Ultimate GlobaLab Challange

What are the characteristics of the good group building activity? In my opinion I would underline the following elements:

1. Participants should be challange – challange can be on the trust level, meaning it is not easy to trust other person in the group, and if it will happen then the good base is created; participants can be challanged to do something stupid or to touch other participants – usually in the beginning there might be some resistance, but break through always brings great results.

2. Participants should create a feeling of success that bound the group – if there is success, if something happened and hte group didn´t manage to complete the tasks it is important to anyway create a feeling of achivment of something, and then analyze what could be improve in order to complete task.

3. Participants should get an idea who might play different roles in the group – this usually happens with the paper of the leader, and it is good for the team and trainers to identify them early on. Although in the debriefing what might be interesting is to tackle different roles in the group and hteir importance for the group functioning.

4. Participants should build the basics of their new culture – this can be a song, move, internal joke anything. Those small things brings people together and create a good mood, so it is good to come back to those cultural elements from time to time.

There are for sure many other elements of good group building and if you want to comment please feel free.

Below I would like to present you the group building activity that I did during the GlobaLab training in Lithuania for the groups of youth workers and teachers. We ave created the GlobaLab Pass and give participants one piece of paper with the instuctions. To make it more interesting, we have translated the quests into the languages of participants, so they needed to cooperate.

What you can get in the debriefing:

1. Using the group as resource – everyone is importnat

2. Feelings while completing different tasks – if people felt uncomfortable follow up on when, and what should happen to make them feel comfortable

3. How they organized their work, and how all the people felt about the work flow

4. Personal needs of the group members for working in the group

5. You can do as a last part contract with participants who they would like to work. With my group I felt it is not necessary.

The ULTIMATE GlobaLab challenge!

Dear fantastic, enthusiastic, motivated and nice group!

You are about to start the GlobaLab training, you managed to get into the project, you successfully (or almost successfully) packed your language, and you proofed your responsibility by not loosing your flight/bus/train and you got to Byliškės.

The only thing you still miss to move to the next phase of the training is GlobaLab pass. The GlobaLab pass will be awarded to the whole group hence completing the set of quests specially design for you, and by this proving that you are in the right place.

The rule is simple, you have one hours and you need to complete all the tasks. How? Well this already depends on you!

QUEST 1

Save the water! Water is one of the very limited resources on our planet. Lack of this creates migrations, famine, and territorial conflicts among others. Your tasks is to transport the water from one basket to the other one using only the kitchen film. The task will be accepted if all the water will be transported without loosing a single drop of water.

QUEST 2

Creativity matters! Rap the GlobaLab! We would like to have from you a rapping song. Go for it!

QUEST 3

Everybody on board. This quest will be consider completed when each person from the group will know all the names of group members. We will check randomly:D

QUEST 4

Do you trust? Everyone needs to participate in this quest, but the group can divide themselves into 2 smaller groups (that means the task needs to be completed twice). The group stand in line in the way that each person see the back of the other person. You put your hands on the shoulders of person in front of you (unless you are the first one). Everyone close their eyes (get blindfolded) and only the person who is the last one can have open eyes. The task of the group is to complete the walking route and don´t get hurt.

QUEST 5

Maintain relationships! The quest is about doing something that will help the group to maintain the relationship (in the enjoyable way) during the whole duration of the training. The quest will be considered completed if this something will be done.

Hope you enjoyed it!