Why I give serious people pointless tasks

I once got challenged after sharing a thought about how long thirty leaders take to make thirty decisions. The lady who asked had a fair question: “Group size explains why decisions slow down, Govert. But I know it’s not the only reason you keep breaking leadership teams apart in your sessions.”

It isn’t. And I’ll admit I left that thought somewhat unfinished. I wrote that splitting a group is “partly for the group to feel how they decide.”

Partly.

The pointless tasks

I don’t just split a team into separate groups and step back. I give each group an assignment: a question to settle, a problem to work on, a thing to build. That assignment is an instrument—it’s rarely about the task itself. Its real job is to let a group work in conditions clear enough that people start to notice what they usually cannot.

How they actually decide together, for instance. How one person waits to see where the senior voice leans before committing. How another keeps refining the question instead of answering. How a third goes quiet and lets decisions get made around them.

They are things the group can only feel itself doing when the situation is simple enough to feel them.

The serious tasks

Other times, the instrument is a build. Using a method like LEGO Serious Play, I’ll ask a group to build something abstract into a model: where the real obstacle sits, what the team has stopped saying out loud. What a team cannot say to each other, it will often say through the thing it has built. The model gives the unspoken somewhere to go.

In one session, a person who had stayed silent all morning reached across, pointed at a small piece that everyone else had treated as background, and said that the real problem was there.

It was. And it hadn’t appeared on anyone’s list because it only surfaced from the act of building and looking.

Two tasks that look nothing alike. One cold and rational, a pointless little decision. One that looks like play. Underneath, they both get a group to start revealing the answers it already holds.

A team under analytical pressure will hand you its rehearsed answers—safe positions it has held for years, or the already agreed-on version of itself. The genuinely useful material is what nobody has put into words yet, and you can’t reach it in a fixed time by asking harder.

These seemingly strange tasks let it surface on its own.

Most teams are stepping around something

You rarely get to see what that is in an ordinary meeting, because your task is very clear by definition: decisions to make, options to weigh, and so on. Everyone, including you, is bent on the content.

Nobody has the unique vantage point to watch how your leadership team is working. And I don’t recommend running your Thursday meetings the way I run a session.

But you can borrow the one habit beneath it.

Next time your team is deciding something, pay some attention to how they are deciding. Notice where speed is letting everyone avoid an issue, and which questions keep reopening. Notice what your team keeps revisiting beyond the important stuff and wonder why. Notice, in particular, where energy drops. That last one is usually something your group has quietly agreed not to discuss.

— Govert

First published in the Professional Closeness Digest on 25 June 2026.