Team Exercises
 

Creating a high performance team is easy, right? -- Wrong!

Building a strong team takes work and time and Collaborations team exercises can help.  Whether you are creating a team or studying group behavior, Collaborations exercises will provide insight you can not get anywhere else.  Collaborations exercises demonstrate in a short period of time what might take a team weeks or months to learn on its own.

Collaborations is designed to be simple in concept but deep in insight.  The concept of each exercise is clear and should be familiar to everyone.  Every participant will be able to look at the situation and be able to determine what action should be taken.  The difficulty is getting the group to work together.

Collaborations consists of three different sets of exercises.  In each exercise, a group is required to work together to achieve an objective.  Exercises are run on the computer of the exercise leader and is shown on their screen.  Exercise leaders will project their screen for all participants to see.  Participants use 'clickers' from Turning Technologies to provide their individual input.

The three Collaborations exercises are:

• Maze - In this exercise, participants are asked to move an object through a simple maze to reach a goal.  The hitch, all participants are controlling the same object and must work together to determine how it will move.  Simple in concept, difficult in practice.  Maze is excellent at demonstrating the phases of team development, leadership styles, effective communication, and social psychology concepts.

• Pong - This is the original video game of Pong.  Participants are divided into two teams.  The hitch, all participants on a team are controlling the same paddle.  Warning - participants tend to get strongly engaged and things can get loud.

• Pattern - This exercise asks a group to create a single image.  Images can be created using color or shape palettes.  One of the lessons from this exercise is that the final result is not what any individual imagined at the beginning.

Maze and Pattern exercises can be used by researchers to better understand the characteristics of team effectiveness.  Exercise leaders can collect data on exercises to compare the results of different teams.

In addition to the team building and educational benefits, running Collaborations exercises is a lot of fun.