Alaskan Adventure

A great ice breaker for managing group conflict and building consensus decision-making

Scenario

'You and some friends have chartered a 36-foot boat for a weekend trip of fishing and glacier viewing. The weather turns much colder with freezing rain and snow, causing poor visibility. Your group manages to reach a rocky shore, but is left in a precarious situation with very few salvageable items to help.'

Participants must rank the items in order of their importance for survival. Our Survival Simulations have helped thousands of team members to experience and understand group dynamics at first hand.

Participants have an opportunity to focus on key teamwork processes including:

• Making consensus decisions

• Solving complex problems

• Managing different viewpoints and perspectives

• Influencing and communicating

Structure:

The resources provide a safe means of experiencing adventure situations that challenge participants to think and work as a team. The products demonstrate the importance of group process in achieving team effectiveness and help to build synergy within work teams. They offer the participants an opportunity to observe team dynamics in a non-threatening environment providing insights for team development.

Adventure simulations present participants with believable dilemmas—ones in which they can easily picture themselves. The activities ask the participants to individually solve the problem and then repeat the problem-solving process as a group using consensus decision-making techniques. The activities demonstrate that effective teams frequently produce better results than individuals alone.

Applications:

• Provide stand-alone team-building training

• Use as warm-up activity in larger training designs

• Assessment centres

• Evaluating the success of team development processes

• An on-job team skills ‘refresher’.