Exercise - The Team has 10 Minutes to Get the Fire Extinguisher out of the middle of the circle and put into the bucket
At no time may a member of the team enter the circle
At no time may a member of the team touch the Fire Extinguisher with their hands
The fire extinguisher must not touch the ground outside the circle
The team may use as much or a little of the supplied equipment as they like
For Staff - There are really easy and really complex ways of solving this problem, but there is no 1 right method.
Some of the equipment that i added as "Red Herrings" was actually used and used to good effect - i.e. one time the spoons were bent and used as hooks!
When finished - Standard team debrief
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Exercise 3 - A Notty Problem
Purpose of exercise - Learn to keep control in a situation where sub groups appear
Preperation - Take a shoe lace and tie 3 nots in it, one at each end being a simple knot and a more difficult knot in the middle.
Example below
Get a Long length of rope, long enough for everyone in the team to hold with both hands.
Exercise - Line up all the people who are going to take part in the exercise in a straight line with the long rope on the floor in front of them
Get them to put their hands out in front of them (palms down). Then tell them to pick up the rope.
From this point until the end of the exercise, they cannot move thoer hands from that part of the rope (no letting go, no sliding their hands along it)
Now the staff nominate where in the rope they want the knots made. i.e. knot 1 between billy and johnny. etc.
Now set them a time limit (15 mins normally works) and sit back and watch the chaos!
Now tell them to make the knots shown on the shoelace at the locations you nominate without taking their hands off or along the rope!
For Staff - You must marshall this exercise carefully, preferablly with more than 1 person to make sure that no-one lets go of the rope or slides it through thier hands
When finished - Debrief on how they tackled this, i.e. did they split into sub groups, 1 to tackle each knot?
In the leaderless version of this, does each knot get created in a different way?
In the leader led version, does information flow between the team? a good example is if they still all stand in a straight line, or do they move into a circle/huddle to talk to each other (no-one said they couldn't move around! - just keep holding that rope)
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Exercise 4 - Flip Over
Purpose of exercise - Tests your patience & consideration for others when working in a team in a confined space
Preperation - Put a Matt on the floor (ours was 1 metre by 2 metres, but it needs to be only large enough to accomodate all the team members and leaving just a little space
Exercise - Get all the team members to stand on the matt
Tell them that at no time can they step off of the matt (our's are traditionally told that they are surrounded by Shark infested custard!)
Tell them that they have 15 mins to completely turn the mat upside down, but without stepping off of it.
For Staff - If they do step/fall of off the matt then make them start again (they love that bit)
If they complete it too easily add a few more team members and tell them to try again.
Reversley, if it is way too difficult then try again after removing a person or two.
Just don't make it too easy!
When finished - Find if they came up with a plan on how to tackle it? If so did that plan work
When this was ran recently, the plan they came up with failed, but they still tried it again another 2 times, classic panicking
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Exercise
Purpose of exercise -
Preperation -
Exercise -
For Staff -
When finished -
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