Search & Rescue

What it is

The art of cooperation is something we are taught as children. For some reason, many of us forget that lesson when we enter the front door of work. This exercise is designed to let participants experience how fun cooperation and teamwork can be.

As with many of our exercises, the exercise simply cannot be accomplished without the effort of every person on the team or group. The same is true at work, although we all want to think we can do everything ourselves. Only the single entrepreneur actually does everything themselves. The rest of us depend upon other people to take care of certain tasks, sometimes incredibly important tasks. However, we often don't try to work as a team unless we have to. This exercise lets participants experience what can be done as a team and how much fun it can be.

Clear communication is required as well as the passing of critical information from person to person in order to accomplish the task. This event will show what happens when there are gaps in communication and the resulting frustration will be a source of long dialogue.

The goal of the exercise is to have the entire team involved, demonstrate the power of teamwork and show the interdependence teams have.

You may use many variations of this activity to achieve different outcomes, depending upon what is desired.

This is best outside, but can be run very well indoors with some room.

This is a fun activity that your group will not forget and relates easily back to work.

What do I get with Search and Rescue?

Variations

• You may have more strings going through the ring.
• This will confuse the system, but include more people at one time.
• Blindfolding or placing people on silence creates a new challenge.
• Have them choose one person to be the leader, but the leader may not touch any of the props.
• Give them a time limit to strategize and complete the task such as 10 minutes.
• They need to rescue as many people as they can in that time frame.