Practically illustrating the behaviours and skills required to make teams high-performing is a very powerful way to reinforce learning.

Activities that involve simple construction work particularly well. This is one reason why Quest’s Pyramid of Success is so effective, particularly used as part of wider business training.

This corporate event focuses on two pivotal team behaviours, collaboration, and competition. Those two behaviours are cleverly highlighted and given life through an inventive business training construction exercise.

Puzzled? Intrigued? Curious to know more? There’s only one way…

The Challenge

Since its invention in 1974, the Rubik’s Cube is widely considered to have become the world’s most popular toy.

Quest has imaginatively adapted the cube puzzle concept and combined it using images from past team-building events. For the Quest cube puzzle, not just one but three cubes of decreasing sizes are used. When constructed Rubik’s style, and then correctly stacked, the successful result is a tower or more specifically a Pyramid.

That’s the theory! Of course, as on all Quest corporate events, innovative elements of this challenge are enlivened when tackled by teams, working collaboratively.

A clever, creative and experiential way to perfectly illustrate team behaviours.

Puzzled!

A short verbal briefing will be delivered to start the team building event. The materials for the challenge, 81 light-weight cubes, will be demonstrated. Tacitly supported by the facilitators, the members of each sub-team will think they are competing against the others.

The teams will begin, equipped with random piles of varying sized cubes, each sporting part of an image on every side. Presently they will realise they cannot complete their brief with the equipment provided, causing some confusion. The facilitators will observe closely, and possibly call “time-out” to ask questions and encourage other angles of thought.

Ultimately at least one team will suggest a way to progress, and the facilitators will encourage this emerging potential collaboration.

Communication

This team building event demonstrates that the route to successful collaboration is effective communication. Our facilitators will carefully observe the communication that takes place within the teams, and what, if any, takes place between the teams.

As expected in experiential business training of this level, the amount of facilitation will be carefully managed by Quest. Teams will be actively encouraged to find solutions with the minimum of external input.  

After the appropriate time, if necessary, the facilitators will gently prompt the teams to possibly make progress via a cross-team meeting. During that meeting, (facilitated if required), the team representatives will recognise that a potential solution is possible. However, collaboration and sharing will be crucial behaviours in that solution.

Building Success Together

Following the meeting, the sub-teams should pool their equipment. By this point in the event, the teams will have worked out a central tenet of the challenge: That is by arranging the varying sized cubes in a particular way, three larger cubes can be created. 

They will have also grasped that the cubes cannot be stacked haphazardly. Mirroring workplace requirements perfectly, this business training challenge reinforces the importance of adherence to effective systems and processes.

To achieve success, the cubes must be arranged so the images on all sides of all cubes are correctly formed.

The power of high performing teams communicating effectively and collaborating productively is immense. Once the teams master that power, they will be able to create the “Pyramid of Success!”