The discovery route to
teambuilding
Teambuilding plays an important
role in turning the old South Africa into the new. People of
different races and cultural backgrounds, who would have barely
acknowledged each other a dozen years ago, must now pull together to
transform their organisations into competitive enterprises.
Today it is a fact that men,
women, whites, blacks, the fit and the disabled all have a
constitutional right to be treated equally and enjoy the same
opportunities in the workplace. Never mind that life is not fair and
organisations seldom, in fact, treat people equally – the ideal is
there and that’s what counts for the teambuilding trainer and
facilitator.
Unfortunately, teambuilding can go
horribly wrong. Instead of building trust it can destroy it; instead
of cementing new relationships it can drive people apart. This may
happen due to poor facilitation or wrongly chosen activities.
Sometimes too much truth is told and the result is that people leave
the teambuilding venue feeling offended instead of developing a
buoyant sense that we are all, after all, only human. Learning to
forgive each other’s shortcomings is part of teambuilding.
As a pioneer of river rafting in
South Africa, and also a Professor of Communication in the 1990s, I
have studied and managed teambuilding from both the practical and
theoretical perspectives. Practically, when rafting began in this
country, it was possible to persuade companies that all they needed
to do was chuck their diverse staffs together in a whitewater
inflatable and shout “Paddle!” Sheer terror would do the rest.
Raft crews did come to depend on
each other, but often in the wrong ways. Blacks who could not swim
were cursed by their white colleagues who needed to save them. The
compliment was returned by the blacks who cursed whites for their
arrogance. They completed the task all right – they got down the
river – but the outcomes did not achieve what corporate heads fondly
hoped for: greater mutual understanding.
Teambuilding has come a long way
from those days. Where I now live and work at Otters’ Haunt near
Parys, we specialise in relationship-building through information
exchange. The outdoors still comes into it but the emphasis is on
personal and group discovery rather than shock therapy. As a
facilitator, I employ the concept that IN-formation is what
is new and interesting, EX-formation is what we know already
(or think we know). Exformation is tied to our stale ideas and
prejudices.
Small groups from 4-20 identify
what they know about each other, and from that flows what they do
not know. Discovery means setting out to learn what you know
you don’t know about others. In pursuit of what they need to
know about colleagues, individuals discover things about themselves
that they did not know either. This technique is based on innovative
developments in human information theory (as distinct from
cybernetics or machine information theory).
Those who benefit most from this
approach tend be colleagues who have worked together for some time
but suffer all the ills of having only exformation about each other,
not real information. Management groups and executives are as prone
to this as technicians in the factory setting.
For more information about what we
offer, email Otters’ Haunt or call me to discuss your facilitation
needs. We also provide a venue, the
Heron's Nest,
for small-group brainstorms in an
exclusive garden setting very different from the formal atmosphere
of the average hotel or lodge. The venue can accommodate 15
comfortably is fully online throughout, enabled by wifi connections to internet
satellite. We are only 2km from Parys on the North West Province
bank of the Vaal.
info@otters.co.za Mobile: 084 245 2490
Article: February 2005
To Top
|
