Welcome to another episode of Incorporating SuperPowers. I’m going to be honest with you guys, this show I’m excited about, because this gets into a level of understanding of human beings at a level that most of us overlook, and that’s playing.
Our guest today is Les Pardew. He’s written over 16 books. He comes from the video game world, and now he is the CEO and founder of Mystery Escape Room.Â
But what’s even bigger is today we’re going to be talking about escaping the team building paradigm, because Les has partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to understand, dive-in and research how teams solve problems together and he’s got data from over 5000 teams that have come through now that they looked at. I’m excited to dive into this conversation today because there’s going to be a lot you’re going to go to glean from this conversation alone that’s going to help you build better teams moving forward, and more importantly, give you an excuse to take them all to an escape room. Les, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m glad to be here. Glad to be able to share some things with you. I think that what we’ve discovered is important. I think it’s something that needs to be out there and people need to understand it.
Well, especially in the business room. I said the business room, in fact the escape room for business. Especially in the business realm, where understanding how teams work together in superpower terms, we use things like in-group/out-group dynamics, archetypes, and personality types and whatnot. But really understanding it, at the level of like, here’s a real world problem with time constraints. How do those teams come together? When you can look at that and implement what’s being learned, more importantly, go to an escape room and practice it, right? With your teams, you can take a look at the data and really go, “Oh, this is what we need to do here. This is what we need to do there.” So I’m just going to come up the gate here. What is the data saying? What is the data showing?
Well it’s showing that most companies aren’t doing a very good job when it comes to getting teams to solve problems together. And in fact, corporate groups are some of the worst performing groups that we have come in. And that’s amazing, when you consider all of the money to spend to try and get people to work well together and they aren’t. And it’s sad. I think the most eye-opening statistic that we have is that a group of total strangers are 13% more likely to succeed than a group from a company.
I want to know, do you have stats on what it’s like for people that work in the same organization with the government?
We haven’t split out government employees yet, but I would really love to get Congress to come into our escape rooms.
Oh my goodness. Can you imagine? I mean, I think people would “Hey Houston, we’ve identified the problem.” Right?
Yeah.
It’s such a unique problem that we’ve seen this ourselves within team-building. Every organization, while it’s unique and you have to kind of go through it, if you have an understanding of how these teams work and in problem solving, then you can identify the key elements. So what are those key elements that you’re seeing that need to happen in a team that’s efficient?
Okay. Well, the key element really has to do with the people in the group being willing to put forth their ideas. And what we’ve discovered is that the more hierarchical the organization, the worse they tend to do, because they hold back. And there’s a lot of reasons behind that. But interestingly enough, the breakthrough came and we had a room that was really, really difficult, probably 90% failure rate. So only 10% of all of the teams that went through that room were able to solve it before time ran out. Okay? And then we had a group of 10 year olds come in and solve it. Okay?
So I’m laughing because I can see the team of corporate people all getting frustrated and whatnot because they’re all trying to solve this stuff, whatever it is, in their own minds and they’re not speaking it or putting it out in the middle.
Yeah. And anybody who’s had a 10 year old understands that it doesn’t take very long for an idea to pop in their head before it’s out their mouth. I mean, that’s almost instant. And so what we started doing is we started really looking at what the dynamics of the 10 year old group was, and it had to do with the fact that they were idea factories. I mean, they just poured on the ideas. And what they lacked in knowledge and skill they made up for in enthusiasm and in equalizing everybody. Every idea was worth exploring. And they explored them all. It didn’t matter how stupid the idea was, they explored them all. 10 year olds are fearless and we can learn from children. We can.
Well, yeah, absolutely. I want to get into the meat and potatoes of this and really look at what it means for small to medium sized businesses, large sized businesses, but more importantly down to that individual level of how leadership can identify what needs to happen next. So before we go on break, can you share a little bit more about where people can go find you, a website, where they can find the nearest escape room, maybe?
Okay. Well, to look us up, just go to mysteryescaperoom.com. We have a whole section there on team building and we do programs all over the country with it. But we have three locations in the West. We have physical locations in Salt Lake City and St. George, Utah and also in Tucson, Arizona.
Right here in Tucson, Arizona. We’re in Phoenix, so yep. Yep. I think I know where the next family outing is going to be. Great stuff. Good stuff. Folks, go check it out. Go take a look at Mystery Escape Room. They’re doing some great work in the world. And when you get back from the break, we’re going to dive more into what this means and how you can implement some of the stuff that we’ve seen in the space of team building right after the break. And before we go, if you haven’t downloaded the Superpower Network App, you can stream all of your shows now live directly from the app on Apple, on Chrome. Go download it, listen. We’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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