Quad Orienteering
The team crosses the desert on quads, map in hand.
What it looks like
A video says in thirty seconds what a page explains in a thousand words: the terrain, the noise of the engines, what the hands are doing with the map.
What it is
Teams get a compass and a checkpoint map, and cross the dunes on quads. Departures are staggered, the checkpoints have to be reached in the order given, and at each one somebody gets off the quad to stamp the card. At the finish the times are read and the cards checked: the team that completes the course in the shortest time with every checkpoint validated wins.
Navigation and driving, at the same time
The principles come from traditional orienteering, with the driving added on top. Inside each team the roles get shared out and the participants take turns at the controls, so that everybody does both the navigating and the driving instead of splitting into passengers and pilots.
Speed alone doesn’t decide it. What decides it is reading the map properly, identifying the checkpoints and taking collective decisions under pressure. It happens often that the person who is best with a map finishes ahead of the fastest driver, and that is the part of the day people talk about afterwards.
The difficulty is finding your own way across ground that has no signposts and changes shape with the wind. The day after, the team knows how it decides when the map and the horizon disagree.
Who it makes sense for
We suggest it to companies that want to work on company identity, on clarity of roles and on setting and reaching shared objectives. It suits energetic groups, and it gives the most when the team already knows each other and wants to go past the introductions.
It’s for groups that want a day out in the desert with something to solve in it, rather than a tour. We run it across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
A session runs from sixty minutes upwards, and it grows with the number of checkpoints and the distance between them.
What we provide
A compass, a checkpoint card, the rules and a simplified map of the ground. The quads are all-terrain vehicles with tyres made for stability and for turning on soft sand, and the trainers go through the safety instructions before anybody starts.
The whole thing is built around the group, so that an incentive trip has what it needs to work on individual and collective skills instead of only filling an afternoon.
The race
Each team has to find the points marked on the map, in sequence. Once one is found, the team moves on to the next as fast as it can. Every area of the ground is watched 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