Orienteering
The team finds the control points with a map in hand.
What it looks like
A video says in thirty seconds what a page explains in a thousand words: how loud it gets, how much laughing there is, what the hands are doing.
What it is
Teams get a map, a compass and a control card, and have to reach a series of control points marked with flags, in the order given, in the shortest time possible. At every point there’s a puzzle to solve before they can go on. Leaving somebody behind is not allowed: out among the dunes, being on your own isn’t an option.
An exercise for the mind and the body
Orienteering is a timed challenge for teams of every kind. It develops communication, collaboration and leadership. To get through it the team has to work out a shared strategy and pick a leader to follow, while acting throughout as one. Leaving the weaker members behind is strictly forbidden. Only genuine collaboration gets you the win.
It comes from orienteering as a sport, an individual discipline born in Scandinavia. It’s a timed course across wild terrain in which the competing teams, with a topographic map and a compass, have to reach the finish in the shortest time possible by passing through a series of control points in a specified order. We’ve moved the trial onto the desert dunes, which makes it harder and a good deal more absorbing.
The difficulty of orienteering is working out the best route for yourself. Among shifting sands, in ground nobody in the group has ever seen, the team has to find its own reference points and decide together. It’s the situation where the difference between technical leadership and charismatic leadership becomes visible, and where you can see how a decision actually gets taken and what drives it. The day after, the group knows who it follows and why.
What is an orienteering team building for?
The purpose is to find a series of points scattered across the desert terrain, using a few instruments, maps and compasses, and the help of your teammates.
It’s aimed at groups who want a day out in the open and want to work on how well they hold together.
An orienteering course can run for anything from a couple of hours to a full day.
The equipment we provide
A compass, a control card, the rules of the game and a simplified map of the terrain. Those are the only means you’ll have for finding your way between the stages. Nothing special is needed beyond that: comfortable shoes and protection from the sun.
The whole event is conceived and built by our team so that an incentive trip has everything it needs to develop individual and group skills.
The competition
Every group has to find specific points marked on the map. Once they’ve found the first, the team moves on as fast as it can to the next objective. The teams have to solve a puzzle at each checkpoint before going on to the next. Every area of the ground is watched over by one of our staff, to keep the activity safe and running properly.
At the end of the activity there’s a prize-giving for the winning team.
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