The TeamWorking method

From the experience to what’s left the day after

A trainer at the whiteboard mapping out where the team is going

Why we always start from an experience

A concept explained in a training room lasts as long as the slide. A concept lived through in the field stays, because whoever lived it remembers it with their body before their memory. Strong teams get built on purpose, out of shared experiences and goals people have actually agreed on. That’s why we’ve spent years training through experience: you take a team into a new situation, where its habits stop working, and you watch what it does. What it does there is what it does at the office, only more visible.

Kolb’s cycle, with one extra step

The method follows David Kolb’s cycle of experiential learning: you live a concrete experience, you observe it, you draw a principle from it, you test the principle in a new action. We’ve added one step, between awareness and action: alignment. Before going back to work, the team decides together what to keep and what to change, and says it out loud. That step is what separates a good experience from an experience that still shows the day after.

Kolb’s cycle with the extra step TeamWorking adds Five stages set out in a circle, followed clockwise. Experience: you live something together, Kolb’s concrete experience. Observation: the trainer watches, and the team watches itself, reflective observation. Awareness: the team sees what works and what gets in the way, abstract conceptualisation. Alignment: together you decide what to keep and what to change; this is the step TeamWorking adds, and the original cycle has no equivalent. Action: what was decided goes back to the office with the team, active experimentation. From action you return to experience and the cycle starts again. Kolb’s cycle, with one extra step 1 Experience You live something together. concrete experience 2 Observation The trainer watches, and the team watches itself. reflective observation 3 Awareness The team sees what works and what gets in the way. abstract conceptualisation 4 Alignment Together you decide what to keep and what to change. 5 Action What was decided goes back to the office with the team. active experimentation THE EXTRA STEP The original cycle stops at four: before going back to work, the team decides out loud.
Kolb’s cycle with the extra step TeamWorking adds The same five stages in a column, from top to bottom, with the return from the last to the first. Experience: you live something together, Kolb’s concrete experience. Observation: the trainer watches, and the team watches itself, reflective observation. Awareness: the team sees what works and what gets in the way, abstract conceptualisation. Alignment: together you decide what to keep and what to change; this is the step TeamWorking adds, and the original cycle has no equivalent. Action: what was decided goes back to the office with the team, active experimentation. From action you return to experience and the cycle starts again. and it starts again 1 Experience You live something together. concrete experience 2 Observation The trainer watches, and the team watches itself. reflective observation 3 Awareness The team sees what works and what gets in the way. abstract conceptualisation 4 Alignment Together you decide what to keep and what to change. 5 Action What was decided goes back to the office with the team. active experimentation THE EXTRA STEP, NUMBER 4 The original cycle stops at four: before going back to work, the team decides together, out loud. Kolb’s cycle, with one extra step.
Il ciclo dell’apprendimento esperienziale di David Kolb. La quarta tappa, l’allineamento, l’abbiamo aggiunta noi.

How it runs, in practice

Every activity has three movements. The briefing, where we tell the group what to watch for without spoiling the surprise. The experience, where the trainer observes more than they speak. The debrief, where the team says what it saw about itself and picks one or two things to carry back to the office. In the playful formats the debrief is light, in the Training formats it’s structured, and in Team Coaching it becomes the heart of the work.

What you take home: a group that has seen its own dynamics with its own eyes, a shared language for talking about them (who decides, who listens, who waits) and a decision taken together, small and concrete, which is in force the next day. Underneath all three sits trust, which is what lets people delegate without checking, say an unpopular thing out loud and ask for help early, and it gets built by going through something together rather than by being described.

What we don’t promise: that one day changes an organisation. One day makes it visible. Changing it is the work of a path, when that’s what’s needed.

Three levels, one logic. Team Building surfaces things. Training surfaces them and gives them a name. Team Coaching surfaces them, names them and accompanies the team over time, with checks at fixed points. You come in at the level you need, and you can stay there.

The five things we look at in a team

Identity, roles, values, direction, behaviour: those are the five dimensions we read a team along, and they’re the same five as in the book. An activity touches all of them, but every format touches them differently. That’s why we choose the format according to which of the five you need to see.

And the two we always look at: how the team decides, and how it handles disagreement. They’re the hardest to see from inside and the easiest to see in an activity.

On the debrief we’re demanding. It’s the part almost everyone would like to skip to get to the drinks, and it’s the part that makes the rest of it worth having done, the day after.

Years of evidence in the field

We’ve worked with more than eight hundred companies since 2001, and with 79,450 people, in the Gulf and internationally. The method came out of watching them: every time a group got stuck at the same point, we took a note.

The formats run from a light experience to a structured path, and the choice depends on three things: what you want the team to take home, how many of you there are, and how much time and space you have. We build the Team Coaching programmes from the same three.

Every activity is designed around the objective, around who’s in the group and around the depth you want to reach. The same format, with two different objectives, is two different days.

Who’s behind the method

The team

How we tell it

How our clients tell it

Where all this comes from

The method has debts it declares: Kolb for the cycle, Lencioni for the dysfunctions of a team, Dilts for the logical levels, Clutterbuck for team coaching. The books that shaped us are listed in Books on team building, with the reason we recommend each one.

When what surfaces deserves an afterwards

An activity surfaces a great deal about how a team communicates, decides and works together, and sometimes what surfaces deserves more time, more depth and a method. That is where a Team Coaching path can begin: a different road, to be taken only if it is needed, to turn what the day made visible into a new way of working together.

Discover Team Coaching →

13

years in the Emirates

800+

companies have chosen us

79,450

people have taken part

Let’s talk about your next team building

You don’t need to have picked a format yet. Tell us what you want your team to take home, how many of you there are and where you’ll be, and we’ll do the rest: within 24 hours you get a considered proposal for your case, with the formats that hold up against your numbers, and what each one leaves the team the day after.

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Prefer to talk? +971 50 795 9666 · info @ teambuildingincentive.ae