If you have worked for a company of even modest size you will have been subjected to a “team building exercise,” which I’ve found to be about as unnatural for actual team building as setting up a group to “do innovation” is. Yet companies, especially large ones, insist on doing both.
Read Paul’s essay, it’s a good one for a number of reasons but the one thing I kept thinking is that I pledge now that I will never subject anyone to a team building exercise.
A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate “team-building” exercises.