Could your teams cut a hole in postcard big enough to step through? Do they have the planning and time management skills to build a bridge for the millenium? Some of these challenges are deceptively simple and straightforward, others more complex. But every one is easy to deliver and can be trusted to work again and again.
If you've encountered resistance to 'games' before, your teams will find it hard to fault these activities. There are no jokes or tricks to annoy participants. And the results will speak for themselves.
Everything in this pack is focused on practical demonstrations of effective teamwork, covering:
* Communication skills
* Decision-making
* Problem solving
* Planning
* Creative thinking
List of Activities:
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1 The Millennium Bridge
A team challenge in which teams compete to build a bridge across the swamp in the medieval village of Swampy, ready for the first millennium. They have to select a site, cost the whole operation, build a scale model and plan and deliver a presentation to the villagers.
2 The Eggspurts v. The Eggshibitionists
A highly participative challenge in brinkmanship, as teams battle to throw an egg as far as possible between participants. The teams have to make a collective decision on how far they need to go to out-throw their opponents.
3 Complementary Trios
Within each team or trio, one is blindfolded, one cannot speak and the third cannot use their hands. The challenge is to collect their food from the buffet table, and members of the team have to work together to use their individual strengths to achieve success.
4 Hole in a postcard
Having been given a demonstration by the trainer as to how a person can step through a hole cut in a standard postcard, teams are then challenged to cut a hole in a postcard which one of their team can step through.
5 Production Line
In this exercise, teams have to produce, in a three minute production run, as many notepads as possible, the same as a given sample. The challenge combines planning, time management, delegation, problem solving and team skills.
6 What happened here then?
This challenge initially highlights our aversion to having to say we don't know and the lengths to which we will go to invent information so that we can say something is right or wrong, true or false. Teams are challenged to reach a consensus about whether a range of statements are true or false, or if, in fact, there is not enough information and they really don't know.
7 Team Player
An activity which identifies how people behave in teams, and what the result of their actions can be on others. Individuals can score points by simply deciding whether to play red or blue. The result can be success for the team, or the actions of an individual can bring about its downfall.
8 Domino Towers
Teams often need to get a balance between security, meaning a safe yet unchallenging working environment, and opportunity, meaning an environment which challenges, yet threatens potential failure. Domino Towers gives teams the chance collectively to decide how they can win the challenge by striking the right balance between security and opportunity.
9 Red Herring
There is nothing as unusual as a group of course participants, and Red Herring certainly brings out the stranger side of the delegate! Participants have to guess who did what in their teams from a list compiled by their opponents of some of the wackier incidents in their lives.
10 Sheep Pen
Communicating with each other in normal circumstances can be tricky. Take two teams and, after a period of team planning, blindfold all but the leaders. Give the leaders a whistle to communicate with and ask them to move their team, one by one, across a room into the pen. You have set a seriously challenging challenge.
11 The Silurians come to town
Within teams, individuals almost always hold vital information which no one else knows but they assume everyone else knows. Additionally, if someone in a team does not understand something, they will usually assume that everyone else does understand and will say nothing, hoping all will become clear. This activity involves teams of five people who all have a brief. Each brief contains a unique piece of information vital to the success of the team but no one knows that the briefs are all slightly different. The Silurians come to town is the first and easiest in a series of three similar activities, all based on the same principle, with increasing degrees of difficulty. Activity 12 Dinner for Bob and Activity 13 Say Good Morning are in the same style but progressively more difficult.
12 Dinner for Bob
Dinner for Bob is the second in the series and of medium difficulty. It involves the teams selecting a main course for Bob's party and again, all the participants have a unique brief containing hidden information vital to the team's success and which no one else knows. This activity is more difficult than Activity 11 The Silurians come to town and less so than Activity 13 Say Good Morning.
13 Say Good Morning
A deceptively easy title, this is a real brain teaser with a mass of tangled information to unravel. The third in the series, if follows on from Activity 11 The Silurians come to town and Activity 12 Dinner for Bob. Say Good Morning gives each participant a number of unique pieces of information which are not only vital to the team's success, but have to becombined with other people's information to be of any significance.
14 Paperclips in Space
A team challenge which can be run almost at the drop of a hat. It is excellent for filling a small hole in your programme, or as a substitute for a longer one where time is running out. Teams are challenged to build a structure using paperclips on a base, where only one paperclip is allowed to touch the base with the others attached to it and in space.
15 Shaping up
Internal customer care is a vital ingredient of any team: considering what your colleagues need. In the challenge, participants are not allowed to do anything for themselves, only for others. The team can only succeed if everyone thinks about how they can help others. Each individual's personal achievement therefore comes from others in the team.
