Once a year, the Icinga team goes for a team event somewhere about an hour or two away from the office. This year’s edition landed us at the Adventure Campus in Treuchtlichen, right in the middle of this year’s first heatwave. The heat was unbearable. At one point we gave up on the room we had been using and moved everyone down into a basement meeting room instead. It was quite a bit more retro in style, with an overhead projector, that we had a lot of fun with.
F
riday: Retrospective and Hangout
We kicked things off with a game of “who in the room” to shake off the workweek and get into a different headspace. We had a stack of cards with statements on them like “Who in the room is most likely to come into work on a public holiday”, or “Who in the room would I be least likely to go on a date with”, and everyone had to point to the person they thought it’d fit best.
We went through the agenda of the day and headed off to lunch.
First on said agenda came a tradition we repeat every year: the mood graph.
Everyone draws their own timeline of how they’ve felt over the past months and then tells the story behind it out loud. It turns out most of us are not great at remembering our own year in detail – but the exercise still does its job. You come away knowing a lot more about what your colleagues actually like and dislike about their work. (Or who’s holiday they’re most happy about).
Right after that, we took the group photo for the year. We tried to find a spot in the shade and headed right back down to the basement afterwards.
From there, the group split into three groups to talk through a set of open questions.
1. What makes it difficult for us to say “We’re not going to make the deadline”? And what can we do to make that easier?
2. How do we decide that something is “done”? And who gets to make that decision?
3. Which parts of our work do we feel are most arduous, boring, or repetitive? Why do we still do them in this way?
Every group got a sheet of paper and some time to discuss. Because of the open-ended way these questions are worded, we drifted off topic quite a bit sometimes. I do have the feeling that this was intended, though. I learned a lot about the different ways our teams work through their share of the workload and what each of us enjoys (and doesn’t), and we had some great ideas on cross-team collaboration.
I’m curious about what effect this will have on our day-to-day in the future!
This conclu
ded our retrospective, and after some time to freshen up, the evening turned to friendly competition: we had access to darts, billiards, bowling, and table tennis, all running in parallel. The hallway bowling lane got particular use, since we weren’t allowed to use it after 10pm.
Dinner followed, and the night wound down with a round (or five) of Werewolf – the game where you try to manipulate public opinion and accuse everyone else of lying – plus some dice games. More anti-teambuilding than teambuilding, honestly, but fun. We all got a reality check on how well we actually know each other – and picked up on a few tells along the way. Some people have them. Some, worryingly, are very convincing.
Most of the evening was spent under a tent outside as the temperature finally dropped to something bearable.
Saturday: The actual Teambuilding
We started the outdoor teambuilding exercises early on day two, trying our best to successfully get through them before the heat caught up with us again. It caught up with us anyway – around noon we headed for our lunch at the beer garden.
Before that, though, the exercises were the classic trust-and-coordination kind (That we beat in record time and with no mistakes):
- Balloons in the air: To “warm up” we had to keep two balloons in the air. The white one could be touched by anyone, and for the blue one someone called out a name, and that person has to be the next to touch the balloon before it drops.
- The seesaw: For this, the whole group had to get onto a seesaw without it touching the ground. When we managed to do that on the first try, we had to swap everyone’s positions from left to right, again without letting it touch down.
- The steel cable crossing: Lastly, everyone had to get from one side of the cable stations to the other. There were some logs with cables between them and we had to balance across, without anyone falling off. There were a bunch of rules around what would happen with people falling off, but to everyone’s surprise we managed to get through to the other side in one go. (I had done this exercise before with another group, and I could not believe how perfectly we navigated this.)
A handful of people still had energy left after (in the 40deg heat) and they took on a 4-meter wall as a bonus challenge, hauling each other up and over.
Wrapping Up
We closed out the weekend with our lunch at the beer garden and the drive back to the office. We were tired, overheated, but glad to have spent two days together outside the usual routine. The heat made things harder than they needed to be, but I’d consider the weekend itself a success: good exercises, good conversations, and a team that’s a little more in sync than before.
I am looking forward to next year’s team event – ideally with better (worse?) weather.
