Purpose: To illustrate the barriers employees often encounter in trying to serve customers efficiently.

 Time Required: 20 to 30 minutes.

 Size of Group: 8 to 15.

 Materials Required: A supply of cardboard bricks.

 The Exercise in Action: Pam Griffin creates a “brick wall” to show participants how to overcome the barriers to customer service.

Griffin, a senior operations analyst with the Georgia Department of Labor in Atlanta, builds the wall out of cardboard bricks purchased at a local toy store. As the training begins, she explains that some of the bricks represent “immovable” laws or regulations that govern her industry, some are there because of state and local policies, and some are there because of employees’ own inflexibility concerning policies or about “going beyond the call” of regular duties.

As participants offer their solutions to flaws in the system, they are invited to come up and knock holes in the cardboard wall to illustrate a breakthrough, whether as the result of a new policy or as a new way of thinking about a situation.

Sometimes, Griffin says, playful participants come up during breaks and rearrange remaining bricks into new designs—and she uses that as a teaching point, too. “I use this spontaneous action to demonstrate how we often replace one barrier with another without realizing it.”

She says the brick wall idea can also be used in other training programs to illustrate barriers built by trainers, participants, or outside influences such as supervisors or managers who fail to support training back on the job.