Team Building at a Mid-Winter Festival
At the end of January, I attended my first “Snow Down festival in Durango Colorado. I would describe it as Durango’s version of Mardi Gras , five days and four nights of midwinter silliness. Each year has a theme and this year’s was “Ye Olde Snowdown 2008 , where everyone was encouraged to don Authurian costumes! There are a ton of events including an evening parade and the usual and customary late night reverie. And there was the ultimate team-building event , the annual outhouse-stuffing contest!
As you might imagine the contest consists of teams of people trying to stuff themselves into one of those construction or event site biffys. The team that manages to cram in the most bodies wins a gift certificate to the local restaurant sponsoring the event. (I don’t know the last time you have been in one of those port-a-potties, but there is a little placard inside that states; “Maximum occupancy 100 persons , that always made me laugh!)
The event was highly entertaining, but what struck me was the teamwork required to succeed. First of all, this is not an event that a serious team would try to wing. It takes some major-league planning starting with the make up of the team. One would think, that you would want to just assemble a group of little people and call it a day. Well, the people who go on the bottom need to be strong enough to hold up the people piled on top of them and the way that people enter or are stuffed into the biff (depending on where you are in the process) is highly choreographed. And once you fit everyone in the door closes for 10 seconds before everyone gets to pile out as the crowd counts off the number of people exiting the outhouse. The day we were there the winning team managed to cram in 17!
Now I would never recommend this activity as a team building exercise for the usual corporate client. The liability would be too great. I think all of the participants at this event had to sign waivers that they were doing this contest at their own risk. However, what I do think you can learn from this activity is the importance of planning in any team activity or process. I’ve seen countless teams plunge right into a project with no planning at all only t have backtrack, slowdown, and actually redo work. So come to “Snow down in da Nile 2009 and see how teams can work effectively!