Team Building

The team building exercises that were held last week were excellent fun. We had Tony Brindle – ex mountaineer and outward bound instructor as our facilitator. I really thought his course was the best I have ever been on. Mostly we would learn some theory, and then have a short exercise to put it into practice.

For example, for one of the exercises saw the group split up into 4 groups
2 observers
2 managers
2 supervisors
5? Workers

Everyone was split up – I opted to be a worker for this one. We were brought down and placed on a giant chess board. Then about 10 mins later the supervisors came down, numbered us, and went away. Came back after about 5 mins (we were getting colder!) and told one of us to move. This process was repeated. We, the workers, were becoming agitated and restless. I was all for telling them we weren’t going to do anything until the situation was explained .. i.e what we were supposed to be doing. See by this time, David and I had worked out we were playing a sort of chess game and we figured we knew what to do to win the game.

In the event we ran out of time. But it was a beautiful illustration of how much extra communication is needed when groups work remotely. The mangers you see, assumed we knew the rules & aim of the game, so they never communicated this to the supervisors, who in turn never communicated it to the workers. We, the workers, should have made it clearer to the supervisors that we wanted direction.

In the pic above we had to pour water into the vertical tube to raise the water level inside to float a ping-ball to the top.. really not as easy as it looks (we should have siphoned it).

There were lots more examples and exercises.. culminating in a sort of rogaine where everyone was running around looking for clues.. great fun..

Then there was a salsa workshop and a few drinks etc. to celebrate the end of training. I must admit, I’d completely forgotten quite how much I enjoy salsa (though in particular merengue – so much easier). There are some not incredibly amazing pictures here