Leadership Tip: The Continuum Exercise

Our leadership tips have focused on how to create a community of learning among leadership program cohorts.  Understandably, many programs want to offer their participants the benefits of skills building activities or exposure to field experts.  At the conclusion of the formal program it can be hard to shift participants from a primary role of recipient to one of contributor.  But when participants are engaged continuously as contributors, they are more likely to remain active and to experience the enduring benefits of peer learning and collaborative problem solving. 

In this issue we are sharing The Continuum Exercise, an activity that actively engages program participants in generating knowledge.  For example, if you wanted to tackle the issue of work/life balance among a cohort of active leaders, you could bring in an ‘expert’ in the area or try a more participatory approach:

1. Creating the continuum: Invite participants to describe both ends of the spectrum – the ideal balance between work and personal life (this will be a “10”), and the opposite situation at its absolute worst (this will be a “1”). You can capture key words describing each side on separate pieces of paper.     (10 min.)
2. Grounding learning and reflection: Now ask participants to place themselves in the context of their current work or leadership experience and take a few minutes to consider where they would place themselves (what number between 1 and 10) with regards to work/life balance on this continuum.   (10 min.)
3. Continuum clustering: Next ask the group to line up according to their numbers from 1-10.  Depending on the size of your group you can cluster participants into smaller groups of 4-6 people.  Groups may not be equal in size since you will want to keep people who have chosen the same number in the same small group.  (10 min.)
4. Small group assignments: Each group will now be asked to find a space where they can complete several tasks.  They will introduce themselves, make up a name for their group, and come up with a group response to 2-3 questions.  In this case it might be, “What conditions or practices support work/life balance?”, “What are some of the biggest challenges to supporting work/life balance?” and “What is one creative strategy for improving work/life balance?”  (20-30 min.)
5. Sharing:  All of the groups will be called back together to share their group name and response to the questions.  (10 min.)

To name a few benefits: The Continuum Exercise engages participants in tackling important issues; serves as a source of creative ideas and strategies; grounds the learning and problem solving in the concrete experiences of participants; encourages personal reflection; challenges participants to look for the convergence among individual ideas to develop the best collective response; and offers a fun and energetic way of working together to produce ideas, knowledge and solutions.  Have you tried this exercise with your program participants? We would love to hear from you, so please tell us about your experience with this or other similar exercises.