The Infinite Mirror Maze
Over the winter break, I promised my kid a day or two of Mom Camp… those days during a school break where I take off work, plan a couple of activities, and do my best to say “yes” to everything. And on this particular day of mom camp, between exploring the USS Pompanito (a World War 2 era submarine) and taking a cruise around Alcatraz (so cool!), my son asked to do the Infinite Mirror Maze on Pier 39. This is the gimmicky of the gimmicky in the middle of tourist central. And I said yes.
So here we are, in middle of a mirror maze where at first glance, everything you think is a path forward is actually a mirror. If you have mild claustrophobia, as I do, you start to panic a little. My stress response began — my heart rate went up, my vision narrowed, and at that moment I wasn’t having fun.
Which way out?
I had the beginnings of that fright-flight feeling of being in unfamiliar circumstances with no clear path forward. I’m in a tourist trap maze with my kid, so I know I’m going to be OK, yet all the same my stress response kicked in.
Do you remember the last situation where every path felt like a wall and you couldn’t figure out how to move ahead? Oh, and how that feeling multiplies when there is a team of you feeling stuck and turned around?
- “What if we have to start over?” (truth: we did… all the way back to the front desk),
- “Who is leading this?” (I swear I tried not to tell him what to do — pinky swear)
- “Didn’t we try that way before?” (we had), and
- “Will we be stuck here forever?” (elapsed time on 2nd attempt was 3 minutes).
Stress response happens to all of us, but when we fail to find a way out of it (i.e. downregulate, my new favorite word), we risk chronic stress response. And that has some pretty detrimental health effects. So imagine if you are on team and you constantly feel like you are bumping into walls? It’s not good for productivity, and it’s not good for anyone’s health.
Laughter really is the best medicine… or something like it.
How’s your heart rate doing after reading those questions? Well, I wish I could send you the sounds of my son’s giggling through our whole mirror maze endeavor — his unbridled joy in just being together and watching me fumble at something — because it brought out two things:
- a reminder that this was just a mirror maze; and
- my parasympathetic response.
Your parasympathetic response is downregulation, bringing your heart rate back down among other things. And it’s something we can manage and get better at over time. Once you downregulate, you can refocus your thinking, and even tap into your creative problem solving.
Your team values are the key to team downregulation
My gut tells me that you have someone like my son who giggles in your midst: find those people on the team who can bring you back to your team values. That’s exactly what my son did. Our team values for the day were about being together, having fun, and saying “yes” as much as possible. Remembering these values allowed me to fire back up all the good parasympathetic stuff and reengage. As soon as I did, I saw something new: I looked down at the bottom edge of the mirror and figured out how to tell the difference between the mirror and the path forward. Yeah, we solved that maze pretty fast. And with lots of laughter.
The research shows that a stressed team is less productive. And a team with positive morale is more productive — but human resources alone doesn’t hold the key; positive morale rises when we like working together, and that gets more possible when values are explicit and shared by the team. Stuff like respecting diversity of opinions, empowering each other, committing to support individuals, and building trust.
And what if you had a team value about creating laughter? The Mayo Clinic would approve.
I’ve worked with team after team that gets stuck. They ask all the same questions when those projects hit and they feel stuck. We’ve worked together on team values, which are unique from the values of the organization, though often times echo them .Team values focus on the commitments they’ve made to each other for the kind of team they will be for each other.
Have you ever had that exhale when you all think “Oh yeah, that’s why we’re here. We got this.” These moments happen when we our anchored together in shared values. But do you know what your team values are?
