Bean Baggers

Bean Baggers

Make the customer present in all that you do. Bean baggers is a great activity that enables high levels of involvement by participants working in teams, as they apply their skills and compete for the customer and the rewards.

The experiment shows the benefits of effective coaching, effective measurement, and effective displays of performance data. It highlights the fallacy of trying to make everyone the best performer, instead of working on the system and reducing variation in the teams’ work processes.

Bean Baggers shows the importance of linking customer needs, incentive programs, motivational slogans, supportive management action, and genuine process management capability to drive real and sustainable improvement in business results.

Bean Baggers is a game played by 10 or more people plus a facilitator. People form into teams of 4 to compete against each in throwing weighted bags towards a target.

The teams continually work to improve their performance through;

• the use of incentives
• support for each other
• team focus sessions
• Strong leadership and other approaches.

By looking at the measures of performance in different ways it becomes clear that teams are not improving and that individual performances are varying. The teams’ discover ways to improve their processes and the results actually improve – for the team and for the individuals.

Issues raised by the Bean Baggers Experiment highlight the lack of improvements stemming from incentive programs, motivational slogans or posters that are not backed up by management action on the process.

When run by an effective facilitator it can provide insight into the fallacy of trying to make everyone the best performing worker. More effective strategies identified are

• Working on the system and reducing reaction to events
• Responding to signals from the processes of the way work is done and pattern of the results.

Bean Baggers is great development activity in any learning and development situation or management workshop. It is a great exercise for team building and service improvement workshops and can be extended in a variety of ways to kick start improvement efforts in any workplace.