So you're putting together a team.  Naturally, your first thought is to invite people who possess the necessary skills and knowledge required to get the job done.  But let's say that you have at your disposal a large pool of candidates with rather similar abilities and experience.  What criteria, then, do you use for choosing your teammates?

With all things being equal, your next step is to look at the potential personality mix. But this raises an interesting philosophical question:  Do you select a homogenous group with similar personalities and the potential for common vision and harmony, or do you go for a heterogenous team with diverging personalities and the potential for energetic discussions from varied viewpoints?

Both strategies have their advantages, as well as their pitfalls.  With a group of homogenous personalities, for example, you are likely to have far fewer conflicts. Everyone gets along, everyone's communication styles are fairly similar.  There are fewer fights, a common vision…but somehow, this kind of group doesn't always perform up to its potential.  It seems to need the energy boost that comes from the impassioned, sometimes conflicting discussion of ideas.

With a heterogenous group, you get a different kettle of fish.  Personalities clash, and different communication styles can lead to one misunderstanding after another. Meetings seem like a war zone.  And yet, from the crucible of conflicting personalities and ideas can often arise some wonderfully creative energy and invention…IF you can keep teammates from killing each other.

Consider the case of colleagues Jean and Diane.  Jean has spent the last three years as a member of a homogenous workgroup characterized by a fondness for brainstorming. Ask a question on her team and everyone enthusiastically throws out a dozen ideas.  Idea generation is their talent, their "personality"; culling these ideas and making actual decisions - this they are not as good at.  But boy is it fun in this group thinking out loud and bouncing new thoughts off each other.

Diane, on the other hand, has spent the previous two years as a member of a team characterized by quick analysis and decision making.  Her group's "personality" is to hold up one idea at a time for group consideration, and then to assess that idea- either implementing or discarding it based on the person's ability to convince the others of the idea's merit. 

Now Jean and two of her fellow "brainstormers" find themselves on a four-person team with Diane and two of her fellow "assessers".  Rick, their boss, thinks this is a fine idea, in theory - creating a heterogenous team of "idea people" and "implementers": the best of both worlds. The reality, however - at least initially - is something of a battlefield.  At this new group's meetings, Jean and her gang consistently try to lead the team into idea-generation sessions.  Diane's posse, in response, attempts to assess each idea as it arises, constantly interrupting the other trio's brainstorming flow.  When Diane's group dominates, Jean's group feels shut down and unable to shine.  When Jean's partners prevail, Diane and her allies feel frustrated and impatient, forced to sit around uselessly, adding no input, while the other people spin their wheels and no decisions are made.

It strikes me that what we're talking about here is stability vs. dynamism.   When building a skyscraper, for example, you need to start by constructing solid base, but you can't simply stand pat when you've finished firming up the ground level.  You then need to reach upward, building each initially wobbly new level one at a time, until that new level has been stabilized. And then you reach upward again, dynamically. So, too, with teams.  You try to create as homogenous and as stable a team as you can, with a common purpose and an agreed-upon vision.  But too much homogeneity and stability leads to stagnation and complacency, and the team's productivity eventually degrades.  So you reach "upward" and add some "imbalance" - new teammates who shake things up with their different personalities and their conflicting outlooks.  Sparks fly…and dynamism happens.  The danger is that too much "dynamism", in the form of arguments and personal attacks, might knock the building over if not monitored and managed with skillful process and communication.

Rick's team, in its heterogeneity, has enormous potential.  If its group members can learn to communicate skillfully and understand each other's strengths (and weaknesses), their ability to generate innovation and change, and then to implement successful action plans, is virtually unlimited.  What the team needs, however, is a willingness to take turns letting each faction do what it's good at.  Jean's group might, for example, request very specifically, "Please let us brainstorm and think out loud for 5 minutes, without interruption. That's how we come up with our best ideas."  And Diane's group defers - this time - knowing that soon their chance will come to assess and implement the best of those ideas.   Neither faction may like the other group's style, and they may not always navigate the interactions skillfully, but they know the big picture: that the occasional conflicts are worth the pain for what they can help the team achieve together.   

And that's how you build a team skyscraper, my friends.  With the right mix of homogeneity and heterogeneity, of dynamism and stability.    

Traditions and rituals, it seems to me, are the glue of relationships.  The more rituals you create with people, the more firmly linked you all tend to become, no matter whether it’s work teams, lovers, friends, or family. So a department brings in pizza to the office every Friday; a retired couple goes to the same hotel every year at the same time (and stays in the same room); old high school friends get together on Thanksgiving to play football (my buddies called our annual game the “Turkey Bowl”).  As time goes by, these traditions not only provide people with something to look forward to, they also build up a store of collective memories – an oral history, a catalogue of events to be referenced at every reiteration of the ritual.  And once a tradition gets started, it can be very difficult to stop it.  Somehow, it just takes on a life of its own.

My fiancée, Jen, and I, like any couple, have quite a number of rituals, some quotidian, others a bit more idiosyncratic.  Every Sunday morning, for example, we go to brunch at Bambino’s, the Italian place down the street that gives you free scones with your meal.  Later that night, we do the Sunday crossword puzzle (by Merl Reagle, our favorite crossword constructor).  And every year, on the anniversary of our first date, we write treasure hunt clues for each other.  Yes, we are both treasure hunt geeks!  I’m not sure how the tradition first started; certainly my business has something to do with it.  In addition, Jen and I actually met on a treasure hunt (the annual BATH – Bay Area Treasure Hunt – staged by our friend Alexandra Dixon). Whatever the reason, our clue-writing tradition is now a joyous but very much required event.  You have to deliver the goods – an elegant little treasure hunt – or you’re in the doghouse. 

Traditions and rituals, as we all know, have rules by which all participants must abide.  In our case, the first rule of our anniversary treasure hunt tradition is 1) No one may talk about it in advance.  That’s right, the treasure hunt clues have to just appear at some point during the anniversary, without any build up. To paraphrase the movie Fight Club, “The first rule of Dave and Jen’s anniversary hunt is that you do not talk about Dave and Jen’s anniversary hunt.”  I suppose this was originally meant to cut down on expectations and to give the other person an out if they were too busy that year to come up with something.  Yeah, as if.   No matter how busy we are, we both always come up with a treasure hunt.

The second rule of our anniversary tradition is 2) The puzzles and clues must incorporate information about the relationship.  So a clue might incorporate pictures of all the places where we like to hang out.  Or it might involve a trivia quiz of all our favorite books.  This year, for example, I wrote a quiz consisting of characters from our favorite sci-fi TV and movie characters.  The point is to draw on your knowledge of your partner as well as from the hobbies/experience/traditions that you share as a couple. 

The final rule of our treasure hunt ritual is 3) At least one of the puzzles we write for each other must be completely new – a puzzle type our partner has never seen before. This is the toughest unspoken rule – at least for me.  From my perspective, Jen is a fountain of new clue ideas…a virtual clue generator.  Me, I have to work a bit harder, scouring puzzle and games books for weeks in advance, looking for something unique and different to borrow or adapt. Because you see, Jen is a darn good gamer.  I want my clues both to delight and to challenge her.  They’ve gotta strike that right balance, not too easy, not too hard. 

Our anniversary, March 21^st, just passed and once again we both pulled off the tradition, with pizzazz.  Jen wrote me four clues – one particularly cool one using a photocopy of a picture of us cut into jigsaw pieces, another involving a cypher created from barcodes on our favorite energy snack bars. (Clever girl!)  My clues for Jen included the above-mentioned sci-fi clue as well as a world map puzzle referring to places we’ve visited together over the last four years. 

What will next year’s anniversary treasure hunt be like?    Gimme a break; I’ve got 11 months to think about it.  Not to mention the fact that we’re getting married in October.  Will that inspire a new tradition:  the wedding day anniversary treasure hunt?  Gosh, I better start preparing, just in case. J

So I got engaged in January.  How strange and wonderful to be writing those words.  At age 43, I’m something of a late-bloomer when it comes to matrimony.  In the past, it always seemed like I had an excuse: I hadn’t met the right person; I wasn’t “ready”; I was too busy with work, etc..  At least in retrospect, I like to think that the reason I’d stayed single so long was I hadn’t yet “met my match.” And then along came Jen…beautiful, funny, smart (a Stanford PhD), and perhaps most importantly, a treasure hunt aficionado.  I didn’t stand a chance!

Many of my friends and family have been asking, “So how did you pop the question?  Were clues and puzzles involved?”  This would certainly have been logical, appropriate even.  We almost always write clues for each other on our anniversary. But no, the actual wedding-engagement-moment was fairly mundane, taking place at home, on the living room couch. No fancy, clever lead in.  Just a simple, “Will you marry me?” Pretty surprising, huh?  I have certainly had my share of romantic opportunities in the last four years; together, Jen and I have traveled to Vienna, Florence, Bologna, Jerusalem, Hawaii, London, Paris, Geneva, Vancouver, and Vietnam.  So why, with all these exotic locales to choose from, did I opt for a straight-forward question, right there on our beat-up old white sofa?  Truth be told, I can’t tell you, exactly. It just happened, unrehearsed. I will say that all those far-flung locales have always seemed like “clichés” to me.  Everyone pops the question in front of a beautiful sunset.  And then the precedent is set:  your married life is going to be one big extended love scene out of a romance novel. My experience, however, tells me that relationships don’t live on the tropical beaches or the cruise ships; they’re won, and lost, and won again, at home – in our very domesticity, our daily life.  By offering my hand to Jen in our living room, I like to think I was saying, “All those beautiful places we’ve been to are nice, but those are just the highs.  I’m going to be here day in and day out, for all the middles and, yes, for all the lows as well.

Teams, of course, as human relationships, operate much the same way.  They require their successes and their high points, absolutely! But the teams that really last are willing to grind it out, day in and day out, battling through the conflicts and petty squabbles that threaten to pull most teammates apart.  In the teambuilding field, one often hears about Forming/Storming/Norming/Performing: the team cycle that begins with initial formation, followed by conflict, followed by moderate success, and concluding with heightened performance levels. Myself, I think it looks more like this:  Forming, storming, norming, storming, norming, storming, norming, performing, storming, norming, etc.  In other words, relationships aren’t linear. They keep looping back on themselves, starting over, again and again. 

The trick to being “engaged”, it seems, is showing up for the peaks, showing up for the valleys, and showing up for everything in between.  I’m betting my future on it, that's for sure. J

  Surely you’ve all seen one of those police procedural movies, where two cops are teaming up to interrogate the suspect.  One guys always plays the part of the “Good Cop” while the other takes the role of the “Bad Cop,” right?  The Bad Cop tends to be direct, aggressive and accusatory, firing questions at the suspect with just that little hint of imminent violence. In a sense, the Bad Cop is the torturer, the inquisitor.  By contrast, the “Good Cop” is sympathetic, gentle and understanding.  He’s your buddy, your potential deliverer from the hands of brutality and duress.  Of course, both cops are working together for a specific result, either to wrench a confession from the suspect, or at least to get some needed information.  The scene is one of the oldest movie clichés – but it works, I think, because we recognize how effective this kind of “teamwork” might be.  Heck, if we were in the suspect’s chair, wouldn’t we be flinching from the Bad Cop and looking for aid and assistance from the Good Cop?  In dire situations, who doesn’t cast around desperately for an ally, a friend, any friend?

Good cop/bad cop is an extreme model of teamwork; I’d be perverse, indeed, to recommend it as a direct business strategy, although I’m sure that some of you may have experienced something like it at work from time to time.  Good cop/bad cop is about as manipulative as you can get, although it does seem to work – at least in the police station.  But I think something like good cop/bad cop can be utilized in a positive way, as well.  In a 2004 article, I wrote about “Thinkers” and “Feelers”, terms taken from the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator developed by the mother and daughter team of Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, respectively.  In that article I wrote:     

“Thinkers make their decisions by reason and logic. At their best, they work independently, take charge, like control, and get results. At their worst, Thinkers put results ahead of feelings, are in too much of a hurry, keep their reasons to themselves and overemphasize competition. Feelers, on the other hand, tend to make decisions based on personal relationships. At their best, they listen actively, work cohesively with others, consider others' feelings, and have good counseling skills. At their worst, Feelers have their loyalty taken advantage of, won't push for what they want, and are afraid to change what is comfortable. (From Baron and Wagele's Are You My Type, Am I Yours (1995, Harper Collins, pg. 160)).”

Good Cops tend to at least represent themselves as “feelers,” listening patiently to your story and paying careful, almost tender consideration to your plight.  By contrast, Bad Cops tends to pose as “thinkers,” pushing urgently for fast results and a speedy confession. In the police procedural movie, this archetypal duo uses their diverse skills and approach for control and subjugation.  But what if a “thinker” and a “feeler” got together for positive reasons?  What a powerful combo they might make!  “Good Manager” would use his powers to empathize with his supervisees, developing amazing degrees of departmental harmony and unity.  “Bad Manager”, on the other hand, would utilize his powers to focus on logical, efficient processes and procedures. 

Myself, I wouldn’t mind at all working for “Good Manager/Bad Manager.”  I’d always know there was the right person to go to for whatever needs – thinking or feeling – that might come up for me.  The team would have someone to keep projects moving forwards toward the prescribed goal, and someone else to make sure everyone’s human needs are met. 

That would be no cliché at all.

Some time ago, I wrote an article about Survivor, the juggernaut TV reality show that strands a group of strangers on a desert island and challenges them to “outwit”, “outplay” and “outlast” their fellow contestants for a chance at a million-dollar prize.  In that article, I argued that Survivor was the best teambuilding show on television, at least for half of its 14-week running length.  For the first eight weeks or so, participants live in groups (or tribes), working together both to feed and shelter each other as well as to win competitions against the other tribes.  Then everything changes.  The tribes are merged, and the final few weeks are about everyone competing against everyone else, as individuals, jockeying for a chance to be in “the final two”, with a chance at the big money.

Survivor is undoubtedly my greatest guilty pleasure.  I’ve faithfully watched every Survivor season to date, enjoying the way tribes attempt to leverage their strengths and weaknesses, both to win competitions as well as to survive a month and a half on the beach with minimal provisions.  Some tribe members cook, others fish; some swim fast, others solve puzzles at the challenges. Along with the leveraging of diversity,  I also appreciate the process of “culture-building”, as tribes invent a kind of meritocracy, placing the highest value either on hard work around camp, athletic prowess in the challenges, or social skills and affability around the campfire.  Every Survivor season is different; teams either pull it together in a common vision, or devolve in a morass of personality struggles and multiple agendas.

And okay, sure, I’ll admit it: I get a kick out of the soap-opera element, as well – who’s fighting with whom, which muscled stud is gonna hook up with which lithesome beach babe, that kind of thing.  Heck, this is entertainment after all!

What intrigued me the most about the recently-completed season of Survivor was the emergence of betrayal as a galvanizing force for increasing team unity and performance.  It all happened on episode eight. The Aitu team had six remaining tribe members, the Raro team had eight.  In a stunning twist, host Jeff Probst offered each participant a chance to mutiny from their current tribe, to jump ship and pledge allegiance to the competition, “the enemy” tribe.  To the shock of their Aitu tribemates, Med-student Candice Woodcock and actor/writer Jonathan Penner seized the opportunity, stepping forward and swearing allegiance to Raro, essentially putting their former team in a huge bind.  Aitu’s four team members would now have to go up in the challenges against Raro’s eight, a daunting task. Even more dire was the Aitu tribe’s prospects in the event of a merge when, theoretically, the Raro tribe should be able to methodically vote them off the island by force of numbers. By all rights, Aitu should have been sunk, but something miraculous happened.  Against the odds, the out-matched Aitu tribe started winning …and winning…and winning.  In all, they won four consecutive challenges; clearly they had taken the mutiny personally – as a sign of betrayal – and there was simply no way the betrayers were going to beat  them!

Aitu had more going for it, of course, than simply its feelings of righteous indignation.  They were clearly a little older than Raro, a little more mature. Moreover, Aitu was quite unified in their values, agreeing unanimously on the priority of hard work and honest communication. (By contrast, Raro was struggling with infighting, factionalism, and a split between those who valued work and those who preferred to laze around, letting the others provide for them while they enjoyed an island vacation.)  Perhaps most importantly, Aitu had really learned to identify and leverage its diversity.  Its remaining team members after the mutiny included:

• The Jock:  Oscar "Ozzy" Lusth – perhaps the best athlete (and fisherman) Survivor has ever seen.
• The Heart:  Sundra Oakley – the tribe’s big sister, skillful at keeping the team emotionally unified.
• The Brains:  Yul Kwon & Rebekah "Becky" Lee – lawyers both, dynamic both at solving the puzzle challenges and also at working the inner game of Survivor alliance-building.  (Eventual million-dollar-winner, Yul, may have been the most strategic person to have ever played the game.  His ability to pull Jonathan back into the Aitu fold, at crucial moment, was pure genius.)

Thus the Aitus were strong, smart and synchronized – a winning combination on any team.

Still, I keep coming back to “the big betrayal”.  When Jonathan and Candice bailed out of their tribe, the effect on the remaining Aitu teammates was palpable.  You could almost hear them saying, “We’ll show them, those rats!”  Suddenly Aitu was the maligned underdog, with a gigantic chip on its shoulder.  And up went their performance level.  Quite simply, from then on this was a team that would not be denied!  And even after the merge, when the pull often gets stronger for individuals to break alliances in search of the best deal, the Aitus stayed together.  In the end, they knocked off all eight of the former Raro tribemates, going into the final four undaunted, as a unified team. 

So, am I saying that, in order to raise our work teams’ performance, we need to give them a common enemy, someone to hate, someone to vanquish?   Not precisely, although I won’t deny that people are driven strongly by emotion.  What teams do, require, I think, is a sense of “meaning”, something that makes them feel that their work product is larger than themselves.  I would always prefer that this “meaning” be positive and affirming – helping to make the world a better place in some fashion – rather than negative and destructive. In the short term, rallying against a common villain can release a lot of accessible energy, but such negative emotion can often come back to bite you, especially when, as so often happens in business, you find yourself suddenly needing to collaborate with that other team.  TV’s Survivor is a zero-sum game, with winners and losers, heroes and villains.  It’s designed for drama and conflict, and hence exceedingly entertaining for a mass audience.  But how many of us want to actually be in such charged, "dramatic" situations in our workplaces!

I invite you to consider how we can invoke positive emotions and meaning when rallying our teams.  The effect of constructive (vs. destructive) emotions is much longer lasting than tearing others down, and a lot more enjoyable to be around as well.  In the end, our goal should be create an environment where everyone’s the survivor.

As a treasure hunt guy, I travel a lot.  It’s one of the joys of the biz, and also—on occasion—a bit of a drag.  International travel only accentuates those dual feelings of exhilaration and exhaustion.  After all, how wonderful it is to be paid to visit an exotic city!  But oh my, the jet lag, customs inspections, passport control, surly taxi drivers, etc. Does travel have to be so tiring?!  Often there’s very little time to even enjoy the host city. On a typical “treasure hunt trip”, I jet in, play-test clues, tend to hunt logistics, assemble materials, meet with the client, deliver the program, and rush to catch my flight back to San Francisco.  As any business person who travels for a living can tell you, it’s nice to get away, to have a nice meal or two in a scenic setting, but it isn’t exactly a vacation.

Still, if you must spend a portion of your life on the road, you might as well take an interest in the journey.  How often do we get caught up in the rush to “arrive”, thereby losing sight of the here and now!  I see this often in my treasure hunts, with participants focusing on the end result – winning – and missing the lessons of the activity:  collaboration, communication, conflict resolution, strategy, etc.  It’s as if their minds have flown away from their bodies, lost in the fantasy of how it will feel to hold up a trophy and defeat their peers, and missing the thoughts and feelings they're having throughout the day.

So I try to be present – not only during my hunt gigs, but also while I’m moving from one city to the next. Inevitably I spend a good deal of time in airports, those curious buffer zones that smooth the transition from one culture to another.  In many ways, all airports are similar – the hard, industrial lighting, the synthetic chairs, the taciturn security personnel.  But inevitably there are differences, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, as if the vibe of the city somehow penetrates the airport and infuses it with local character.  Las Vegas’ McCarrin Airport, for example, is glitzy and brash – like Vegas itself – with slot machines in the terminals and a huge video screen in the baggage claim showing previews of casino shows.  Orlando International Airport, on the other hand, is all about Disney, with brightly-colored cartoon characters nearly everywhere you look (especially the ubiquitous Mickey Mouse), lending the place a cheerily-garish theme-park feeling.  In essence, airports are a preview of the host city, as packaged and processed by the local department of tourism.

Airports are great places for people-watching. Family dramas play out in real time.  Lovers reunite.  Siblings squabble.  Business people set up virtual offices.   For the most part, people are civil and polite in airports, but there’s a lot of tension and impatience to be observed as well. I recall one time in Paris’ Charles De Gaulle airport when a bomb scare had forced a main hallway in the check-in-desk area to be closed for over an hour.  As the crowd grew, people continued to elbow their way forward to the barrier rope, as if each small gain in territory would accelerate their progress toward their destination.  There is an expression in Japanese that seems apt to me, loosely translated as, “When on the road leave your courtesy at home.”   Alas, when traveling, people around the world so often give in to their impatience, thinking only of where they need to get to and not where they are, whom they are with, and how this impacts their fellow travelers

So I want to propose a game to play at airports and while on the road, to slow ourselves down and to reconnect with the present.  Start by counting your footsteps.  See how many steps it takes to walk from security to your gate. Stay focused on each particular footstep, noticing how it feels, observing how the floor changes from tile to carpet to moving sidewalk, whatever.  Try not to count ahead or make predictions about how many steps it’ll take to reach your final location. Just stay focused on the steps. From time to time, slow down and stand still; look around and see if you can locate three interesting people in your sightline, or three unusual architectural details of the airport.  Then continue walking and counting steps from where you left off.  Stop again after 100 or so steps and inhale deeply, attempting to identify three unique airports smells (ugh!).  Continue on to your gate and there close your eyes and try to identify three specific airport sounds, sounds you might not hear anywhere else. 

I think you’ll find that slowing down like this opens up new worlds.  Airports become fascinating places, packed with sights and sounds and sensations.  We like to think that our final destination, our hotel, is the final arrival…but truly, we are all constantly arriving -- at the here, at the now. 

  As a trainer, you have to be ready for anything.  But sometimes even the best laid plans of mice and men go out the window and you have to scramble-and always, always, this seems to happen when you're on the road. 

So there I was in Dubai last week, about as far out on the road as you can get, in the midst of a nice little treasure hunt for a group of 11 natural gas analysts.  Everything was going smoothly.  The hotel conference room was comfortable and well appointed. The clues were bullet-proof - play tested and nicely printed (in color) at the local Kinko's.  (Yes, they have Kinko's in the United Arab Emirates).  The Polaroid cameras were loaded and working.  The hunt participants were making good progress on stage-one of their driving treasure hunt around Dubai City.  All was ship-shape; I'd done my planning well and was feeling appropriately confident.  And that, of course, is when I let my guard down and everything went acropper. Yes, my friends, I was about to enter treasure hunt hell!

  It went down like this:  ascertaining that the group was okay without me, I hopped in a taxi and raced on over to one of my prime clue sites-a glittering camel statue outside a luxury hotel.  What better location, I figured, to get some photos of the teams on the hunt!  In spite of the dreadful traffic (a Dubai specialty), I arrived at the clue location in stellar time, jumped out of my cab and positioned myself discreetly in view of the camel.   This was going to work out splendidly; I'd get some nice pics, hail another taxi, and meet the group at Planet Hollywood in plenty of time for lunch-just as I'd planned. And that's w-h-e-n...i-t...h-i-t...m-e; my bag was still in the trunk of the cab-my bag with all the clues for stage two of the hunt.  Trainer's Worst Case Scenario come true.  Head spinning.  Mind racing.  Heart on course for thrombosis.  "I am so sunk!  I don't have the taxi driver's name, nor his license number or ID, nothing.  All I have is a receipt for the 20 dirhams I paid him.  If I grab a taxi and proceed to the lunch point, what do I tell the client?  'Oh, sorry, I've lost the second half of your program.  Terribly sorry. Here's your money back.'  Ten thousand miles I came for this program, and it's going up in a cloud of sheesha smoke. Argh!!" 

Clearly I had to shake this off and start thinking clearly.  My plans were blown, sure. But there might still be some way to salvage the situation.  It was time to scramble, and scramble I did.

Fortunately for me, Dubai-the Beverly Hills of Arabia-is not what you would call a "developing country".  People are rather honest, theft  is low, services high.  In short, it is the very definition of "developed".  Hotels, in particular, place a high emphasis on catering to the needs of  the rich and famous.  I am neither of these, of course, but I do a fair approximation of a desperate Westerner. Thus did I hurry to the nearest hotel bell man and explain my plight.  "I need your help in tracking down a cab driver.  Yes, I know, there are hundreds of drivers here in Dubai.   There must be some way to find him."  A quick scan of the cab receipt (a lucky thing I'd asked for it) revealed the name of the taxi company.  My bell man said, "Let me call them."  Ten minutes (and many miles of nervous pacing on my part) later, he came over to inform me that the taxi company had found my driver!  He was 20 minutes away but on his way back for me soon-with my bag (and my reputation!). 

Twenty minutes became forty, natch--this is Dubai, after all, a city with some of the most gridlocked streets to be found anywhere in the world (a subway is under construction but still years away).  But eventually my cab driver rolled on in.  Off we plunged into the noontime traffic, inching our way--painfully--towards Planet Hollywood.  In the end, I bustled into the restaurant just as my group was finishing their meal - just in time for stage two of the hunt!  I didn't get much to eat that day myself, apart from some crow, perhaps.  But my scrambling had paid off.

Planning is certainly to be recommended, both as a trainer and as a team member.  But there are times when you just have to trust your instincts and go, go, go.
 

The treasure hunt was coming to an end, and I was definitely in trouble.  And to make matters worse, I knew it was my own darn fault. 

The scene: a classroom at the Boston Museum of Science. The players: a group of thirty management consultants.  Everyone had come through the first stage of the hunt in the museum with flying colors, returning in record time, with all the clues correct. Clearly these were a bunch of sharpies; surely, I figured, I could up the ante in the second hunt – push them out of their comfort zones a bit. So, ten minutes into their 90-minute stage two hunt, I rushed in and announced, “Management informs you that the deadline for your current project has been pushed up – dramatically.  You now have only one hour for this hunt.  Terribly sorry.”   

Chaos ensued.  Teams started scribbling madly on their clue sheets.  Representatives from teams started bartering frantically with other teams in an effort to swap answers and exchange clue resources.  Some groups even tried to create alliances, divvying up their clues with other teams so they wouldn’t have to visit all the locations in the hunt.   This was a rather splendid idea, I thought, except that each team, by rule, was also required to take a group photo of their team at each location.  Hence the complication – if you split the clues with another team, you only get half of the required photos.  Tempers flared; temperature rose; I’d made a terrible mistake.  By reducing the time, I’d pushed the challenge beyond the people’s ability to succeed – and they weren’t having it! 

In my last blog entry, I wrote about my attendance at this year’s NASAGA conference.  In one fascinating session, presenter Bernie DeKoven spoke to us about “flow”, a term much-popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  According to DeKoven, the “flow” state is like being “in the zone”; we feel like we’re at one with our task -- whether it’s hitting a tennis ball or making a presentation.  One of the main characteristics of “flow” is that the challenge closely matches our abilities.  In other words, if the challenge is too high for our capabilities, we’re likely to check out in frustration. Conversely, if our abilities are too high for the challenge, then we’re again apt to check out, this time in boredom. 

By changing the rules on my treasure hunt group, I had escalated the challenge beyond the group’s existing ability to succeed. In short, I’d taken them out of “flow”.  Thankfully, just about everything that comes up during a training is “debriefable”.  So, back to the wall, I ventured: “Well isn’t this just like work?” Management pushes you up against an impossible deadline. How do you react? Do you sit and suffer, or do you make it work for you?  Etc.” 

As you can imagine, the discussion was animated, if not a bit acrimonious.  I’m sure I deserved it. I’d like to think that they got some learning out of it.  This is what we trainers call “rationalization”.  I know I learned something:  be careful how far you push people for the sake of “teachable moments”.  There’s a lot to be said for allowing people to experience that rare and elusive state of “flow”.

One of my favorite organizations is NASAGA, the North American Simulation and Gaming Association.  Every year its membership of teachers and trainers meets at their annual conference to exchange ideas about how games and simulations can bring alive classroom lessons and training workshops.  I’ve been going to NASAGA conferences for 8 years now, and found each one a treasure trove of innovative presentation techniques, game design tips, icebreakers, jolts, etc.   Having been in the training business for a decade or so, I thought I’d seen it all until – during a workshop at this year’s NASAGA conference in Vancouver –Ken Bellemare proved that the mind is stronger than the potato.

Everyone in our class was handed a potato and a straw -- not one of those flimsy stirring straws, mind you, that dissolves in your coffee.  These were good, strong restaurant straws and hard, red Russett potatoes.  Ken instructed us to place the potato in the crook between our thumb and forefinger.  Then, on the count of three, we were to summon up our mental and spiritual energy, let out a might “Yaw!” and thrust the straw through the potato.  I’m a pretty open and optimistic fellow, but I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical about that little piece of cylindrical plastic making its way through an intractable, starchy tuber like a potato.  Well, what the heck – if I fail, I’m sure at least a few others in class will do likewise. Surely in advanced karate classes, not everyone manages to break his board, right?  So I lined up my straw, visualized it going all the way through the potato like a knife through butter, and uttered my most full-throated “Yaw!” And by golly – the straw went right on through my potato.  Remarkable!

I haven’t yet used Ken’s potato activity in one of my teambuilding workshops, but I’m surely going to.  After all, we are often faced with challenges in our life that seem impossibly hard and impenetrable – like a potato.  Sometimes all it takes to get through is a simple, ordinary tool, and a whole lot of belief. 

   "So how does one become a treasure hunt master?"  It's a question a lot of people have asked me over the years. To which I generally answer, "Oh, you know, the usual career path...school of clue-ology, that kind of thing!" Which gets a laugh, of course.  But really!  How did it happen?  Here then, in brief, is my story: From Blues To Clues

The year was 1995. I had just turned 31 and I was "temp"-ing around in corporate offices all over San Francisco, wondering if and when my real career "light bulb" was ever going to go on. Everyone else around me seemed to know what they wanted to do with their lives (or so it seemed). So why not me? Why was I still stuck in the "career blues"?

An unabashed extrovert, I knew one thing very clearly about myself: I process things best out loud, in conversation with others. Luckily, I had a friend from the neighborhood, Scott, who was willing to indulge me in a series of regular brainstorm sessions: The purpose - to help me get a clue about my career.

And so we began to meet at a nearby cafe, me and my "business buddy," every Monday night. Over the course of several weeks, we talked about a large variety of job titles, but nothing was clicking. Scott, an entrepreneur with his own environmental planning business, then made a radical suggestion that changed my life. He asked:

"Have you thought about starting your own business?"

The son of a journalist and a teacher -- as liberal and anti-business as you can get -- I burst out, "Are you kidding! I don't know the slightest thing about economics or marketing or bookkeeping. There is no way I'm starting a business!" Scott, bless his heart, was a patient and persistent fellow. He kept on pushing and probing and eventually talked me into at least thinking about entrepreneurship. As I had recently been working in an employment agency, we both decided I should take a week to ponder starting a possible business as a professional interview and resume coach. So off I went.

Then the strangest thing happened.

The notion of life as a career coach just wasn't sitting right with me. Not that there's anything wrong with that career, certainly.  It just didn't sound fun to me, and fun is a big deal in my life. If I was to start a business, with all its challenges, then shouldn't I LOVE what I'm doing? Clearly I needed to look at things another way. So I ripped out a new page in my notebook and jotted down the title: "Activities I love doing."  My thinking was, if I could figure out the things that really thrilled me over the years, then perhaps I could craft a business built on the direction of my heart. What I came up with were these three "touchstones":

1) Travel. 

2) Working with groups.

3) Games and wordplay.

So Monday came around again and I explained to Scott that these three activities were what really turned me on. Couldn't we perhaps come up with a "career" that might incorporate my favorite touchstones?  Scott soon reminded me that I had once attended a treasure hunt in San Francisco -- a big public-event fundraiser -- from which I had come back quite jazzed. Perhaps, Scott suggested, I could start my own treasure hunt business. "Well sure, I could try it," I answered. "But would it fly?"  Moreover, would it be possible to incorporate "teamwork" into the treasure hunts. Now that would be interesting!

And the rest, as they say, is clue history. Okay, that's a flip response.  Truly, it's been a ton of hard work, persistence and luck, as any entrepreneur can tell you. In fact, I kept my day job for 5 years (!), creating treasure hunts on the weekends for friends and family at first, then later expanding out to social groups, organizations and companies. The learning curve was intense, but what sustained was the source of the business itself -- my heart. Rather than looking outside myself for something to excite me, I instead looked inside for my passions and brought something new into the world - teambuilding treasure hunts. The job for me! And now, I feel like one of the lucky ones, doing at least one of my "touchstone" activities almost daily: traveling, leading programs or creating word puzzles!

And you can build a career from your touchstones as well! For those of you in job transition and even those who aren't, consider trying the following: 

1) Make a list of all your favorite jobs and activities, the ones that make you giddy with excitement just thinking about them. 

2) Try to determine what features or values characterize those jobs or activities.

3) Narrow your list to down to three or four "touchstones" -- the thing at the core that turns you on.

What you'll have before you is a powerful, personal list of the features and characteristics that you deserve to have at the heart of your next "career". Making the list takes as little as a weekend, but the results can be profound!  Try it!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to my first Dr. Clue Team Building blog.  I'm really excited about this opportunity to open a dialogue with you about my favorite topics:  team building and treasure hunts.  In the entries to come, I'll be sharing team building tips, commenting on treasure hunts I've seen, attended and/or facilitated, and answering your questions about anything you can think of.   Give me a "clue" about your interests and I'll do my best to accommodate. 

For now -- a big welcome!  And much more to come.

Dave Blum

President, Dr. Clue Treasure Hunts