heaven.

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Hamburger Heaven – For the youngest PMs

 

Hamburger Heaven book cover by Wong Herbert Yee
Hamburger Heaven book cover by Wong Herbert Yee

“Daddy, what do you do at work?” can finally be an easy question to answer: “I’m Pinky Pig!” If you have little ones, and want to help them know what a Product Manager does, my family has been having a lot of fun with Hamburger Heaven by Wong Herbert Yee. I got it on a fluke at the library, and was surprised to read about the hero, Pinky Pig, saving the restaurant she works at by doing market research, creating a communications plan, and ultimately helping to deliver winning products. The book is also very cute and rhymes, making it great for read-aloud time. So, if you’re looking for ways to help start training the next generation of Product Managers, give it a go the next time you’re looking for a read. You may even get inspired to do even more market research yourself.