Find the hidden potential in your teams
A fun and versatile experiential training activity that can be used for any size group for any time between 15 minutes and 3½ hours depending on your requirements and how much learning you wish to achieve. MiniTreasure is a team treasure hunt that is played indoors, using a large cartoon street scene full of celebrity caricatures.
Finally, a team activity that doesn’t involve building anything – except great teams!
The pack includes everything you need to train up to 3 teams of 2 – 12 team members at one time. All parts except for the Team Discussion Booklets and Answer Sheets are reusable. For training sessions with more than 3 teams at the same time, order 1 x MiniTreasure Extra Team Pack per extra team required. For subsequent sessions, order 1 x Consumable Team Pack (containing 1 Team Discussion Booklet and 1 Answer Sheet) per team.
More than just an engaging and fun time, MiniTreasure is based on years of experience of using experiential activities to generate real team learning. The provided structured and focused debriefing process turns a team’s MiniTreasure experience into a powerful learning tool.
The Team Discussion Booklet leads all teams through a process of discovering relevant learning that has an impact back in the workplace.
Learning Outcomes–your participants will:
• Discover where they are as a team on the team performance continuum
• Identify 6 areas of team effectiveness
• Recognise existing blockages to the team’s performance
• Agree at least 3 action points to implement back in the workplace
• Capture additional learning points for later implementation.
What’s included?
All you need to run a 3-team session, including:
• A comprehensive Facilitator Guide with session plans and full guidance on running successful sessions
• A 512MB USB Flash Drive with 3 PowerPoint presentations (for briefing teams) showing them how to score their answers and for introducing the debriefing process
• 1 x Facilitator copy of the Team Discussion Booklet
• 1 x Facilitator copy of the NCR two-part Answer Sheet
• 3 x Team Discussion Booklets – for the structured debriefing session
• 3 x NCR two-part Team Answer Sheets
• 3 x large (132 cm x 60 cm) folded Street Scenes
• 3 x Card Sets – including 60 Question Cards and 36 Character Cards
• 3 x Magnifying Glasses (6x magnification) for some of the more detailed questions
• 1 x Presentation Case that everything fits neatly into.
Extra 'Team Packs' are available to allow you to run a session for any number of teams.
How Minitreasure Works
Teams are given a magnifying glass and a large folded street scene to unfold and become familiar with. The whole scene unfolds to fit nicely on a standard 6-foot table, with half the scene the right way round from one side of the table and the other half the right way round from the other side.
After a suitable preparation time, the teams are given their card sets. These have 36 cards with details on each of the celebrity caricatures present in the street scene and, more importantly, 60 questions. The questions are arranged in 3 categories – straightforward, rhyming and picture.
Trainers can set their own timing for the activity. Minitreasure can be used as:
• A great, short icebreaker at the beginning of a larger programme
• A learning-focused session of up to 3½ hours
• A recurring energiser for teams to return to throughout a longer programme
• … or anything in between!
The Team Performance Continuum
Working Group
A loosely formed set of individuals who happened to be all working on the same activity. Little or no structure to the team and very little in the way of obvious team processes helping the team to do the best that it could with the challenge. Team members rarely talked with one another about the challenge and when they did the discussions had little impact on the way that the team went about it.
Pseudo-Team
Team members got on well with one another and there was a friendly enjoyable atmosphere while they tackled the challenge. There was little or no disagreement or conflict of any kind. No one challenged the way that the team worked or the speed that it was working at. All team members were happy to trust one another to work towards the common goal of getting as many questions right as possible in the time they had available.
Potential Team
Even if team members enjoyed the challenge they experienced some frustration because they clearly didn’t all agree on the best way go about it. There may have been some open disagreements or people may have 'bottled up' their frustration for the sake of keeping the peace, but more than one person was dissatisfied with the team’s approach and that was never resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
Real Team
The team had a productive discussion near the start of the activity about the best way to tackle it. Between them, the team members offered more than one way of going about it and, after looking at the pros and cons of each, they agreed a common approach. During the activity they checked that their approach was effective and anyone who felt it wasn’t said so and was listened to.
High-Performance Team
The team did everything in the 'Real Team' description above but also showed a high commitment to making sure that every team member enjoyed the challenge and was comfortable doing it throughout the exercise. Even before they were given the Team Discussion booklet, they had started to examine how they could have done better at the activity and what learning they could take back to their workplace.
The team types are adapted for MiniTreasure from 'The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organisation' by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith (1992 – 2005). The least effective team type is at the top and the most effective at the bottom.
