Smoke Grenade

Distracting the troublemaker = making the team work well

Hack Challenge

Team constellations are not always optimal — often due to political reasons.  This means you might end up with ‘Mr. Know-it-all’s’ or dominant managers that aren’t capable of doing team work on eye level.  In the worst case these (partly unwilling and unaware) saboteurs destroy the team dynamics and influence decisions with their hidden/biased agendas or restricted ways of thinking. 

Hack Description

An innovation consultancy that facilitates lots of internal innovation projects within German DAX companies has a very straightforward solution to that.  Often you can identify the potential troublemaker(s) before the projects start.  Before every critical workshop or milestone they then provide the troublemaker with an extra task, which appeals to his ego, e.g.: “You are the only who knows how to research this … .  The team will need your critical input in two days, when we will merge theirs and your work progress.”  The task is carefully selected insofar as it wouldn’t be able to influence the teams direction they take in the meantime — without any interruption.  Typical tasks are: competitor analyses, trend analyses, and the like, which we already known before. 

Hack Outcome / Effects

In most cases it works.  Appealing to egos with expert tasks has become a powerful way of disarming the dominant troublemakers.