Ballooniture - Team Building activity

Team building activity for creative use of existing resources.

Ballooniture is an example of 60 minute long team building activity that Create-Learning created to compliment a 2 day off site staff development training. The objective of the program and
activity was to facilitate innovative ways to engineer, market, and sell
their product. This group developed and sold medical products to health
care and nursing care facilities.

The purpose of this initiative was to push the groups to begin to think about creation and innovation of their ideas, introducing some chaos as well as developing the dynamics of the teams.

The challenge is once you have a great idea how do we make it happen? The group had 80 people they were placed into 10 groups of 8 people with cross functional purposes (i.e. on each team were staff
representing - engineering, manufacturing, marketing, sales, customer
service, human resources, management) these are the groups that the
participants work in on a daily basis.

Here is the letter they received when they walked through the door.

Ballooniture:

A new client has asked for you to make ballooniture for a large grouping of in home care facilities. They would like this ballooniture
to be safe for people of all ages and abilities.

The client has given the following guidelines for building the new ballooniture:

• Practical (can actually be used)
• Able to hold a team member for a full count of 10seconds
• Portable
• Creative use of resources (They have a very low budget)

The resources are limited, each team will have the following:

• 72 balloons
• 15 feet of string
• Rubber bands
• Roll of Masking Tape
• Scissors
• Packing Tape

Each group will present their innovative Ballooniture to the clients executives as well as explaining the many benefits of their product design. Your group will have a total of 45 minutes for planning,
design, creation and marketing of your Ballooniture to the clients
executives who will be observing and deciding whether to award your
group the contract.

Conclusion and Processing:

Once the 45 minutes was up two of the Create-Learning facilitators represented the clients executives.

We asked them challenging questions and kept pushing the group to explain their process and design method. Following the presentations we gathered the group together for some processing of the
innovation and team dynamics that happened

Possible Processing questions:

• How did your group approach the problem?
• Did you develop a particular method of collecting, organizing, gathering and interpreting the innovation process?
• Did a leader emerge in the process? What impact did this leadership, or lack thereof, have on the groups performance?
• Did individuals find ways to support the team beyond taking responsibility for their own roles?
• How is this similar to or different from supporting one another at work?

Michael Cardus is the founder of Create-Learning a Team Building & Leadership consulting & coaching organization. Headquartered in Buffalo NY.