I’m in the middle of a series of blogs about using video on team building or Myers Briggs workshops.  Apollo 13 can be used in much the same way as “Bug’s Life”, which I described yesterday.  The main differences between the two films are that Apollo 13 is real life and more serious, the type biases are different, and the lessons from Bug’s Life are more clear to see.  This makes it a suitable alternative to Bug’s life if the team are a rather serious bunch and see cartoons as being beneath them.  However, on most workshops I use both video clips: Bug’s Life acts as an simple introduction, and then Apollo 13 helps apply the concepts to real life people and situations, with all the complexities they entail.

I usually use two clips.  The first one starts a few seconds before the explosion occurs, and shows the reaction of the crew and Houston to this unexpected event.  When the ground control crew realize there is a problem, they go into overdrive in the reading and generation of data.  I conclude the clip immediately after someone starts to speculate about the cause and Flight (the character played by Ed Harris) says "Let's work the problem, people.  Let's not make things worse by guessing".

Again, I ask participants to focus on certain aspects before I show the clip.  If I have already used Bug’s Life then I ask them to look at just sensing and intuition, and estimate the rough proportions in which they are being used, and work out whether each of these functions is portrayed in a positive or negative light.  The usual conclusion is that there is hardly any intuition being used in this sequence.  Ground staff and the Apollo crew focus on clarifying and disseminating information, and the final statement from Flight indicates a bias against intuition (which may be collective typological bias or the cultural demands of the situation, ie: necessary in order to succeed).  In other words, they only trust sensing. They not only seem to distrust intuition, but they see it as “guessing", not recognising the more advanced forms of intuition.

Then I show the clip where the carbon dioxide levels are rising, through to the point where they have solved the problem and the levels start to rise again.  At one point in this clip a number of scientists and technicians are sent to a room with duplicates of all the objects on the spaceship thrown onto the table.  They are asked to make a filter fit into a different shape hole.  Again, I ask participants to focus on sensing and intuition, the proportions in which they are used and how they are viewed.

This second clip can lead into a number of useful discussions.  For example, in this situation the role of intuition was vital, and it demonstrates that no one function or preference can operate in isolation. Also, as the team culture was predominantly sensing, intuition didn’t come easily, but they could still access it by putting several people in a room with a task that encouraged them to brainstorm.  Even when a team seems to be deficient in one preference, they can take conscious action to redress the balance, and different preferences can work to support each other.

In the end, such discussion inevitably leads to discussion of the team’s own dynamics, their own biases and under-representation of preferences.  Individual or self-reflection is ultimately the goal of using any video, because insight enables them to take better action.

As a final note, I deliberately use Apollo 13 with Bug’s Life because one shows a situation in which sensing and thinking are presented negatively and the other positively.  The two together offer a form of balance.  If both video clips were to reinforce the positive aspects of one preference then this would present an unconscious bias which would be unhelpful.