Facilitation, de-brief / reviews and level of complexity in general

 

A good facilitator team can balance action and learning as appropriate to suit each client. These are samples of some issues a client may wish a team building activity to illustrate or include.

 

Team Roles and Diversity

A myriad of different team challenge approaches can be designed so that different types of team role contribution are essential for a balanced and profitable approach to the challenges we have set.  Team members will find it essential that different team role styles come forward at the right stage of a project to deal with different aspects of the challenge and contribute to total team success.  Leading, Thinking, Doing, Supporting and Challenging roles are needed at different times.  Models such as Belbin, Myers Briggs or DISC are well re-enforced here.

 

Overcoming Task Overload

The team can easily be overloaded with data and potential point winning challenges, but must quickly plan and prioritise how they will actually go about attacking one of our more complex challenges.  Failure to use good systems, cross checks and teamwork will lead to teams falling into the activity trap and becoming task focused at the expense of the bigger picture objective.

 

Cross-Functional Working

We can design events so that teams are required to engage in meaningful cross-functional sharing of ideas and resources to enable them to complete the project with greater speed, profitability or effectiveness.  We can design the event so that failure to do so or working within stovepipes will greatly reduce profitability.

 

Bigger Picture Thinking

If we provide all teams with an overall united challenge or outcome, but leave temptations to focus only upon the execution of their own team objective only, issues of Big Picture versus Micro thinking will come into play as teams need to address not only their own project, but also those of other teams to ensure overall success.

 

Improve Execution

The winning approach to a challenge can be designed to require not only the great plans and systems that teams will devise, but also an emphasis on following through into effective and timely execution if the ideas and approaches are to be converted into real and workable outcomes.  Good teams will follow a model such as Plan – Brief – Execute and De-Brief throughout.

 

Fun and Motivation

We aim for all of our approaches to be high energy, high interaction and high fun.  Teams have a great deal of fun, and motivate one another a great deal towards completion within the timeframes permitted.

 

Fish and Cheese type stuff

The latest management books and philosophies that may prevail within your company will either be familiar to us or conceivably available to us and therefore easily integrated into our approaches, or indeed we can create entirely new approaches to re-enforce key themes and learning points from the business model or business book of your choice.

 

Creativity

Teams can be presented with challenges that require genuine individual and team-based approaches to creativity for good outcomes along with insights, approaches and genuine process tools for developing team approaches to creativity.

 

Change

Changes to technical information, structure, customer needs, deadlines and other mission critical elements can be injected at various times within challenges to mirror real world issues and themes.  Failure to quickly adapt to the changes will result in losses and adverse outcomes for the team.

 

Communication

Internal and external communication will be essential as teams need to interpret and then effectively communicate information that is critical to making sure the diverse elements of the project come together in the right way for the desired end result.  Failure to communicate effectively will result in confusion and bad execution.

 

Customer Focus

Objectives may be framed in accordance with strict tender criteria from facilitators acting as various profiles of customer with varying and changing needs as the project is underway.  A balance between customer service and profitability is also part of some of our most popular business games

 

Networking 

Within teams there is a high degree of networking as people work closely together to get the project done and we also have activity constructs designed specifically for networking across larger groups.  Networking between teams can also be facilitated if we design the activity to require co-operation between teams for common objectives or shared outcomes.

 

Re-enforce conference content / communicate conference message

Team, company and product related themes and issues can easily be incorporated into the event as either a focus for the project itself or subtly integrated throughout various activity categories to powerfully re-enforce other company initiatives and approaches.

 

With the right systems and commitment anything can be done

Some activities can be designed to appear impossible at first, but it becomes increasingly apparent that when committed to making it work, and by utilising the right systems and approaches what seems impossible becomes not only possible, but very, very impressive indeed!