Escape Room Experience (ERE): (3 hours)
The team will participate in a collaborative, in-person multi-media Escape Room Exercise requiring the use of at least one or more laptops, an internet connection, and comfortable seating and table space for the entire team.
The team will start by completing the ERE, a 45–minute exercise that will require the use of teamwork skills and will organically reveal issues and strengths within the team as they work to solve problems and unlock new puzzles. A facilitator will be present to explain the rules of the exercise and to monitor the team as they progress.
Once the exercise is complete, team members will individually reflect on aspects of their teamwork and team dynamic that helped or hindered them in their progress through the exercise.
This will be followed by a facilitated team discussion with our experts about those same questions, looking to collectively identify aspects of their teamwork that need improvement.
Research Driving This Session:
How Transformative Learning Theory Can Inform Team Building Pedagogy: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10525629251388109
Learning to Collaborate (2.5 hours)
Collaboration is a good idea that rarely occurs in practice. Most teams produce results that not only do not reflect the best of what everyone knows, but are often a compromise solution that is inferior to a better one known by most of the team. Collaboration is complex and learned behavior. The research we published in leading management journals (and is subject of a Harvard Business Review case study) identified the learning milestones in the process of collaboration. Our training program leads participants in teams to engage in the learning of each valuable milestone essential before they emerge as collaborative teams.
In this in-person session, participants will engage in a process that produces cognitive, emotional, and behavioral learning.
Research Driving This Session:
An Examination of Collaboration in High-Technology New Product Development Processes: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0737-6782(97)00080-5
Implementation Training (2.5 hours)
What is planned and what is produced are often two very different things. We do not know whether a plan was good or not until we see the results we achieved. Implementation is a science that rarely gets a mention in business schools or in the real world.
This in-person session is devoted to the challenge of implementation; participants will learn about the technology of communication essential for collaborative problem solving and turning their solutions into reality.
Research Driving This Session:
Argyris Is Arduous: A Strategy for Teaching and Learning Models I & II Theories-in-Use: Fundamentals of Implementing Complex Initiatives in Organizations: https://www.amazon.com/Argyris-Arduous-Theories-use-organizations/dp/1497503450