2 x Lies + 1 x Truth At Work

At Harbr, the culture of the organization is something I genuinely believe in and constantly want to contribute to. Working for a company that values individuals, encourages collaboration and innovation and ultimately creates an environment where people feel included and part of a family and not just a working group really means a lot to me.

This was the driver for the 2 x Lies + 1 x Truth event. I wanted to get everybody together, sharing interesting things about themselves and learning interesting things about their colleagues. We have amazing people at Harbr, from a barista who is now a support engineer to a backend engineer who builds racing cars as a hobby to an EA who used to work in truck racing (there’s definitely a racing theme) etc. It’s really the people at Harbr that make Harbr as amazing as it truly is and I wanted to make sure that within Harbr that everyone got exposed to some of the interesting, quirky and fascinating elements of their colleagues.

For those who’d like to replicate this themselves, it was a really easy process to set up. This is how I orchestrated the event:

First I sent out a Google Form getting everybody to submit four lies and two truths. With a big enough company or team, this can easily be reduced to one truth and two lies. The result was around 70 sets of questions, where each question is comprised of one truth and two lies.

Next I used https://myquiz.org/ to set up the quiz. This is a fantastic site that’s free, works like a charm and can facilitate large groups of people in a quiz. I created the 70 questions, added some humorous gifs, memes and pictures to a bunch of them (this is completely optional, it takes a lot of time) and got the quiz into a ready state. Each question was multiple choice with two lies and one truth, so one correct answer.

The settings were 15 seconds to answer each question and 20 seconds between questions for general banter or to give people time to explain their truths.

Lastly, I got everybody together on a Zoom call. I arranged this event 3 weeks in advance to make sure there were no meeting conflicts, the entire management team hyped everybody up to participate and when the day came, attendance was amazing.

I ran the quiz, reading through every question and embellishing a few of the craziest/funniest entries. This was definitely the best part, and at stages, everybody was in hysterics. Some of the craziest insights that came out from the evening:

1. The most common lie seems to be on the number of toes a person has??!!
2. The second most common lie seemed to revolve around an eating contest with hotdogs.
3. One of our guys doesn’t have a stomach?!
4. Another person used to translate text on breadboards at a breadboard museum. So many questions on this one.
5. Many many more interesting things about everyone.

The trick to making this engaging, fun and interactive really lies with the lies. One of the quotes was that with two lies and a truth you always have the ability to come across at least 66% interesting, even if your truth was deadly dull!

People are awesome and we all have rich histories filled with adventures, crazy experiences, hidden skills and so much more. Sharing a bit of who you are with the people you work with can really help bring people closer. I’d strongly encourage other companies and teams to try the same thing.