Trouble in The Office

OUT OF THE BOX

EXERCISE No. 1: EGG CATCHERS

The best Creative Workshop I've ever attended (to be truthful, the only one I've ever attended) was the one we had two weeks ago. The Marketing Department was divided into smaller groups and then tasked to make Egg Catchers (oo, egg catchers) with materials we bidded for? against? (Help me out here, I'm struggling with my prepositions? conjunctions?) the other teams. We ended up with the bubble wrap and a thick stack of paper plates.

It was so funny, our team. We actually had NO PLAN how to make the egg catcher. We just went bidding for the materials without any vision of how the final product would look like.

(Another group had a really elegant solution -- trash bag filled with crumpled magazine pages, about two feet tall, alias The Smokey Mountain Egg Catcher.)

So there we were, really really tense with the 15 minutes given to assemble the egg catcher. There's this Brand Manager in our team who kept on blabbering nonstop, "Well, I think we should make a kind of stable pad with the bubble wrap and then form these plates into cones like an egg tray and then we could make them sturdy enough to stand. The principles would have to be, number one, enough plates to stand; two, the padding needs to be thick; three, ..."

I missed out her other points. Nagshutdown na ako sa kanya kasi she wasn't making any sense to me. Blah blah blah. Going for the bubble wrap and then the paper plates were poor choices. We should have atleast sought the condoms or balloons (better shock absorbers when inflated) or the FHM magazine. Nakakahiya, engineer ako, wala akong bright idea on assembly.

Faced with a tricky problem, what does an engineer do? Ang turo ng UP -- "Creative Research".

I saw that Smokey Mountain Egg Catcher while going around the entire workshop area. Hey, that's not cheating. Nobody said bawal magmasid. Actually, in MBA, we call that Marketing Intelligence. Ginagawa ko lang ang itinuturo sa akin. Heheh.

I went back to the team with an idea.

While the Brand Manager was blabbering on, I started to roll the paper plates into lumpia-shapes. (I saw this from another group which was making The HotDog Kebabs for Children's Party Egg Catcher. It was hideous and hilarious at the same time! Rolled paper plates held together by barbecue sticks, then stacked like grilled treats.) I asked another teammate to form a bag out of the bubble wrap. I took the plastic bag originally covering the bubble wrap and stuffed it with the rolled paper plates, then placed it at the bottom of the bubble wrap as a base. We stuffed more, no, ALL of the paper plates into the bag, making a nice cushion for the egg when it gets tossed twelve feet away.

Voila! We called that work of art The Deconstructed Installation Egg Catcher! (I should have taken pictures...). Pwedeng pwede sa Musee D'Orse/Orsay. Sayang walang points for looks.

In a few minutes, all of the egg catchers were assembled on the Toss Hall. Aside from Smokey, Hotdog Kebabs, there were the Safe Sex Egg Catcher (inflated condoms held together by spit), MMDA Egg Catcher (bubble wrap shaped like a trashcan), and another one that I can't remember, so let's call it the Forgettable Egg Catcher.

Our team survived the fated egg toss --we were in the top three who needed to do a Sudden Death Match. The two others were Smokey Mountain Egg Catcher and the HotDog Kebabs for Children's Party Egg Catcher. When the second egg toss came, our team's egg flew past the egg catcher -- our tosser got the nerves and shot it way too long. Hotdog Kebabs's toss was short. Smokey won, and took home the top prize of Chocnuts and M&Ms.

What did I learn? Hmm, some people talk too much...?


EXERCISE No. 2: NAILS

This bent my brain till it sprained. Try balancing ten cement nails on the head of an upright screw - no glue, no other implements. We all thought it was impossible! I tried rubbing the nails together to make magnets. Hahaha. Didn't work.

When the facilitator showed us the solution, lahat kami nagmura. Tng%'a, ang galing. Ika nga ni Rico Blanco, POSSIBLE!!!!

Now, everytime I think that something is impossible, I look back on that exercise and say, "It's just a matter of finding out how to balance the nails." And then I feel I can do anything.

:)

posted by Elyss @ 10:16 PM