Whitewater Participant Activity

NOTE: The facilitator will require the facilitators guide to complete this activity.

Participants respond to the following story-line: “You and a group are whitewater rafting on challenging sections of the South Fork of the American River. During a sudden storm, the raft overturns in the river and much of the equipment is lost. It is getting dark and much colder. How will you survive?”

Participants rank the items they must salvage for survival in order of their importance.

Our Survival Simulations have helped thousands of team members to experience and understand group dynamics at first hand.

Participants have an opportunity to focus on key teamwork processes including:

• Making consensus decisions

• Solving complex problems

• Managing different viewpoints and perspectives

• Influencing and communicating

Structure:

The resources provide a safe means of experiencing adventure situations that challenge participants to think and work as a team. The products demonstrate the importance of group process in achieving team effectiveness and help to build synergy within work teams. They offer the participants an opportunity to observe team dynamics in a non-threatening environment providing insights for team development.

Adventure simulations present participants with believable dilemmas—ones in which they can easily picture themselves. The activities ask the participants to individually solve the problem and then repeat the problem-solving process as a group using consensus decision-making techniques. The activities demonstrate that effective teams frequently produce better results than individuals alone.

Applications:

• Provide stand-alone team-building training

• Use as warm-up activity in larger training designs

• Assessment centres

• Evaluating the success of team development processes

• An on-job team skills ‘refresher’.