A couple of times a year I find myself involved in an event with both work sessions and team building. My involvement is with the work sessions and is always focused on core business issues. The organisers will often schedule in some team building components for a change of pace.
All professional team building organisations have trained facilitators to lead the activity and draw out the lessons. In each case I have seen the participants understand the lessons and become good at working as a team.
Yet I am constantly surprised to see that when we return for the work sessions, everything that was learnt during the team building has evaporated. Just one session before the participants were communicating, relying on each other or stopping to plan a little before jumping into action. Now they don't.
What happened?
There is a clue in the last posting Context is Everything. Learning in one context does not mean we will apply in another context.
In activity or game based team building the teams are learning how to "win" at the task they have been assigned. They are learning that each activity has certain declared rules and even more unwritten rules. They learn that success requires a certain type of interaction between the participants. They are becoming good at wining the game. Unfortunately this game is not the same as winning as a management team.
So when they get back into the business focused sessions they forget the rules of the previous game and start playing by the old rules. The learning is not carried over from one context to another. For team building to be effective we have to close the gap between learning and application. At Vaughan Govier we prefer to make them the same.
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