Teams

Teambuilding & Treasure Hunting

Part 1: Confluence

The invention of the automobile expanded the limits of human freedom. Owners of cars could travel far and wide – for business and pleasure.

They could take their families anywhere and anytime. Enthusiasts banded together to create new activities. Racing for the professionals and rallying for the amateurs. Rallying really took off in a big way after WW2 and spread all over the world.

A Rally team typically had 2 people – driver and navigator. The navigator constantly updated the driver on what was likely up ahead on a particular trail. The driver was prepared for the swerves and bumps and could speed the rest of the time.

Thus the first automobile team was born – consisting of 2 specialists who complemented each other in facing the challenges along the trail!

The first motoring hunts in Malaya took off from the rallies introduced by the British. Crucially, the hunts as opposed to the rallies, allowed 4 in a car.

Why not bring the family along? Or 2 couples could join together to make it “more fun”. But what to do with the passengers sitting behind?

Give them something to do. The rally-hunts combined the classic rally features – navigation-driving teamwork and questions so that everyone had something to do!

Challenges along the way occupied the passengers as they looked out for landmarks, counted specific items, picked up flora, searched for hidden marshals, visited local places of interest, took part in off-road tasks, performed specific vehicle maintenance procedures, and answered questions on general knowledge.

The classic treasure hunt was born!

Though the history is spotty at best and requires a major campaign to unravel and document ( one of the long term aims of THS ) , let me bring to your attention the quickstep from a 2 man team to a 4 man team.

Teams

Much has been written about teams and their importance in the corporate world. The history of team- work theories began after a pioneering experiment on studying  worker productivity that came to be known as the Hawthorne effect.

Having spent 30 years in semiconductor manufacturing, I am all for the idea of teams that work at many levels and across different platforms. Teams drive innovation and creativity and they need to be groomed to be game changers.

What exactly is a team? A team is a group of people who work together to achieve a specific goal. You might take exception to that rather general definition which might even fit an organization.

The phrase “work together” means exactly that – to work hand in hand. It’s a coming together of individuals who normally would not. The intensity makes the difference between a team and other organizational structures.

A team is full of energy. It can have fights within and still call itself a team as long as it holds together and deliver the touchdown. A team is made of distinct personalities. Great team building recognizes that and never crosses the line from enhancing work culture to smothering conformity.

In big organizations, there is a natural tendency towards “islands of activity”. To blunt this trend, teams are formed now and then to break through inertia and keep the traffic flowing.

Periodically, corporations need team building to scrape the plaque from their arteries lest they seize up and die. Some make their own medicine, some call in quacks, many rush to expensive specialists.

Before the scalpel makes the cut, there are safer choices – a diet change and an exercise regime can do wonders under a master eye.

Corporations that treat team building like quickies and one-night stands fail to reap the benefits of a long term marriage.

Many and manifold are the vehicles of classic team building. But one has been overlooked or rather under-appreciated for quite some time.

Nowadays, the classic hunt is a cryptic one – many are hawker fare, cheap and nutritionally worthless, some are fast-food, of unvarying standard  and safety, few are gastronomic delights, delivering far beyond their pay grade!

It is the writer’s opinion that the motor hunt can be the best format for team building - delivering improved performance for a corporation – when applied consistently over a period.

Teams go from Hunting 101 until they achieve exceptional performance.

In Part 2, we will see how this can be achieved

Part 2: Consolidation

THE NATURE of competition forces companies and groups to innovate every now and then.

Take the automobile industry as an example.

All cars are essentially the same – yet, not all car companies do well over a period of time. What distinguishes the great car makers is the capacity to surprise and delight consumers. The whole team commits to common goals. This is an extraordinary task as anyone working in any company can attest to. As the number of people rises in an organization, the natural trend is to identify your particular patch of territory. Very seldom will you come to know other parts in a familiar way. The distant common goal gives way to a multitude of immediate concerns. Team building attempts to reignite the spark that animates the team spirit by doing away with nonessentials. Focusing on particular problems in sequence, the teams digest the immediate challenge and harness their resources to solve them. Team building cannot offer the same problems that participants face at work. Nevertheless, they can asymptotically approach the essence of group method to problem-solving.

The best forms of individual team-building events usually involve decisions that the teams have to make at some point within the ‘game’. These decisions are the crucial mortar that binds the individual bricks together. If a team cannot ascertain the possible course of action needed in the task then performance suffers. Such performance feedback is immediate as the competitive scenario lets teams immediately realize that other teams are doing better or worse than them. If team building tasks are only to do with raw skills and talents, then there is not much that the teams can learn from. There is no ‘blow away’ factor to strive for. For example, if an event was only to do a task fast, then there is not much that teams can do in terms of strategy and options. Brute speed overcomes all other concerns. When speed is mixed with accuracy or steadiness, then another axis is added – and this where the team must come together to fashion a plan. As the axes of constraints increase, the path to the goal becomes as complicated as anything else in life. Great team building always incorporates a matrix of choices in its tasks.

Treasure Hunting as the Ultimate Team Builder

So how does treasure hunting fit in the spectrum of team building? In hunting, there is an overall goal and need for decisions to be made on the way. Specific skills come to the fore: navigating and driving, spotting and decrypting, strategizing and communicating, googling and referencing. A well constructed hunt should stretch the teams in all of these skills. New teams need to take cognizance of weaknesses and work towards building up defences. Treasure hunting has the added quality of repeatability in that the skill sets can be honed over a series of hunts and teams can benchmark themselves on their progress.

Another great feature of treasure hunting is that in the early stages, teams continue to work together between hunts to develop advantages and discuss their past failings. Nothing is as important as that for improvement. At least once a month, teams can join hunts and find how they are faring in the challenges. The variety of hunts provides a broad base for teams to get a sense of the sport. In closed hunts, the course setters can experiment with innovative ideas and wed different concepts. The closed hunt has provided the writer many opportunities to enhance the experience of a treasure hunt for participants from a single company. In one case where the company wanted its staff to be familiar with its product ( a walkie talkie ) a hunt had to be designed to utilize the device in a practical and useful manner. Splitting each team up so that members covered 2 stretches simultaneously, the team solved their sets of questions and with their answers had to solve a separate set of questions which could only be solved if they had the correct answers

However, the structure of the 3rd set of questions was such that they could work backwards and narrow down on the answers for the 2 stretches. Communicating via the walkie talkie was the most efficient way to solve as many questions as possible. In another case, teams were left stranded without money and handphones in a locale. Clues were given so that they had to chart a course to identify the new locale where they would get the next set of clues. This extreme form of hunt proved very useful in making many participants aware of their own limitations and forced them to come out of their shells to communicate with locals to find out how to get to the next destination. What a change from sitting behind desks and communicating via e mail! Hunts can be incorporated in the larger team building structure to really exploit locality and geography. The hunt is a marvelous tool for reopening eyes to familiar sights. A cryptic definition of a 3D object – as in an I-SPY question – does wonders for rediscovering the neighbourhood and its unique features.

Over a period of time, hunters who are exposed to such aspects of the hunt have the range of their subconscious extended. It is there that the great problems are solved – after extended periods of concentrated effort. The ordinary world that we pass through everyday dazzles in its details. Puzzles and Patterns exist all around us. Next time you drop into Equatorial Hotel, Penang go to the fountain and find out how many unique paths there are for the water to come down. Try to do it within 30 minutes. This is another unique quality that the best treasure hunts can provide- transforming real world situations into case studies for teams to crack and solve! In one swoop, we connect with our surroundings in a unique way and link disparate concepts that would otherwise lie idle in the mind. The forging of unusual synaptic paths in the brain is crucial for breakthroughs.

The permanence of such paths is made possible by participating in hunts that exploit the surroundings in a multitude of ways. Not only via signages, but by pictures and symbols, by 3d objects and repetitive features, by patterns and links – is the mind stretched and becomes a ‘transmuter’ of the ‘leaden’ world into golden cornucopias of endless inspiration. The next time you hop into a car with others and start off on a treasure hunt – remember this : working with other minds to solve problems is a great opportunity that comes very rarely in most peoples’ working lives. Working together enhances everyone – but in subtly different ways. Be sure to participate fully. Prepare as you would an exam. Partake of the camaraderie and bonding that such an event offers. Brainstorm the harder clues. Listen and do your part in researching and paring. Contribute in decisions that have to be made. Step back when silence is best. When you do your part, the team’s energy flows like water and all members ride the wave. There is nothing quite like solving a hard problem as a team. The concatenations of insights from dissimilar minds have the singular effect of the whole group experiencing a soliton in consciousness! At its apotheosis, the hunt liberates and lithifies the isolated litters and slivers of sentience into limpid lucidity.

JayMen