Beyond Team Building:

Transcending Remedial Activities and Lessons

By Chuck McVinney
© 2001 McVinney & Company

The Limitations of Traditional Programs

Frankly, most team building games and exercises end up boring me. That's not because I don't believe in the subtle forces that bind or break teams, and the importance of experiencing those dynamics in facilitated settings. And, truth be told, I greatly enjoy the facilitation role in such settings. Instead, my frustration is based on the contrived competition they create. From sack races to scavenger hunts, and "discover collaboration" games from simulated wild-west gold rushes to outer space wars, most of the games leave me with a sense of shallowness, a vague sense of emptiness. Even though the points learned are well taken, the lasting effect seems muted by their sheer gaminess and triviality. Some of our customers have threatened to never call again if we use the desert survival game on them, or ask another team to go blind-folded holding hands across a wooden bar.

On the other hand, distancing ourselves from the everyday work place in order to experience things together in other settings is a highly desirable way to learn. We have documented over the years of our work that enhanced creativity ensues and deeper relationships and connections are possible when people work together on things the take seriously. By "seriously" we mean stuff that they have a stake in while being challenged by new environments and processes. That's why the emerging team development activities we are creating have been focusing on new ways for teams to address their community and interpersonal issues in more dramatic and creative ways. By tying team development activities more closely to the work the teams are actually doing, we are seeing more real and transferable learning occur.

This doesn't mean the team activities are not different, fun and exciting - they always are. These programs, which we call "Environmental Team Development", are based on a simple premise; if we can put people into interesting, beautiful, unique and challenging natural situations and evoke real teamwork at the same time, we can provoke new understandings about how to handle true business challenges. Simultaneously, we are able to create team development programs that are themselves sustainable. By "sustainable" here we mean first, transferable to the real work place, and second, memorable enough to make behavioral and performance differences over time.

Examples of "Environmental Team Development"

The tall ship activity described elsewhere on this web site, is one such event. Real people face real experiential challenges that are full of natural metaphors and relationships to the work we face everyday. The experience, like the learning, is actually exaggerated. The ship trip offers tangible goals, lasting learnings, and healthy interactions. The challenge is fun and rewarding, while full of the unexpected and the rigorous. Creativity and discipline are rewarded in real time, at the same time, and people come away refreshed and changed. A customer from one trip two summers ago commented almost a year later that she still thinks of the learnings from that activity when interacting with her teammates. She said the insights about how people behave and learned together on board still guide her through the rough waters of everyday interactions and events.

Another approach to creating alternative team development challenges in unique settings has been to invent community based activities. Recently, a technology team worked with us in a seacoast location to research all the ways the 400 year old town had remained sustainable over its life. They researched culture and the arts, finance and commerce, education and politics, and other related areas. In doing that they uncovered the strategies the community had used in good times and bad to create and re-create themselves as a living entity.

The teams made brilliant multi-media presentations from their research using simple tools we had given them. Then, the whole team worked together to discover the metaphorical and actual connections between the sustainable behaviors the town demonstrated, and those that their company could model or learn from in securing their own sustainability. Connections were made about creative ways to sustain the company that may never have emerged in any other setting.

The Future of Team Development

These days, we are putting our minds together with our customers' minds to discover and invent other natural order and community based activities, like the ship trip. They are exciting, real, and provide connections and insights to improve our teams, our organizations, and our chances for business success in the ever more complex and changing world of the new post "September 11th" realities. All work teams are now asked to navigate, integrate, and somehow respond to a new level of challenges - a set of challenges, really, that will require much more sophisticated community and community action to meet successfully.

Team development activities can help in the strengthening of community. To so, the activities need to be more than games - they need to be real tools for planning, creating and nurturing the organizations and leaders of tomorrow. The usual notion of teambuilding as somehow remedial in nature should be reconsidered. Challenging and metaphorical learning events can create new possibilities and breakthrough moments. Through these enhanced and more in-depth events we are working with our customers to re-discover and apply the power of sustainable thinking to assure advanced community formation. That cannot help but lead us into a future where we can find ways to live safely, prosperously and responsibly.