Toy Therapy for Business Meetings

Ever since I first facilitated a business meeting, I knew that my appreciation for a good toy would prove a powerful tool for increasing participation and productivity. Over the years, part of my facilitation service became a kind of Toy Therapy. I knew how to give people the right toy at the right time. When I first learned of a company called Office Playground, I realized that I wasn't alone in my appreciation for toys and the playfulness of adults and predictability of social dynamics.

As a case in point, I take four different toys, each of which is available from the abovementioned Office Playground, each of which having a different impact on the productivity and creativity of the group effort. Taken together, these four toys span a range of social engagement, from personally pensive to collectively wacky.

We begin with the Velvet Slime Anenome. Give everyone a Velvet Slime anenome and you give them enough to do with their hands so that they can actually focus on the meeting, engaging the touch with something quietly yucky, yet kinda fun.

When a bit more participation and expressiveness might be needed, we distribute Bendable Clowns. These small, rubbery figures have a wire core that allows them to be bent into different positions. One might say that having your own clown to bend helps you from getting bent, as it were. The fact is that they occupy the fingers, like the Velvet Slime Squishy Beads, but are also expressive, engaging the psyche like they engage the hands. Further, people can make their clowns appear to interact with others, creating scenes and stunts, building clown pyramids. So here we have a toy that sets the stage for personal and collective interaction.

Wishing to engage the mind a bit more actively, and to open the possibility for perhaps even more pointed social discourse, we give everyone two Boinks. Boinks are nylon finger cuffs - flexible open tubes that you can stick your fingers in and forget how to pull them out. They are also flexible enough to flick as well as fling. Thus inducing either a contemplative state whereby one is attempting to free and imprison oneself more or less simultaneously; or a semi-manic social engagement during which time participants strategically sproing at each other.

And then, when push has clearly gone beyond shove, and you need people to get beyond social and personal barriers, it's time to bring out the Snapper Hands - stretchy like rubber, sticky like stick-to-the-wall sticky highly-flingable little hand things that can grab things, like sheets of paper and people's attention.

You'll find yet more examples of Toy Therapy for Business Meetings in my collection of "Toy Stories."