Bill Nussey's Notes

I have always been a fan of team building events to help organizations work more collaboratively and help people build more personal connections. We have done countless events like this at Silverpop over the years and I thought I’d share a few that have worked particularly well.

Team Story Telling

Overview: Each team of 4-8 people is given the same stack of pictures. The team must work together to create a story from a subset of the pictures and share it with the other teams.

Setup:

• Each team is given the same stack of 50-60 pictures
• Each picture is printed on a sheet of paper with room at the bottom for notes
• Use Flickr or other photo sites for ideas

Rules:

• Split up the group into teams of 4-8 people (six worked well for us)
• Each team must pick 40 or more of the pictures to create their story
• The teams are given 30 minutes to finish and name their stories and then present them to each other
• Optional: people can vote for their favorite story (other than their own) and the team with the most votes is declared the winner

My colleagues and I at Silverpop recently tried this at an offsite for our top 50 leaders. We set up the teams with people that normally did not work together so we could help build as many new bridges as possible. The mix of photos ranged from humorous to dramatic to artistic.

The results were incredible. Most of the stories ended up being funny (some were hilarious) but the topics and ideas brought out an amazing level of creativity across the teams. All in all, this was a great team building exercise I can easily recommend to any group that wants to exercise their “right brains” and build camaraderie at the same time.

Thanks to Ted Murphy and his awesome blog for this team building idea.