We Built This Team on Murder and Silliness

[hrj]

Work had a "team-building" thing yesterday afternoon to celebrate various milestones (like closing out all our 100+ day old investigations) with both the investigators and our QA partners. Of course, having been scheduled well in advance, it ended up happening during a week when we have multiple high-profile investigations at critical stages and have been facing a multi-week workload crunch. But that's life. A couple of people had to drop out to get work done, but most of us showed up.

Previous teambuilding events have been things like corporate-structured productivity exercises (gag me), escape rooms (surprisingly fun -- would have been more fun without the time limit), and some sort of cooking thing (didn't attend because it conflicted with FOGCon last year). This time,, given the constraints, we did an online murder mystery thing. It was...ok.

The mystery puzzle itself was fairly straightforward and stereotyped. Several of us predicted in chat who the most likely murderer would be even before they'd gotten to the death. The information came in an initial live sketch (set up to be  properly distanced zoom presentation, so props for using the technology); a set of relatively simple logic puzzles to "unlock" things like relevant newspaper articles, forensics reports, and toxicology information; and the opportunity to interview the various (remaining) participants in our team breakout rooms.

The live sketch was overdone and crowded out time for the actual investigation activities (we ended up having to do the puzzle-unlocking and report-reading in parallel with doing the interviews, which meant we didn't have the background to know what questions to ask). I wasn't the only person who found the live sketch to be a bit of sensory overload to an unpleasant degree.

I got picked to be my team's captain/spokesperson (which I was completely unsurprised at -- and if you know my history of such things, you won't be surprised either). But I confess that my usual high-level competitive spirit had already checked out at that point. Fortunately, the team members were multitasking independently, so one person took charge of the interviews, a couple of us worked on the logic puzzles, and when we compared notes to ID the suspect, means, and motive, it was straightforward enough that we didn't have to hash through things.

We tied for most right answers, though I tried to argue that we should have had a perfect score because one of the "official" answers didn't jibe with the toxicology evidence.

The event organizers (who do these things as a business) knew we were a group from [name of pharmaceutical company] but were not aware that our group were professional investigators. They had a bit of a "Doh!" moment about some of our approaches and commentary when that got mentioned in the post-discussion.

All in all, ok as an afternoon's silliness. Not so much with the "team building" but definitely a bit of "team affirming". Definitely affirms the value of having a bunch of independent multi-taskers who don't wait to have an authority organize their activities.

Comments

[lferion]

The mystery people were not expecting your (all) level of expertise! That’s always fun :-). Im glad it was a better time than many of those things often are.

Thank you for the laugh! And yes, you should have been given the point 😁

[hrj]

In some ways, our expertise might have gotten in the way, because the actual puzzle was on a much simpler level than what we usually deal with.

[threadwalker]

What a nice break from routine.

[hrj]

Yes, and that was the best thing about it.

[cellio]

It's dangerous when the outsider-produced scenario is in the professional space of the clients. :-) Thanks for the laugh.

[hrj]

Yeah, we kind of got them from two directions: we're professional investigators *and* the "mystery" involved drugs.

[hudebnik]

I've been in two Escape Room team-building exercises with my team of Google software engineers. Who are very bright problem-solvers, but not extraordinarily good at escape-room: in one case we escaped with about a minute to spare, and in the other case we ran out of time by not obtaining one important clue (which, IIRC, was only to be obtained by asking the site staff person the right question).

[hrj]

Having done one escape room, I've decided I love escape rooms. But I really dislike solving puzzles under a time challenge. It's just not how my brain works. (When people ask me why I don't try out for Jeopardy, I laugh hollowly. I'm fine in my living room. On stage I'd be a complete mess.)