Ideas for team-building

[NickBristol]

Afternoon all,

The place where I work has just come thru a re-organisation and understandably people aren't working too well at the minute. To get over this, our team of 20ish has been asked to arrange a one or two day team-building session with an environmental & practical side to it, either fun-learning type stuff or a community-type project. A few of the ideas so far have been falconry, coppicing, learning a woodland skill or a river / urban area clean-up type thingy. Location isn't important so long as it's England or Wales and there's money available to pay fees or expenses :wink:

My questions to all you people are:
- Do you have any ideas for activities?
- Does anyone know of reputable, competent, skilled teachers who could do any of the above, preferably tied to an organisation tho not 100%essential. Shameless advertising or self-promotion is wholeheartedly encouraged (for this post only )

Cheers for any help - it'd be really appreciated.

[RAPPLEBY2000]

john muir award scheme,
very easy to set up,
take the group on an adventure to a place, walk camp ect.
discover plants animals enviroment
discuss it
conserve it anything from collecting litter to making stone walls etc.

15 hours+ and you get a basic john muir award.

great achievement, you can organise local paper to report it or get a celeb to hand out the certificates.

the certificates can be added to any C.V. as an extra personal achievement!

have a good look at this!
http://www.jmt.org/award/

everso easy anyone of any ability can get the award, but is prehaps an easy option for you :wink:


it would look good for your CV also the fact you organised it!
if interested send off for the handouts/paperwork two weeks ahead they are busy! :!:

[TAHAWK]

Contact your local Scout headquarters and ask for names of those who present the group-forming sesisons in Wood Badge training.

I used these at my former employer after we went through, in order, over a period of ten years:

"Downsizing" x 3 , "Rightsizing," "Reorganization,"
"Breakthrough," and acquisition by another corporation.

The Wood badge group-forming exercises worked as well in a work context as in a Scouting context.

[Nod]

Jack teaches Hurdle Making.

You don't work at Royal Mail do you? We've just had another re-org, jobs gone, changes to teams etc. It's never ending.

[stevec]

i've done some different team building stuff, it varied from place to place, two of the faves were the spiders web, and sheparding. both are good fun and involve a bit of thinking to say the least. have a look round, lots of places offer team building stuff, some places offer dedicated team building instead of bushcraft/survival courses. as you don't want advertising, i won't mention the one i'm thinking about. if you want more info, let me know and i'll point you to the courses that i've been on. hope your quest goes well.
steve

[alick]

I've done the big annual "challenge" events that GEC used to run for this sort of thing on three occasions. The best was held at and led by the Brathay crew at the top end of Windermere.
The spiders web is a great team builder.
Another really good one is a giant version of a jenga tower, about three feet high with a stout plank across like the bar of a T. In teams of four or five, you all stand on the tower and plank, then dismantle the tower under you, rebuilding it a couple of feet to the side. At no point can you touch the ground and only one nominated person can place the blocks in position in the new tower. Lots of cooperation needed !
Another - again in teams of five - you have to move the whole team together twenty five yards through a wood from a start tree to a finish tree. You get 10-15 minutes to memorise a route, but then have to do it with everyone blindfolded. Allow two or three attempts. This needs cooperation to stop the human chain being broken up. I like it because people who are not fit or into the outdoors can take the lead and do really well.
Finally, take a four foot length of 3" dia plastic pipe. Block the bottom end and suspend with the open end about five feet high. Drill a series of holes randomly around the length of the pipe. Drop in a ping pong ball. The challenge is for 3 or four of the team to block the holes in the pipe while the other two fill the pipe with water from a nearbye barrel using plastic cups, floating the ping pong ball to the top until it can be retreived. You can't tip it out. It's a race. Fingers come off, you all get very wet and you lose water! Great fun.
The key is to mix the events so that different abilities are needed and as many people as possible can take the lead and contribute. Go for it !

[TAHAWK]

The exercise leader explains the following group-forming process and guides it gently, especially being sure the comments are positive and perhaps giving minimal comments to "get the ball rolling."

Each team member is given a piece of paper on which he/she writes down a couple of sentences about the three most important events in his/her life.

No. 1 presents what he/she has written down. No. 2 acts as reporter and writes down (summary - few key words) the respective comments of the group members (other than No,. 1) as to what positive things the brief stories about these three events reveals about No. 1 on a piece of paper with a circle in the center.

After everyone has said everything that comes to them, No. 1 is handed the "report" and -- privately -- draws an arrow into the circle for the comments that seem most imeaningful to him/her.

No. 2 now presents and No. 3 acts as reporter and so on.

Continue until all have presented.

I have used this with goups who know eachother well, casually, and not at all. I have used it with homogenious and disparate groups. I have used it with adults and teenagers. Believe it or do not, very "private" things have always emerged that gave new insight into who the team members are - inside. Tears are typical.

On the face of it, one might say, this should not work. With the proper leader, it always works.

[NickBristol]

Just wanted to drop a short note to say thanks to all those those contributed ideas for a post-restructuring teambuild. In the end another organisation came to us with an opportunity to clean-up a section of river bank so we took that option instead. After a long tiring day collecting well over 200 binsacks of assorted rubbish, plus another ton or so of assorted fridges, beer kegs (empty :cry: ) and odd shoes, we all felt closer as a team in having achieved something worthwhile and with a very obvious benefit as the end result. It also struck home just how wasteful our society is, and in the case of all the used needles, how self-destructive our society can be.

Cheers again for all your imput, if any other of you want to do a similar thing for your organisations then please get in touch and I'll forward on the contacts details.

Ta Nick