Monthly Archives: August 2023

Team Building Activity – Look into the future!

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This past Wednesday I had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop with all the senior leaders in our organization to start working on our Annual Objective for 2024. As part of that workshop, I put together a team building activity to bookend the workshop. I got a lot of positive feedback from the attendees, so I thought I’d share what we did here, along with my lessons learned, so that others could use it if they were interested.

Activity: Looking into the future
Time Required: 10-15 minutes
Materials Needed: A decent sized ball. I used this kick ball.

  • Get your participants to stand in a circle, ideally arms-length apart.
  • Stand in the center of the circle and introduce the activity while holding the ball. Here’s a paraphrase of what I said to my team – “Today, we’re going to predict the future. Now, as many of you know, I’m an actor. The last show I was in was about a medium who used a crystal ball to speak with dead Hollywood celebrities. I learned something very valuable when I was doing that show – Genuine crystal balls are heavy, fragile, and expensive. The crystal ball we were using was the most expensive part of the show. Even more expensive than my salary! Because I want to be responsible with our members money, and because I don’t feel like cleaning up a bunch of broken glass, I’m going to ask you all to use your imagination and pretend that this fine kick ball is, in fact, a very fancy crystal ball and that when you are holding it you can see into the future.”
  • Introduce the rules of the game. These are the rules that I shared with the group on Wednesday (you can partially see them on the slides behind me in the picture above).
    • Only the person holding the ball can speak.
    • Players who are not holding the ball may communicate with eye contact, gestures, etc…but no words.
    • Prediction must be accompanied by the current count of predictions
    • If a prediction is a repeat of a previous prediction the team must start over
    • Predictions may, however, BUILD on previous predictions. Example – “1! There will be a rain of trout that hits New York City!” “2! The ambassador from Chile will suffer a serious injury after being hit on the head by a falling trout.“
    • If the ball hits the ground for any reason the predictions must start over.
    • If a new round of predictions begin, predictions from a previous round may be repeated
    • You cannot throw the ball back to the person who threw it to you.
  • Explain that the goal is to see how many predictions the team can hit in the time allotted. You should challenge the team with two goals – One of them that you think should be achievable, and one that should be hard. In our case, we used 25 and 50. Put some kind of bet in place to make it interesting. I initially had the idea to be the “bad guy” and assert that the team would never hit the goal and my partner (Adam Ulery from Compass Productivity) would be the “good guy” and bet that they would. I volunteered to agree to conduct the rest of the meeting using my puppet, Mr. Judgey, if I lost. We were discussing our bet with the CEO before our workshop, and he got into the game in a big way. He offered that if the team hit 25 predictions we’d donate $2500 to the local chapter of Celebrate Birthdays (the charity the team was sponsoring for the day), and that if we got to 50 we’d donate $5000. I threw in me using the puppet for the rest of the meeting as a bonus to tier on the 50 predictions.
  • Toss the ball to one of the participants and get the game started!
  • Play referee and make sure they follow the rules.
  • If you can, record the session.

The point: I based this activity on an exercise we have used as an ensemble warm up in a few of the productions I’ve done in the past. In that activity, the goal was to keep the ball in the air and count out every time you hit it, and the point was to get everyone in the ensemble thinking and working together as a unit before the show begins. It’s also a lot of fun. In this case, I wanted to add on to that by getting them thinking about the future as our workshop was around building an Objective for 2024 that would focus on the Most Important Thing our credit union would accomplish next year.

Retrospective:

  • What went well: The team hit the stretch goal, with a list of 50 predictions that ranged from serious, silly, far-fetched, and realistic and pretty much everything in between. We had some laughs, shook off the after-lunch drop in energy, and got into the right mindset to do some forward-thinking. We raised $5000 for charity and I got to freak everyone out with my eerily accurate Muppet. We gave a spontaneous lesson-in-the-moment about stretch goals in relation to the 25 and 50 targets, getting the team to agree that if we had started with 50 as the goal, or even 75, that they would have been less motivated to try and hit it.
  • What didn’t go well: I didn’t anticipate how quickly the team would devise a strategy to get to the goal without dropping the ball. In the theater world, the ball is constantly moving. In this scenario, the team member got to hold it while they were making their prediction. They quickly realized they could just hand the ball to the person next to them and let it go around the circle. There was also no motivation to make a prediction quickly, so team members holding the ball could pause to think about an answer.
  • What I’d do differently: Add the following rules to the list above –
    • You cannot pass the ball to the person immediately to your left or right.
    • You cannot move from your spot.
    • If you hold the ball for more than 5 seconds the count resets.

Conclusion

After we finished the workshop I closed our time together with the following (again paraphrased, because I don’t work from cue cards my friends):

I spent a good deal of time working in and around Renaissance Festivals when I was younger. Yeah, probably not much of a surprise given the fact that I’m wearing a kilt. When I was doing so, I got to know quite a few fortune tellers – Tarot card readers, psychics. You name it. I’m sorry if I’m ruining the illusion for you, but none of these people possessed any kind of supernatural powers. What they had, was the ability to look at the world as it is, look at trends, ask probing questions of their patrons, and make a relatively accurate prediction about what their future looked like. We did that together today. We may be right, we may be wrong, but we used our collective knowledge together to gaze into the future and make some predictions. I’m excited to see how they turn out.

Bonus: Adam recorded the session for me, and I’m going to keep track of their 50 predictions for 2024 to see how many come true!

Update: I can’t believe I left out one of the most impactful parts of this! As I was finishing my summary, I asked everyone to pass the kick ball around the room one last time and sign it as we moved on to our next activity. This, I told them, was our contract that we were committing to building a future together as one big team. I gave the ball to our CEO as a memento of the event and a reminder for everyone of what we did together.

Remembering Holly

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Taken at a pizza place in Little Five Points, Atlanta before we went to Dragon*Con in 2002

This is another post that has been sitting in Drafts for years that I finally decided to wrap up and post.

My first memory of Holly Blain isn’t actually a memory about her at all. It’s a memory about her brother, Beau.

I was sitting in the gym at Tyrone Middle School, when this kid I had never met before walks up to me. “Hi,” he says. “My name is Beau. My sister says you play Dungeons and Dragons and we should be friends.”

And, just like that, we were.

Holly was one year ahead of me at Tyrone, and we must have known each other in some kind of very tangential way, but I don’t remember ever really associating with her before that day. But somehow or other she knew that Beau and I should be friends, so she told her brother to go up to me and make it happen.

She did that kind of thing all the time. When Holly decided that something should be a certain way, she just expected the world to fall in line. If you didn’t know her, this behavior would come off as kind of selfish and irritating. I’ll be honest with you – it came off as a bit selfish and irritating even if you did.

But here’s what you have to understand about Holly. Here’s why Holly was so damn special. Holly did what she wanted to do, when she wanted to do it, and she believed that we should all be able to do that, and she would do anything in her power to make sure that you had the kind of freedom she wanted for herself.

I guess I can only explain this by way of personal example. When we were young, and going to Bennigan’s every Tuesday night to dance, Holly would go whether or not she had the money to get in the door. If she didn’t, she’d just count on being able to find someone who was willing to pay her way or convince the door man to let her in for free “this one time.” Annoying, right? But if she found out you wanted to go and didn’t have the money to get in the door, she’d offer to find a way to get you in as well. Whenever Holly came over to my house she would jump on my computer and use it without asking my permission first, and if you know anything at all about me you know I’m highly personal when it comes to my electronic devices (and, in defense of my highly protective nature, one time when she did this she saw something in my email that she really should not have seen). I had to start locking my computer and enable a guest account whenever she came around. Holly was the kind of person who had no problem whatsoever with someone using her computer without asking, so it never occurred to her to ask to use mine. If Holly was cold at my house she would adjust the thermostat, but if a guest was cold in her house she would expect them to do the same. You see my point? Holly did whatever she wanted to do, and she wanted YOU to do whatever YOU wanted to do, and if those two things happened to conflict with each other you just talk it out and smile and move on and keep on loving each other.

When I learned that she was flying to Texas to go to Butt-Numb-A-Thon even though her application had not been approved, I just had to smile. That was so very typical of Holly. Deny her admission to an event? Fine. She’d go anyway and hope she could change your mind once she got there, and even if she couldn’t she’d just enjoy the experience of trying.

That was Holly.

—

I started this post shortly after Holly passed last year. I did so knowing I would be heading to her memorial service and I wanted to get my thoughts sorted out before I did so. What I said at the service was pretty close to what I ended up writing here. I worried then that perhaps I might offend someone by what I was saying. Unless you really paid attention to what I was saying it was kind of easy to misinterpret my words as a criticism of her behaviors and personality when that was the exact opposite of what I was trying to do. I had the same feelings when I spoke at the funeral of her brother, Beau, where I also had words that were, perhaps, not the standard things you would hear in a eulogy.

But if there is one thing that I loved and admired about both of them it’s that they were very self-aware. They knew who they were, and how society perceived them, and it didn’t bother them if perhaps some of those perceptions cast them in a negative light.

As I get older and become more and more “conservative” and set in my ways, I think often of them and wonder how long they would have been able to keep that up. I know it’s a very unconventional way to think about a person, but as I frequently do I think about the quote from the end of Batman: The Dark Knight. “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Part of me believes that Holly and Beau were powerful enough forces of nature that they would have successfully fought the push to compromise on their core beliefs as they got older, and part of me is thankful I never had to see the opposite happen. 

Which is a very selfish way of remembering them, I suppose, but there it is. 

Daily Writing Prompt – Tell us about the last thing you got excited about

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Tell us about the last thing you got excited about.
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This one is easy, although I’m sure many folks will see it as being kind of boring.

My wife and I do lots of neat stuff together, but every weekend we have a morning ritual of sitting together in our hot tub for a few hours while the sun rises. We talk, we have breakfast, or we just sit there quietly on our smartphones and read.

I love it. I get excited about it every weekend.

At 50 I’ve come to realize that it’s the little pleasures in life that really bring the most joy. Vacations are amazing. Parties are fun. Going out with friends is a blast. But having the time and space to just BE with my wife for a few hours and appreciate the life we’ve built together? That’s the absolute best.

Daily Writing Prompt – 08.21.2023

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Where did your name come from?
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I was, apparently, named after a football player.

For all I know, this story is apocryphal. I could, if I wanted to, completely validate or debunk it by actually talking to the one person who is still alive who had a say in my name, but it’s more fun to go with this one.

My Dad was a huge football fan. He played in high school, and told me he had been offered a college scholarship to play in Seattle but changed his mind after visiting the campus and seeing how big the players were at the college level in comparison to the folks he was used to getting hit by.

If I’m being completely honest he likely threw in something about the fact that they were “big and black,” which wasn’t at all the norm in Pullman, Washington where he grew up. My memories of my father and the type of person he was are disjointed because he left us when I was very young and we had periods without contact that lasted years. He died in 1999 when I was 27, and he and I had just really formed a somewhat normal relationship when that happened. His views on race are one of the things that I tend to look back on with rose-tinted glasses and make a lot of excuses for at times because, well, I miss him and want to have positive memories of my Father. But I digress…

So anyway…my Dad was, apparently, a big fan of Mike “Mad Dog” Curtis. Curtis was a linebacker for the Baltimore Colts when they won Super Bowl V in 1971 (the year before I was born). If you search around on the internet you’ll find references to Curtis that range from him being “no-nonsense” to “a mean son-of-a-bitch” and everything in between. He is one of those “old school” Defensive players who made it a regular habit to try and destroy pretty much anyone they came into contact with, most famously in Curtis’ case a fan who rushed on the field in a game against the Miami Dolphins in December of 1971 (less than a year before I was born…you see where this is going??).

Mike “Mad Dog” Curtis was a mean, though-hitting, sadistic football player who my father idolized, so he decided to name me after him. I’m sure, ostensibly, he said he was naming me after his brother, Michael Thomas McGreevy, but the fact is that “Curtis” is not any kind of familial name I’m aware of in either his tree or my Mother’s, so I’m pretty sure he had “Mad Dog” on his mind when he finally had “his boy.”

Turns out he got a sensitive theater kid who cries at really emotional commercials. Sorry about that, pops.

An interesting side note to this story…When Curtis died in 2020 at the age of 77, he lived here in St. Petersburg, Florida. It’s far fetched, but I wonder sometimes if he ever saw my professional name in the papers (Michael C. McGreevy) here locally and pieced together the connection. It’s highly unlikely, but it’s an interesting thing to think that the man who I was named after passed away in the town I grew up in and still live in today.

Daily Writing Prompt: What are your top ten favorite movies?

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What are your top ten favorite movies?
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Yep, I already missed a day. Oh well.

So this is just off the top of my head and in no particular order.

  1. Jesus Christ Superstar
  2. Memento
  3. Avengers: Infinity War
  4. Avengers: Endgame
  5. Moulin Rouge
  6. Amadaeus
  7. Sharknado
  8. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
  9. Tommy
  10. A Clockwork Orange

A significant number of the movies listed above were on cable when I was a child and I ended up watching them a billion times, which probably says a whole heck of a lot about the way my brain works.

Daily Writing Prompt – What do you love about where you live?

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What do you love about where you live?
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Simply put, I live where people dream of going on vacation.

I’m not trying to say that everything about Florida/The Greater Tampa Bay area is perfect. Far from it. Hell, “Florida Man” jokes exist for a reason, and despite heavy Northern influence on the major metropolitan areas Florida will never let you forget that it is, indeed, part of the Deep South. I mean, there is a HUGE Confederate Flag off of I4 right as you cross into Tampa territory.

But…There’s a lot of stuff about this area that is pretty great.

The weather is pretty great. Yes, it’s hot most of the year. Yes, it’s humid. But the thing is, with the obvious exception being the times when a hurricane is barreling down on us, I’ve never heard the powers that be tell us not to go outside because we could die. Ocean breezes keep things relatively livable, even if you end up a sweaty mess. I used to be enamored with the idea of living places that are cold and grey, because I love the rare days we have that are that way in Florida, but I was disabused of that notion by my wife after visiting Chicago in November a few years ago. While we were driving between cities, she turned to me and said “I want you to look around right now. See how everything is brown and grey and wet? See how everyone is sad and depressed? It’s like this for MONTHS AT A TIME.” When we were driving across the Howard Frankland bridge after arriving home that November, I noted the beautiful sunset and the fact that I could see a school of dolphins playing in Tampa Bay and realized that cold and grey days could get old quickly.

The cultural scene here is pretty great, too. We have a ton of local theaters, artists, musicians, museums, and various other ways to scratch your creative itch. Downtown St. Petersburg and Gulfport are two communities that are filled with eclectic people and businesses, not to mention being LGBTQ+ friendly.

Obviously we have beaches, and one of them (Clearwater Beach) was recently rated as the Best Beach in the South. We don’t have waves to speak of, but our beaches are top notch and many of our beach communities are still pretty low-key and chill if you’re just looking to kick back, have a few drinks, and watch some stunning sunsets.

The food scene here has really taken a turn for the better in the last decade or so, thanks in no small part to the efforts of folks like my friends Greg and Michelle Baker. When I was growing up it seemed like the majority of restaurants around here were either chains, dives, or prohibitively expensive. Now we’ve got a wide range of eateries cropping up all over the place, from food trucks to Michelin star restaurants.

I suppose it goes without saying that if you’re into theme parks or cruises you’ve got your pick of the lot here in Florida, and from where I am in West Central Florida we’re reasonable driving distance to all of them. We also have St. Augustine, which is the oldest continually-occupied settlement of European and African-American origin in North America and just a really cool place to visit.

But ultimately? For me? Florida is home. We’re a state made up of transients, and when I was growing up very few people who I knew were actually born here. I wasn’t myself, but I’ve lived here for about 48 years. I live two miles or so from the house I grew up in. I can’t go anywhere in St. Petersburg without having some kind of memory pop into my head. This is where I have my roots, and despite all the reasons to want to live somewhere else I’ll never not love St. Petersburg, Florida. There was a time when I wanted nothing more than to live somewhere else, but the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve realized that it is a pretty amazing place to live.

Where I want to be and who I want to be

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This post was “written” almost a year ago. I was experimenting with using dictation tools to write a post on my morning walk, and the end result was pretty scattered and required a lot of editing. I got about half way done, had to move on to other things, and promptly forgot about it. This morning I stumbled across that draft in progress and decided to finish it up. Honestly, it was rough. I had to remember what was on my mind a year ago, and I went off on some completely unrelated side rant that was about a thousand words long and needed to be edited out. I think the end result here is worth posting, though, so here it is.

The company I work for recently went through a major reorganization. A new department was created for our business unit and our team was moved into a new vertical under a different executive. A VP position was created to head up the new department, and another senior leader was given that position to help align all of our Agile/Lean/Project/Strategic activities.

It’s a lot of change. I was, admittedly, quite shaken when it happened. I’ve had my cheese moved more than once at my current job, but this one felt overwhelming at first. I don’t feel that way any more, and in fact I’m really excited about all the changes, but that initial jolt was pretty big.

One of the reasons it was such a shock to my system is because I was moved into what we are calling the “process” vertical in our organization. As someone who believes in and supports Agile, being in a group that seems to be on the “processes and tools” side of the “Individuals and Interactions” equation wasn’t a look I was happy with. I’m still not entirely keen on the optics around it, if I’m being honest, but I do believe that in our current structure we landed in the right place.

In any case, I was meeting with my new boss on Monday (the above mentioned Vice President of our newly formed department), and we were having one of many “getting to know you” style conversations we’ve had since the change. While we’ve worked together for many years at this point and have a perfectly amiable working relationship, we don’t really know each other all that well so we’re spending some time working on that. In our conversation on Monday, he asked me where I wanted to be in five to ten years.

Now I need to go ahead and state for the record that he knows about my cancer and said right up front that he realized his prepared topic for the day probably wasn’t something that was top of mind for me at the moment. I concurred and stated that “alive” was really my top-of-mind goal, but since I intended to achieve that one it was totally cool to talk about what else I’d like to be doing and we did so. In the time that has passed I’ve thought about it some more, and that was the path I took to starting this post.

When I reflect on my early days in software development, I see a perfect example of how my mind works. My first job was with a company that sold ColdFusion based auction software. The original person who wrote the code did so in a way that was most efficient at the time he wrote it. The internet was slow, and any extra white space in the background of a page could cause longer load times, so he removed any characters that were “extraneous” from his code.

The result, while readable to a visitor of the site, was a solid mass of text that was nearly impossible to decipher on the back end.

As my responsibilities there grew I eventually got access to that code base and was charged with helping to fix/improve the software. Every time I had to access a page, I would poke around in it and make it better. I would add comments where none existed. I would explicitly name variables from x or y. I would tab-delimit nested code. I would update deprecated functions or replace code blocks that were inefficient. What I was doing was removing technical debt, but I had no concept of what that was at the time. I just wanted to understand how the code worked, and I wanted to help make it better.

Which is a perfect example of how I look at the world. I want to understand how it works, and I want to make it better. So when I think about where I want to be in five or ten years, my answer is really just as simple as that – I want to have made the world a little bit better. To do so I need to keep learning. To do so I need to look for ways I can improve the code of the world around me, whether that is in my personal life or professional one. I want to take my experience, my influence, and my knowledge and apply it in little ways to make incremental improvements for as many people as I can.

But, ultimately? I still want to be here.

Daily Writing Prompt – What positive emotions do you feel most often?

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What positive emotion do you feel most often?
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Yes, it’s a new experiment. I’m trying (again) to get back in the habit of writing more often thanks to the fact that I’m reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. I figured I would use the daily writing prompts from WordPress to help out with that.

Ok, so. The positive emotion that I feel most often. That’s a rough one to answer, because the last few years have been dominated so heavily by negative emotions. I’m also back on Wellbutrin right now, and have been for a few months, so my emotional state is for the most part pretty neutral/ambivalent.

I literally just had to search for “positive emotions” to get a list of them to help find the one I’d select, but it worked.

Contentment

Despite all the chaos of our lives, and all the challenges we’ve faced together, I spend a good deal of time feeling very content. In many, many ways I feel we have built a very satisfying life together. It’s not thrilling and filled with adventure, but it’s nice. It’s comfortable. We have good friends, a lovely home, and the ability to enjoy our time together. We have regular “rituals” that we enjoy. We don’t want for the necessities. We can afford to take vacations when the opportunity arises or make the occasional indulgent purchase without worrying about how we’re going to pay for it. We are planning for retirement and confident we’ll be able to when the time is right. It’s a good life, and I’m happy it’s ours.