Inventions

Originally posted on January 01, 2009 and updated by Brandon Klein on July 07, 2025.

Ever tried to build something complicated with your hands while someone breathes down your neck with a stopwatch? That’s essentially what the Inventions module throws at workshop participants – except they love every minute of it. After years of running these sessions, I’ve watched teams transform from skeptical professionals into MacGyver-wannabes, cobbling together contraptions from mousetraps, fishing line, and sheer determination.

What Makes Inventions Different From Your Typical Team Exercise

Most team-building exercises feel like team-building exercises. You know the type – trust falls, personality tests, or those cringe-worthy icebreakers where you share your favorite vegetable. The Inventions module strips away that corporate polish and gets people’s hands dirty, literally.

Here’s the thing: when you give a group of accountants, engineers, and marketers a pile of junk and tell them to build a device that moves a tennis ball from point A to point B without touching it, something magical happens. They stop thinking about quarterly reports and start thinking like kids in a garage.

The beauty lies in the constraints. Limited materials. Impossible deadlines. Vague instructions that participants scrutinize like lawyers reviewing contracts. These aren’t bugs – they’re features that force innovation.

The Psychology Behind Physical Problem-Solving

There’s solid neuroscience backing why building stuff works better than talking about building stuff. When participants engage in hands-on construction, they activate different parts of their brains than during typical meetings. The motor cortex lights up, spatial reasoning kicks in, and suddenly that person who’s been quiet all morning is suggesting we use the rubber duck as a counterweight.

Physical manipulation of objects creates what researchers call “embodied cognition” – our bodies inform our thinking. It’s why LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® facilitators like Arzu Coşan see breakthrough moments when executives build metaphors with plastic bricks instead of PowerPoint slides.

Setting Up Your Inventions Module: The Nuts and Bolts

Let me save you from my early mistakes. My first Inventions module was a disaster – not enough materials, too much explanation, and one team that somehow set off the building’s fire alarm (don’t ask). Here’s what actually works:

Materials That Matter

Forget buying expensive “team-building kits.” Hit up dollar stores, raid recycling bins, and check your junk drawer. You need about 15 items per person available, though they’ll only use a third of that. Here’s my battle-tested shopping list:

• The Basics: Wooden dowels, styrofoam sheets, cardboard tubes, plastic bottles, string, fishing line, rubber bands
• The Weird Stuff: Old CDs, mousetraps, toy cars, funnels, pulleys, magnets, springs
• The Tools: Scissors, tape (lots of tape), glue, staplers, rulers
• The Wild Cards: Anything that makes people go “What the hell would I use this for?” – rubber ducks, old phones, campaign buttons

Bundle small items in clear bags – twist ties and pipe cleaners together, for instance. This counts as one item and prevents the materials table from looking like a craft store explosion.

The Critical Setup Sequence

Timing is everything. While participants are getting their initial briefing, your crew should be setting up materials tables like they’re prepping for a cooking show. Clear signage matters – “MATERIALS,” “TOOLS,” “EXPENDABLES” – because confused people make poor choices under time pressure.

Here’s the kicker: participants select their four items BEFORE they know what they’re building. It’s like grocery shopping blindfolded. This forces strategic thinking from minute one.

Running the Module: Where Magic Meets Mayhem

Start with the Apollo 13 clip – you know the one, where Ed Harris dumps junk on a table and says they need to fit a square peg in a round hole. It sets the perfect tone: urgent, impossible, but somehow achievable.

Then hit them with this truth bomb: “Seventh graders have successfully completed your assignment.” Watch the mix of disbelief and competitive fire ignite. Nothing motivates senior executives quite like being compared to middle schoolers.

The Rules That Rule

Your assignment sheets become sacred texts. I’ve watched teams parse single words for loopholes like they’re Supreme Court justices. One team spent 20 minutes debating whether “portable” meant “can be carried by one person” or “can be moved at all.” (For the record, it means the device can be picked up and relocated, period.)

Key rules that prevent chaos:

• Each person gets four material items initially
• Unlimited tool and expendable use
• Trading materials is allowed but time-consuming
• The device must work without human intervention during demonstration
• No pre-existing motors or batteries (unless specifically provided)

What Actually Happens in the Room

The first 10 minutes are always painful to watch. Groups stare at their materials like they’re alien artifacts. Someone inevitably suggests an overcomplicated Rube Goldberg machine. Another person starts building without consulting anyone.

Then around minute 15, something shifts. Maybe it’s the ticking clock or the sounds of productivity from other teams, but groups start to gel. The natural leaders emerge – and surprise, it’s rarely who you’d expect. I’ve seen executive assistants take charge while C-suite executives happily follow orders.

By minute 30, you’ll see:

• Rapid prototyping with tape and prayer
• Heated debates about physics principles half-remembered from high school
• Someone inevitably trying to bend the rules (“But technically, gravity IS making it move!”)
• The first spectacular failures, usually involving too much ambition and not enough structural integrity

The Integration Challenge: Where Things Get Spicy

Just when teams are admiring their creations, you drop the bomb: “Now connect all your inventions into one mega-device.”

The room goes silent. Then explodes.

This is where the real learning happens. That beautiful, elegant solution Team A spent 90 minutes perfecting? It needs to play nice with Team B’s monstrosity held together with hope and rubber bands. The psychological shift is profound – from “our solution” to “the solution.”

I watched one pharmaceutical company’s teams struggle with this integration phase for two hours. The breakthrough came when a junior analyst suggested they stop trying to preserve each team’s original design and instead cannibalize the best parts. Senior leaders initially resisted – they’d invested too much in their baby. But when the integrated device finally worked, launching a tennis ball through five connected contraptions to ring a bell, the cheers could be heard three floors away.

Managing the Chaos of Integration

Integration phases need different energy. Drop the music volume. Give teams space to negotiate. Your role shifts from taskmaster to diplomat, helping teams see beyond their sunk costs.

Watch for these integration patterns:

• The Frankenstein: Teams try to bolt inventions together with minimal modification
• The Phoenix: Complete destruction and rebuilding with salvaged parts
• The Democracy: Endless discussion with no action until time pressure forces decisions
• The Dictatorship: One strong personality takes over (sometimes necessary, often problematic)

Learning Extraction: Making the Magic Stick

Here’s where most facilitators drop the ball. They run this amazing, high-energy module then wrap up with “So, what did we learn about teamwork?” Please. Your participants just went through a compressed innovation cycle – extract real insights.

The Debrief That Delivers

Structure your debrief around three lenses:

1. Process Patterns: How did teams move from chaos to solution? What patterns emerged? I use a simple framework: Panic → Exploration → Convergence → Refinement. Most teams hit all four phases, and recognizing this helps them navigate future challenges.

2. Role Emergence: Who became the designer? The builder? The devil’s advocate? The resource manager? These roles emerged organically, often surprising the players themselves. One CFO told me, “I haven’t built anything with my hands in 20 years. I forgot how good it feels to make something work.”

3. Constraint Innovation: Every breakthrough came from a constraint. Not enough materials forced creative substitutions. Time pressure eliminated overthinking. Vague rules sparked innovative interpretations. As we explore in our guide to metaphors and analogies, constraints are creativity’s best friend.

Connecting to Real Work

The gap between building a tennis-ball launcher and solving enterprise software integration is smaller than you’d think. During one session with a financial services firm, a participant noticed their invention process mirrored their failed ERP implementation: over-engineering, poor communication between teams, and integration as an afterthought.

Draw these parallels explicitly:

• How did resource constraints in the exercise mirror budget limitations?
• When did perfectionism become the enemy of progress?
• What happened when teams assumed rather than confirmed requirements?
• How did integration challenges reflect organizational silos?

Advanced Techniques for Repeat Players

Once groups have done the basic Inventions module, you need fresh challenges. Here’s what I’ve tested with success:

The Clock Challenge

Instead of moving objects, teams build time-measurement devices. One consulting firm created a water clock accurate to 30 seconds using plastic bottles and coffee stirrers. The precision required forced different thinking than the usual “good enough” approach.

The Communication Device

Teams must build devices that send messages between rooms without electronics. I’ve seen everything from pneumatic tube systems using paper towel rolls to flag semaphore setups. It’s particularly powerful for organizations dealing with communication breakdowns.

The Chain Reaction

Each team builds one segment of a massive chain reaction. The integration challenge becomes primary, not secondary. Similar to our Build-A-House exercise, this version emphasizes interdependence from the start.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Let me save you from learning these the hard way:

The Over-Helper: Facilitators who can’t resist suggesting solutions. Bite your tongue. Their struggle is the learning.

The Under-Resourced: Too few materials leads to frustration, not innovation. When teams spend more time trading than building, you’ve gone too lean.

The Vague Timer: “You have about an hour” doesn’t create urgency. Use visible countdown timers. Make time tangible.

The Weak Integration: If you’re doing integration, commit fully. Half-hearted attempts to “sort of” connect inventions satisfy no one.

The Surface Debrief: “What did you learn?” isn’t enough. Use structured reflection tools. Our Win As Much As You Can exercise shows how structured debriefs extract deeper insights.

Measuring Impact Beyond the Workshop

The real test comes weeks later. I follow up with participants to track behavior changes. The most consistent feedback? People approach problems differently. They prototype faster, argue about assumptions more productively, and actually enjoy constraint-driven challenges.

One tech executive told me six months post-workshop: “Whenever we’re stuck in analysis paralysis, someone says ‘remember the tennis ball’ and we start building prototypes instead of PowerPoints.”

Tracking Tangible Outcomes

Document specific behavior changes:

• Meeting structures that include hands-on work
• Faster movement from idea to prototype
• Cross-functional teams forming organically
• Healthy questioning of requirements and assumptions
• Integration thinking appearing earlier in projects

Adapting Inventions for Virtual and Hybrid Environments

Yes, you can run Inventions remotely. No, it’s not the same. But it can still be powerful.

For virtual sessions, mail material kits in advance. Include common household items in your list – everyone has rubber bands and paper clips. Use breakout rooms for team building phases, then bring everyone together for integration discussions.

The magic moment in virtual? When someone holds their jerry-rigged contraption up to the camera and it actually works. The cheers through computer speakers hit differently but still hit.

SessionLab’s facilitation resources offer excellent frameworks for adapting hands-on exercises to digital environments. The key is maintaining the constraint-driven innovation regardless of medium.

Making Inventions Work in Your Context

The beauty of Inventions is its adaptability. I’ve run it with surgeons building devices to transfer “organs” (water balloons), with teachers creating student engagement mechanisms, and with software developers constructing physical representations of data flow.

The core remains constant:

• Impossible challenge
• Severe constraints
• Physical building
• Time pressure
• Integration requirements
• Deep reflection

Adjust the wrapper to fit your needs. The principles of constraint-driven innovation, physical problem-solving, and forced collaboration transcend industries.

The Lasting Impact of Getting Your Hands Dirty

In our digital, abstract, meeting-heavy work world, there’s something profoundly satisfying about building something that either works or doesn’t. No hiding behind jargon. No “it depends.” Just physics and ingenuity.

The Inventions module succeeds because it strips away the corporate veneer and reveals how people really solve problems. It celebrates the junior analyst who understands leverage and the senior executive who remembers high school physics. It shows that innovation comes from constraints, not resources.

Most importantly, it proves that given an impossible challenge, limited resources, and the freedom to fail fast, groups of smart people will surprise themselves with what they can achieve. And once they’ve felt that surprise, they start seeking it in their regular work.

That’s when the real invention happens – not in the workshop room with tennis balls and mousetraps, but back in the office when someone says, “What if we tried something completely different?”

The tennis ball launcher gathering dust on someone’s desk becomes a monument to possibility. And in my experience, possibility is the most powerful invention of all.