Tool "Group building: Mission Impossible"

Language: English

Project Featuring This Tool: All Together

Themes:Other

This group building activity can be adapted and used for any seminar or training course

Aim

  • To build a positive and effective working environment and a sense of the group as a team.

Objectives

  • To develop ground rules for working ‘team contract’
  • To interact directly with all the other participants
  • To touch on all topics related to the Training course
  • To get to know the space
Time 1 - 2 hours
Approximate number of participants 20 to 30
Age not relevant
Date published 23 Feb 2010, 19:48

Materials

  • Presentation
  • Mission impossible music
  • Beamer
  • Flipcharts
  • Markers

Setting

A large space that involves people exploring the venue

Step-by-step instructions

The participants are shown a powerpoint with a list of tasks and are told that they have one hour to accomplish them. The team then leaves the room and comes back after one hour. The tasks could be:

  1. learn everybody’s name by heart
  2. count the steps in the youth hostel
  3. find out the lunch/dinner menu for the whole week
  4. come up with 25 ideas on what to do in the evenings
  5. check out the opening times of the store at the corner and the prices for soft-drinks, beer, crisps and crackers
  6. convert those prices into Latvian Lats, Canadian Dollars and Afghanistan Afghani
  7. make a list which participant has brought which cheese/ food from their home country and what other specialty they might have brought as well.
  8. find out which participant is the oldest and which participant is the youngest, which participants have birthdays on the same day, which have birthday in the same week and which in the same month
  9. make a picture of all participants in front of the hostel and in the ??
  10. make a short (3 min) theatre play using the words/concepts: yoga, toothbrush, inclusion, children and opera
  11. come up with 30 reasons why it is better to be at the seminar rather than back at home, right now

Debriefing

After the presentation of the results and activity is debriefed. These might be some guiding questions.

  • How do you feel now?
  • How did it work? How did you manage to accomplish those tasks?

*What lessons can we draw from this experience?

  • Did you experience something that you would like to see happen again in this week?

*Did you experience something that you would like to avoid in this week?

Steaming from the debriefing, the participants are asked to agree on a team-contract, establishing some guiding principles for the upcoming week to ensure a pleasant and respectful working environment.

Tips

Leave a list of the tasks somewhere where they can be found but only if the group looks!

Attached files