Team development adventure | Professional Services
When does a group become a team?
Is it when it is formed, or when it’s been around for a while, or when someone new joins or leaves?
While this question is mysterious and is perhaps also highly personal, what we do know is that there are ways to help a collection of individuals become more ‘team’.
Wabi-sabi team adventures was a bespoke piece of work commissioned to help a highly diverse operations team strengthen their connections to each other and develop one step deeper in their shared history.
The adventure drew on the historically Japanese concept of Wabi-sabi, a kind of reverence towards the story and imperfections evident or implicit in an object that has endured over time. Adapting this approach to apply it to human beings, we curated a team experience that united individual visual storytelling with a training of perception; the habit of looking for what to appreciate in team-members. The atmosphere in the room was electric as people who’d known each other for years/weeks came to discover and understand unknown or previously hidden aspects of each others’ history, and alongside this a deeper empathy, insight and treasuring of the courage and individuality of those around them. There were tears in the room as each team member wrote words of encouragement for the others, sharing them in the form of hearts dotted all over the individual’s personal story chart. The sense of recognition and celebration lifted spirits and gave new courage and patience for the tricky and demanding places that inevitably accompany shared human endeavour.