December 2020

If life gives you lemons, make a lemon cheese cake! This is a story of one such lemony situation. A client of ours, who happens to be a giant publication from India, contacted us for their L&D requirement. They were striving to deliver behavioural learning insights through a team engagement intervention and wanted us to help them curate the experience, from scratch. The brief we received said that there would be around 300 participants, who need to experience a fun and high energy intervention. The team engagement needed to be based on a set of values, including - - Collaboration - Accountability - Delivering value - Speaking out - Going beyond Sounds like a cake walk, doesn’t it? But, it their brief came with its own set of challenges. From a non-negotiable need for cluster seating to having only 75 minutes to run the whole intervention - the challenges were daunting but conquerable. Furthermore, the even was taking place in a jam-packed banquet hall with almost no space for the participants to walk around. It is times like these, when you put on your creative hat, ponder for some time, scout for that secret recipe, whip up a delicious ‘lemon cheesecake’ and delight them. Needless to say, that is exactly what we did! The activity we decided to conduct for this group is called the Maze Challenge. A table-based activity, it is perfect for conferences and large groups. Just like the name, it is a maze, but a digital one. Each team is given a tab with the game installed in it. Their task is to manoeuver through the maze to find a notebook hidden in this maze and escape in time. Also, this wouldn’t be like any other maze, but one filled with challenges and life threating obstacles such as high radiation, wild beasts, and even explosives! The game also offers over 105 trails making it an immersive experience for all participants, regardless of what their use case might be. The learning from this activity aligned very well to the client expectations too. The behaviour displayed by the Navigator – a team member who guides the rest through the maze and is also accountable for the success of the team. While others held in their hands some critical information that helped them. Without this, they would surely die. Speaking out and sharing their opinions openly during decision making is an integral part of the game; Furthermore, taking one for the team and delivering value through those fun tasks set for the teams - it all came out beautifully from the activity. We even brought out the collaboration aspect through a surprise switch during the critical phase of the activity where one person per team was asked to collaborate with the team adjacent to theirs. To add the local Indian flavor to this, we changed an important character of this activity called the ‘Wise One’ to an Indian mythological character called ‘Naradmuni’. Two of our team members received a huge applause and hooting from the teams when they made a grand entry into the banquet room chanting, ‘Narayan Narayan.’ The wise one or in this case Naradmuni, was the only one who could bring the teams back to life if they died in the maze. Of course, it all came at a cost! Our Naradmuni’s had some creative tasks up their sleeves for the teams. And watching them perform to those tasks that included dancing, singing and acting stirred up a laugh riot for everyone present in that room. The debrief or post activity reflection was indeed a cake walk after this engrossing activity. We had two winnings teams that evening, who also volunteered to jump on the stage and do their little victory dance! The overall flow of the program was as following - the initial few minutes of quick energisers that helped break the ice with the participants, was followed by an hour of immersive digital gaming. We witnesses arguments, blame-games, discussions, dances, pleads and big hurray’s! The show finally came to stop with our reflective debrief session, which helped put things into perspective for the entire crowd. And before we knew it, it was time to call it a day! We managed to pull it all together using the creative digital solutions by our partner Urban Gaming. Offering a team building experience that leads to many insights easily applicable back at work, through a cutting-edge digital experience – if that isn’t a lemon cheesecake then we don’t know what is ☺

December 2020 - FocusU

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