Tasks of team building exercises or team building?

Team building activities can be considered different from team building exercises in some respects. They are not equal. When team building involves giving the team to complete a task, something significant that should involve all team members, and that has a deadline, differs significantly from an exercise that is little more than just a game.

The games can be challenging. It may take a significant amount of problem solving that can involve every member of the team. Once the problem was resolved there will usually be jubilation and it appears that the team has bonded and learned from this exercise. This may be so to some extent, but the true value will not be as great as when the team building activities are used.

Consider for a moment an exercise performed by students of fire firefighters. You could take any number of forms, but imagine that a small group of three firefighters have the task to switch off a valve at the base of a wall of fire.

The fire wall is a wall of steel with a large number of nozzles on it. Flammable fuel flows from the nozzles and is ignited. The effect is a literal wall of fire ten feet deep. Turn the valve to turn off the fuel and kill the fire is no easy task!

The team of firefighters practitioners are not games. They advance on the fire wall with a flexible hose set to spray water in a drawing wide range umbrella. A team member brings the tube, another is right behind helping to maintain the security of continuous jet hose - their safety depends on it. The third team member is in the back, pulling in excess hose to make progress easier.

In this way literally walk through the solid wall of fire, protected by the spray pattern of the tube. Once at the wall, the valve can be located and turned off. This kills the flow of fuel to the nozzles and the fire goes out immediately. Mission accomplished.

What happens here is that the team is assigned a task. They can also be given a deadline for accomplishing this task. They are completely dependent on each other doing exactly what they should do, or the task will not be realized. Even more to the point in this example, they can support the serious injury, if every team member has failed.

There is no suggestion here that the team building activities should lead to the extinction of fires potentially dangerous. However, this example demonstrates that a military approach, where a specific task must be accomplished has the best qualities of a team building exercise that has very little in the beginning, middle or end.

Team building activities have a purpose. There is a clear goal that should be performed. The goal would be difficult to achieve, but not so difficult, that it becomes almost impossible. The fire task described above is very difficult and very scary for the first time trainees, but in reality is not as difficult as it might seem at first, and not really as dangerous either. However, it certainly has the effect of rapidly building a strong team! ......