A Spaghetti Exercise for Teams
Everything your organization does and puts out into the world - from the application process to the way your team delivers services - is a reflection of your agency. Ideally, this reflection should be in line with your agency's values and mission statement.
At the CASA Pacifica conference last month, our founder Stefanie lead a group of social workers and nonprofit representatives through a fun exercise demonstrating how mission (should) shape our work.
You might have taken part in the "spaghetti challenge" in school or at an event: participants race against the clock using a packet of dry spaghetti and a roll of tape to build a tower and place a marshmallow on top.
Since Stefanie's conference session focused on using values and mission statements as a process improvement tool, she lead her audience through the spaghetti exercise with a twist. In her version, teams had to use the materials to create a structure which represents a mission statement, and see if others could guess what their mission is by looking at it.
The "mission statements" available included:
Create the tallest tower
Create a piece of "modern art"
Create a moving structure
Create a protective structure for the marshmallow
Not surprisingly, given the audience, every team choose to create protective structures :-)