Hello Friends,
Greetings from Barcelona☀️where we have been swept up in the ⚽Euro Cup 2020 football (soccer) fever. More on that below👇
🙌Many thanks for your feedback on The Quest. A special shout out to Maria in Miami, Aroa in London, Ali in the US, Gillian in Kingston, Connie & Jessica in Toronto, Manu in Montreal, Joan in Mansfield, and Michaele & Barry in Bracebridge.
If you are joining The Quest for the first time, welcome to our exploration of creativity, facilitation, and learning.
I’ll be slowing the pace down over the summer to once every two weeks.
Hopefully, this will give you a chance to catch up on the last edition ✨Creating Rituals and all past editions.
This week’s edition is all about the dynamics of group bonding🔎
👉What football (soccer) chants can teach us about group harmony
👉Adam Grant on finding joy in shared group experiences
👉4 ways music strengthens social bonds
👉5 facilitation tips for boosting group harmony
Let’s dive right in!
⚽What Football Chants Can Teach us About Group Harmony
All of a sudden, the impossible felt possible.
The Ukrainian football team had made it to the Eurocup 2020 semi-finals to play against England. They had beat all odds winning against Sweden just a few days before. They took their positions on the field. Their fans were bursting with hope.
It was about more than football.
The Ukraine team had sparked anger in Russia by including a map with Crimea on the team’s jersey. The team had stirred the pride of a whole nation.
And then, a crushing defeat.
1-0😬
2-0😳
3-0😰
4-0😩
An excruciating 90 minutes. Ukraine lost 4-0 to England. The players were devastated. The fans were crushed. They were out of the tournament.
But it wasn’t over yet.
The Ukrainian players made their way to the edge of the football field where they faced the Ukrainian fans in the stadium. And they started an elaborate rhythm. Their fans wiped their tears away. Without any instructions, they joined their national team in the rhythm following every clap and every movement exactly.
Players and fans wanted to honour their special bond.
At that moment, team and fans were connected in synchronous harmony. My 19-year-old football-obsessed son explained that it’s called the Icelantic Viking Thunder Clap. It’s a way that football players acknowledge and thank their fans for coming to games. Like other football chants around the world, it marks an important moment of celebration and connection between players and fans.
Positive shared experiences help us feel closer to others.
Creating group harmony through collective experiences has been a feature of human life since the dawn of ages. Positive shared experiences help us feel closer to others. They make us feel like we are part of a group. It can spark joy and well-being. And they can create strong and lasting social bonds in our groups.
Before COVID we experienced synchronous harmony with others on a regular basis. On dancefloors. At concerts. In sports stadiums. At offices. In classrooms, workshops, weddings, parties, yoga classes, and retreats.
Shared rituals and group bonding experiences can also have the opposite effect.
They can result in exclusion and violence against perceived outsiders. Watching the football chant raised more than a few questions about race, gender, and inclusion. And that’s exactly why I want to better understand the dynamics of group bonding.
So how can we boost group harmony (the good kind!) in our sessions?
That’s is our Quest for this week.
🌟There’s a Specific Kind of Joy We’ve Been Missing.
A fascinating New York Times op-ed piece by Wharton professor, Ted talker, author, and podcaster Adam Grant. You may remember that Grant appeared back in 🧭The Quest #25 on Living with Uncertainty. In this article, he explores the vital role of collective experiences in sparking joy. And the impact on our well-being of not having these experiences through COVID.
Here are a few of my takeaways:
- Peak happiness lies mostly in collective activity. Emotions are inherently social. They’re woven through our interactions with others.
- We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence. A term coined by sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. During the pandemic, this has been largely absent from our lives.
- Collective effervescence led to an explosion of co-creating and collective problem-solving in the post-pandemic roaring 20s. It might just be me, but with now more ways to collaborate and a boom in the creator economy, It feels like we are in for some roaring 2020’s.
Grant’s article is packed with more key stats and links to research. Read the full piece here.
🎵Four Ways Music Strengthens Social Bonds
🤔Why would human evolution have given us music?
That may just be one of my all-time favourite questions to ponder. That’s what musician and psychologist Jill Stuttie explores in her Greater Good Magazine article. The answer she says may lie in our drive to connect:
“According to researchers, when we try to synch with others musically—keeping the beat or harmonizing, for example—we tend to feel positive social feelings towards those with whom we’re synchronizing, even if that person is not visible to us or not in the same room.”
I had more than a few Aha! moments reading this article. Just from the sentence above, I had 3:
Aha! 1 👉That explains the power of the Viking Clap (explained above)
Aha! 2 👉That’s why music, singing, and rhythm are such powerful facilitation tools.
Aha! 3 👉It’s possible to create these experiences with groups online.
We just have to figure out the Zoom lag issue (if you have solved it I beg you to let us in on the secret!).
Read the full article here.
And if you really want to geek out on the effect of music on your brain, emotions, and social bonding check these articles out:
- Why We Love Music
- Singing and Social Bonding
- The Ice-breaker Effect: Singing Mediates Fast Social Bonding
🧰5 Tried-and-Tested Facilitation Tips for Boosting Group Harmony
You don’t have to be a professional footballer or an accomplished musician to create opportunities for group harmony in your sessions.
Here are 5 facilitation tips that you can use to create moments of synchronicity online or in-person:
- ☺️Breathe Together. Invite your group to take a few deep breaths together. This helps people tune into the session and with each other.
- 🕺Move Together. Warm up the group by playing some music and invite people to walk together to the beat. When we move together we sync up with each other.
- 👏Start with a Rhythm. This can be as easy as a simple body rythym or call and response clap. Being in rhythm increases group connection. See 10 Fun Body Percussion Activities to Try.
- 🪞Use Mirroring Activities. Weave in activities where people copy each other’s movements in pairs, small groups, or the whole group. Mirroring activates connection as well as empathy. See this description of a Mirror Stretch.
- 🌬️Stir up a Chat Storm. An online activity I learned from pro facilitator Cam Houser. Put a prompt in the chat and ask participants to put their answers in the chat all at the same time on the count of 3. This helps people feel connected in time even if they can’t be in the same place.
💌Thanks for reading The Quest
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Until next week!
