Designing Outdoor Learning

As noted previously, a great deal of so-called team-building events are little more than corporate parties with some outdoor fun attached. However, designed properly, with appropriate facilitation, they can provide very powerful learning insights, or as some clients have called them – aha moments.

To do this tasks must be designed and selected to address the real issues the client faces and take them through the Kolb learning cycle, with increasing levels of challenge and complexity. In this way we find that participants rise to the challenge, rather than simply learn, for example, to cooperate during games. The outdoors is simply a medium that is used to engage people in the learning process, rather than an end in itself.

It is also important that analytical models around things like team development, leadership and communication are fed in to legitimise clients own discoveries, rather than either the fun only use of games/tasks, or the front-loading that often occurs with inexperienced facilitators. The trouble is that many wanna-be trainers perceive team-building as an easy thing to do and therefore a good entry point. However, in reality, to deliver high quality learning events that have lasting value takes experience and knowledge.

The difficulty of delivering genuine learning is compounded by the fact that many managers either misunderstand, or misdiagnose, the issues that their teams are facing. To effectively deal with such scenario’s good facilitators have to be able to adjust tasks and review processes to address groups real, rather than imagined, needs. Once again this takes a level of confidence that comes with experience and knowledge.

Combined with the unpredictability of the outdoors, experiential learning can be very challenging as a learning medium. Nonetheless the impact, when delivered well, can be profound and far reaching. We have worked with clients to deliver significant gains in performance that have advanced careers dramatically. Whilst the ability to deliver performance improvement through learning has enabled us to develop award-winning projects, working with street children, sustainability, diversity and global mergers.