“It’s 11.30am on a midsummer’s day and your plane has just crash-landed on a remote desert island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Your task is to rank these 20 items that were salvaged from the plane in order of their importance to the survival of you and the team.”
That’d be one way to introduce the classic team and trust-building exercise called Desert Survival! A powerful way to demonstrate that teams outperform individuals and that collaboration’s key to success, this activity always goes down well.
There are three ways to play:
- With actual items that the team can hold and put in piles
- With pictures of each item or
- With items simply written down on a board or piece of paper
In any case, the team gets around 40 minutes to discuss each item, reflect on their respective pros/cons, and work together to decide what they’re going to keep. In the process, they’ll realize the:
- Need to speak up if they wish to make a point
- Problem with stubbornness in a collective environment
- Value of compromise and sacrifice in search of unity
- Gaps in their personal knowledge/reasoning that others can help fill
From a managerial perspective, the Desert Island scenario also reveals how well the team works together and how easily they find solutions to a problem. You’ll see how rapidly they approach a state of synergy – where collaboration enables them to leverage their individual strengths and become greater than the sum of their parts.
What you need:
- A selection of items to be used on a desert island (or pictures of them) – unless you choose to write them down instead.
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30 Trust-building exercises and activities for teams
Because trust forms the bedrock of any relationship, it’s easier to get along, work well together, and feel motivated about coming into the office each day.
