Teambuilding 2.0
Many company executives are now questionning the value of 'traditional' forms of teambuilding such as executive retreats or staff games (e.g. Executive team building: stop wasting their time). Recently I ran across a New York technnology company GoCrossOffice pioneering a more novel approach....
GoCrossOffice integrate both virtual and physical elements into their team games. I am sure GCO are not the only player in this space as it looks like a very promising future market area. The GCO website references a number of independent research reports on the use of gaming for educational purposes by IBM, and Forrester.
GCO was developed by students at Yale University as a "next-generation teambuilding tool" and differs from traditional teambuilding exercises by bundling training with a fun game that spans the virtual and real worlds.
Teams meet in the real world to collaborate and discuss strategy around a game that takes place virtually. By cutting out off-site trips, companies can save time and money and build more structure into their teambuilding.
For a young company GCO have some impressive clients including the likes of Google and Vivendi - heres a case study from their website if you want to find out more
About Ken ThompsonKen Thompson is an expert practitioner in the area of bioteaming, swarming, virtual enterprise networks, virtual professional communities and virtual teams and has published two landmark books:
Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Nature's Best Designs
The Networked Enterprise: Competing for the future through Virtual Enterprise Networks
Ken writes the highly popular bioteams blog which has over 500 articles on all aspects of bioteams (aka organizational biomimicry) - in other words how human groups can learn from nature's best teams.Ken is also founder of an exciting European technology company Swarmteams which provides unique patent-pending bioteaming technologies for all shapes and sizes of groups, social networks, business clusters, virtual/mobile communities and enterprises. Swarmteams enables groups to be more responsive and agile by fully integrating their mobile phones and the web with bioteam working techniques.
The latest Swarmteams implementation is SwarmTribes which helps social object owners (e.g. musicians/bands, sports teams, film-makers) and good cause sponsors (e.g. Volunteering, Environmental, Public Health) to form unique collaborations with their fans/supporters for mutual benefit.
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14 Comments
Bioteams Books Reviews
Collaborative thinking: four key roles
In his unique book Dialogue and the art of thinking together William Issacs introduces the Four-Player System originally developed by David Kantor. This is a very important technique for supporting real collaborative thinking in teams.
Buy it now from:
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Amazon.Co.UK
We can help you to organize your team building activity in Italy
I guess I'd get more excited about the team building value if it was structured to support actual team projects in which people are involved - at work or in civic or other parts of their lives
In this dire economic 2009 that would be most welcome
- another fan of Ken
Many Thanks Kare - I know I learn so much more if its in the context of my real projects, opportunities and challenges.
I am sure companies are happy to know that they can conduct team building activities without spending too much. Other team buiding events organizer might soon develop this kind of strategy as well.
Kate
Thanks for the tips and great info. Very appreciative. Its posts and blogs like these that really do help people. Thank you.
I saw your site about team building and i really loved it. Thank you
The name Bumble Bee reminds me in the movie of Transformer but the I don't know the real meaning of it and I'm a little bit confused of it.
"The GCO website references a number of independent research reports on the use of gaming for non-educational purposes by IBM, and Forrester."
I guess you should make it into educational purposes. Kind and even teenagers are into games espcially roll playing games or RPG.
Hi Kopi
Thanks for the comment and for spotting the typo which I have now corrected
Best Regards
KEN
Many Thanks Kare - I know I learn so much more if its in the context of my real projects, opportunities and challenges
I am looking for simple to implement teambuilding exercises that doesn't need too many materials.
|I live in Alberta and our company needs some sort of trivia/scavenger event to promote teambuilding. The challenge, however, is it can't be a hunt that requires knowing the city very well. A lot of my co-workers are here from other countries, helping with a merger, so they don't know the city very well.
GCO was developed by students at Yale University as a "next-generation teambuilding tool" and differs from traditional teambuilding exercises by bundling training with a fun game that spans the virtual and real worlds.
Teams meet in the real world to collaborate and discuss strategy around a game that takes place virtually. By cutting out off-site trips, companies can save time and money and build more structure into their teambuilding.