Team building

Today (technically yesterday), we had a team building day with the entire company (well, almost entire anyway) at Brasserie Kwadraat in Ekeren. The day started with tea/coffee and croissants, followed by an introduction of the team building people and the obligatory speech/presentation by the Big Boss.

The first activity of the day was a getting-to-know-you session; the group was divided in two manageable parts of 13 people each and the goal was for each person in the subgroup to have a short face-to-face with all the others in the group, with 5 minutes per conversation. It wasn't just a conversation to have, but to determine one nontrivial common trait; tell each other something special about oneself; and set an expectation for the day.
This was a good opportunity to learn something new from each other. Apparently, I'm no the only biker in the team, there are some former-bikers and wannabe-bikers as well. There are also a number of people who share my passion for DIY and tinkering with stuff. And there are some who can appreciate classical music as well.

The second activity was a practice for some quick on-the-spot team work: a small competition between two subgroups of 13 people. The assignment: get all 13 people on a 2x3m piece of polytarp, cut away as much as possible, and flip over the tarp. All this without anyone setting any foot outside the plastic. The winner of the two teams was the one with the smallest piece of plastic left.
It was oficially called an ex-aequo, but our team actually lost.

Lunch was good (smoked salmon).

The third activity was a larger and complicated project, requiring some planning: Mute and Blind. Again the group was divided in two teams of 13 each. Each team would have one mute person and twelve blind ones, all working together to reach an objective. The assignment was: divide the team of blind people into two subteams of 6, have each subteam find a piece of rope, have each subteam lay out the piece of rope in an equilateral triangle with one point touching one end of a narrow bridge, get each subteam inside their triangle, and finally get each subteam to cross the bridge to the other side.
The mute guy can see everything, but cannot move or touch anyone and thus has to steer all the blind people around on the field using non-verbal signs (clapping hands, whistling, etc). The blind people can talk (to each other and to the mute guy), but not see anything.
An operation of this magnitude needed some preparation of course. We were given given some time to agree on some sort of strategy to get the job done. Admittedly, the preparation of our team was complete and utter chaos, until somebody took the bull by the horns and started making some decisions. We finally ended up with a distributed control system and parallel triangle generation.
This means that the leader of each subteam asked simple yes/no questions to the mute and the mute had only three available instructions: two replies and one interrupt (1 clap for yes, two claps for no and multiple claps for full stop). The control system was distributed in that the mute did not send out instructions (central control), but rather relied on the intelligence of the subteam leaders to ask correct questions (this has one drawback: if something goes wrong in the communication, it requires tremendous imagination on the part of the questioner to realize that one or more of the previous answers of the mute were actually wrong). The subteams used a CSMA/CD protocol to communicate with the mute: basic Aloha. Just listen to the others and ask the question; if questions are asked at the same time, shut up and try again later.
The parallel triangle generation consisted of two methods of creating the triangle: one was simple to execute but needed interaction with the mute to position two of the corners; the other was slightly more complex, but needed only a final confirmation of the mute as a doublecheck for whether the triangle was correctly laid out. As such, both triangles could be laid out simultaneously.
Our team won this one.

The last assignment was to stage out each of the five Company Values in groups of five people: enterprising, urge for realisation, respectfulness, realism, and professionalism.
The day was concluded by having people compliment each other.

Dinner was good.