Action Team Building
The team in motion, where the org chart stops counting for a few hours
What it looks like
Forty-seven seconds of Action: the running, the water, the structures giving way.
Action Team Building puts the team’s performance to the test in conditions radically different from those of the office. The keywords here are adventure, action and fun. The group finds itself in a completely unusual situation and has to take on challenges that ask for concentration, courage and a certain amount of physical activity. What surfaces in those hours is the way a team decides when there’s no time to call a meeting.
The question everyone asks has a short answer: you don’t need to be fit. These formats never require particular physical or sporting preparation, and our specialised coaches make sure everybody takes part in complete safety. A mixed team, with different ages, different physical conditions and different roles, gets through all of them, and in most of these formats leaving somebody behind is precisely how you lose.
Most of us spend the day sitting in front of a screen, with the physical activity reduced to a short walk at lunchtime. Changing habits for a day does the body and the mind good, and it turns up abilities in colleagues that nobody had expected. Success depends on how well the group works as a team, defines roles and plans its actions, and in the race everybody gives their best, so leadership qualities and individual talents come out in the open. In a cardboard boat race the area manager has no advantage over the intern. The day after, what stays with the team is that picture of each other: leadership seen while doing, in front of everyone, goes back to the office along with the adrenaline.
When it makes sense to choose it
It works well if
- the team is new or has just been put back together, and the ice needs breaking quickly
- there are hierarchical barriers slowing the daily work down
- you want to close a kick-off or a convention with something energetic
- the group is large: almost all the Action formats scale well past 50 people
It works less well if
- the objective is to work on a specific conflict between two people or two departments: that needs more reflective formats, like Creative or Training
- the group has significant mobility limitations: talk to us, it can almost always be adapted
The formats
Escape Box
A secret briefcase with a timer, boxes nested one inside another, padlocks to open and codes to decipher. It only comes open if everyone shares the piece they’re holding, and the countdown is usually sixty minutes.
CSI Forensics
The team turns into a forensic squad to solve a crime committed in the hotel where the group is staying. Fingerprints, casts, clues and witnesses to question, until somebody is named in the final trial.
Crazy Car Race
Design and build a mini car with no motor out of recycled materials, then put it on the track. Each team picks a driver to sit in the car and a pusher who stands in for the engine.
Carton Boat
Design a boat, build it from cardboard and tape, decorate it, then take it into the water of a pool or the sea. The competition is fierce, and the goal everybody really has in mind is to stay afloat.
Sailing
A real regatta, where the crew only works if every role does its part, and the boat tells you straight away who’s listening.
Crazy Soccer
Football inside giant inflatable spheres: there’s a lot of laughing, and scoring takes a shared strategy more than it takes legs.
Team Padel
A padel court, strategy cards in hand and a coach watching from the side. The score rewards the choices before the shots.
Performance Driving
On a circuit with professional instructors: control, reading the road ahead, handling the limit.
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 →
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.
Prefer to talk? +971 50 795 9666 · info @ teambuildingincentive.ae