by Sam Brock

The book Zoom by Istvan Banyai has no words, but each picture is related in a sense that it feels like you are zooming out. The first picture is of a rooster. When you zoom out (turn the page), you realize it is a rooster on a farm. When you zoom out again (turn the next page), you realize a kid has set up a farm scene and so on for about forty pages until you zoom out to the point that the world is a tiny speck.

To use it with our team, I cut off the spine (each spread only has one picture, and the back of every picture is black), did a little bit of Sharpie work (in two sections there are immodest swimsuits and natives), and laminated the pages. I took the pages to one of our staff meetings, mixed them all up, and gave each person a page. Because the back of every picture is black, it is easy to hand out a page to each person without his seeing what picture he has.

If you have more pages than people, give some people two pages. A person with two pages must keep the page in his left hand for the whole game; he may give the page in his right hand to another player. It would be my preference to have at least half of the group with second pages. If you still have more pages available after giving everybody two pages, you can either set the extra pages out on a table that the group will use or start the zoom at a different spot, allowing you to eliminate some pages.

Once all the team has their pages, tell them to turn them over and take a moment to scrutinize their picture. After about thirty seconds of scrutiny, tell them to get in order. At first, they will not know what you are talking about. Stick with your command to “get in order.” It usually takes five to ten minutes to get the order correct, depending on how much you tell them if they have just one or two out of order. Once the group has the order correct, go through the zoom so everyone can see the big picture.

Debrief Lessons

• You will usually see groups of three to five forming that have an aha moment where they realize how their group is connected to another group—this is an excellent opportunity to discuss how each group in your organization is connected.
• The impossibility of one person to know the whole big picture—they know where they fit, but they do not know how everything fits together. Lessons about comparison and contentment may arise.
• Each picture is unique but it is part of a whole—a discussion of 1 Corinthians 12 would be appropriate.
• You may find some folks do not want to move—a discussion about being willing to move in order to get in order can be compared to the need of your organization to be willing to change in order to get things right.

Last Thoughts

This took our team about twenty-five minutes to do and talk about. It  was not physically demanding and was easy to do with a larger group. I liked the small-prop feel of it and how easily everyone could participate. There is a second book called Re-zoom; but once a group knows the concept, I don’t think it would be as effective the second time.