“LOLA” is the acronym for Live Online Learning Activity. It is an interactive exercise that is incorporated in an online training session. Different types of LOLAs work in different contexts to achieve different training purposes.
Improv LOLAs are based on activities adapted from improvisational theater. The participants do not follow a script, but spontaneously create dialog and action. These LOLAs facilitate the mastery of skills in the areas such as creativity, collaboration, communication, and change.
This improv LOLA makes use of a creativity technique called Inversions. It begins with brainstorming ideas to achieve an undesirable goal and inverts these ideas toward a desirable goal.
Synopsis
Collect brainstormed ideas for boring and inflexible management. Later, invite the participants to invert these into ideas for positive and pleasant management.
Purpose
To generate ideas for positive and pleasant management.
Participants
Minimum: 3
Maximum: Any number
Best: 16 to 30
Time
15 to 20 minutes
Supplies
Paper and pens for taking notes
Technical Requirement
Mic
Chat
Whiteboard
Preparation
Reflect on the brainstorming task. Read the instructions below. Take a few minutes to put yourself in a participants’ place and brainstorm a set of ideas for managing employees in a boring and inflexible fashion.
Prepare sample responses. Write down your brainstormed ideas. You may use these samples later to explain the task to the participants.
Examples:
1. Follow all the rules and regulations from the Policy Manual.
2. Meet your deadlines.
3. Turn in your reimbursement requests within 3 days after your business trips.
4. Obtain receipts for all expenses.
5. Do not talk directly to the customers.
Practice inverting the brainstormed ideas. Take one of the brainstormed ideas and turn it upside down so it becomes a strategy for achieving the opposite goal of conducting positive and pleasant management. Come up with more than one inverted alternative to each idea.
Examples:
Here is the original response:
Insist that only your Assistance Manager may talk to you.
Here are seven inverted responses:
1. Keep an open-door policy.
2. Spontaneously chat with your employees at different levels.
3. Invite employees to have lunch with you.
4. Learn more about the personal and family life of each employee.
5. Talk about your plans and concerns with all employees.
6. Conduct a weekly meeting with all employees.
7. Invite all employees to share their concerns and ideas with you.
Flow
Present the brainstorming task. Alert the participants that you are going to present an unusual assignment. Instruct them to generate a number of ideas for managing their employees in a boring and inflexible fashion. Reassure the participants that they heard you correctly and encourage them to come up as many alternative ideas as possible.
Present a list of synonyms. To focus the participants, rattle off several words associated with the brainstorming task, such as these: austere, firm, harsh, inflexible, no-nonsense, precise, uptight, rigid, rigorous, strict, and stringent.
Collect the brainstormed ideas. Ask the participants to send you a private message (by setting up their chat to deliver the message only to the facilitator). Silently review the ideas as they come in.
Explain your plan. Point out that the ideas offered by the participants will result in unpleasant management. Confess that you have a secret goal which is the opposite of your brainstorming goal: Actually, you want ideas for pleasant and positive management.
Invert a brainstormed idea. Take one of the ideas submitted by the participants and demonstrate how it could be inverted upside down to become a positive one. Point out that the same idea could be inverted in several different ways to generate many positive ideas. Invite the participants to open their mics and shout out positive alternatives from the same negative idea. Make a list of these positive ideas on the whiteboard.
Invert other brainstormed ideas. Read additional ideas and encourage the participants to turn them into positive ones. Add them to the list positive ideas on the whiteboard.
Identify three powerful ideas. Invite each participant to select a personal set of three positive ideas for pleasant and playful management. At the end of a suitable time limit, encourage the participants to implement these ideas in the near future.
Debrief the activity. After the session, discuss current management practices that are too serious or too playful.
Follow Up
Send the list of positive management ideas as an email attachment to all participants.
Variations
Reuse this LOLA
Management Practices is based on a LOLA structure called Inversion. You can use this structure to create your own LOLAs to explore different interpersonal skills. Here are some topics (along with the brainstorming requests) that we have used in our earlier LOLAs:
1. Coaching: How can you ridicule and frustrate your employees during a coaching session?
2. Conflict Resolution: How can you take one side in a conflict and humiliate people who take the other side?
3. Giving Feedback: How can you publicly give negative feedback to your employees?
4. Critical Thinking: How can you prevent your employees from challenging the company policies?
5. Decision Making: How can you get all employees involved in making all decisions?