Team building exercises

What outdoor training is

The exercises below belong to a branch of experiential training called outdoor training, which despite the name can also be run indoors.

The mechanism is always the same and it sits in three conditions: limited resources, limited time, an objective to reach. From there on the group manages by itself.

They look like games, and they are. That’s exactly why they work: the frame of a game takes people a long way from the office, where roles and hierarchies weigh less, and what you see is how the group actually works. The value, though, isn’t in the exercise. It’s in the debrief afterwards. Without that you’ve had a pleasant morning.

Problem solving

Warp Speed

A new rule comes into force instantly and bans the way the company moves goods and information. The group has to keep producing while staying competitive with people who don’t have that constraint, and has to find the shortest possible time for completing all the necessary steps. It’s the exercise that punishes staying inside your opening assumptions more than any other.

Acid River

The teams have to cross a contaminated river using planks, and there are fewer planks than people. Contact between the participants can never be broken and nobody can step off the planks, and the objective counts as reached only if everybody arrives on the other side.

That last constraint is what makes the exercise what it is. Until somebody is still behind, nobody has won, and the dynamics that grow up around that rule are the interesting part.

Bull Ring

A diamond has to be carried to a point nobody can reach in person. The group moves it by coordinating at a distance, and at the first mistake the diamond is lost. You work on strategy, planning and defining roles, and the margin is so tight that the roles have to be decided beforehand rather than along the way.

Human Balance

The participants stand in a circle, tied to a rope on which each of them can pull harder or less hard. Each person’s balance depends on how much traction the others are applying, and it has to be matched to them.

It gets used to look at what happens when somebody new arrives, or when one person is putting in less than the others. In a circle those two things are felt in the body before anyone says them.

Spider Web

The group is on an expedition, a fire has broken out behind them and the only way out is a gorge blocked by a web. You go through the holes without touching it. The holes are few and the time is short, and nobody gets through without their colleagues physically lifting them.

The trust sequence

The three exercises that follow run in sequence, and the order isn’t negotiable: each one prepares the next. They’re the most intense of the day and they don’t get proposed cold.

1. Levitation. You let yourself fall gradually into your colleagues’ arms, until you’re lifted clear of the ground. It’s the preliminary stage, the one that establishes whether the group is ready for the rest.
2. Trust Dive. The dive of trust, used as preparation for the last one.
3. Trust Fall. A backwards fall with your eyes closed into your colleagues’ arms. The fear and the tension of the first few seconds are part of the exercise, and they’re also what gets talked about in the reflection at the end.

Celebration

The day closes with the only moment when the group is no longer divided into teams. Together they build a routine or a set of chants to celebrate something.

It’s there to close, and closing together after hours spent against each other is exactly the point.

What’s at stake

Getting to know each other, trust, responsibility, loyalty and respect, team spirit. Listed like that the words are worth very little, and the point of these exercises isn’t in the list: it’s in the fact that after a morning like this people have watched their colleagues do something, instead of hearing them say it.

If you’re interested in how these exercises fit inside a whole day, the page on how to organise a team building explains how the rest gets designed.