Your team has booked a two-day conference at a remote coastal hotel, so far from civilization that it doesn't even have a telephone and no mobile phone has ever been known to find a signal. Ideal for ensuring a concentrated meeting without any distractions. Or so you thought...

A distress signal has come in and your team has been asked to help a cruise ship that is drifting into iceberg territory! The captain and crew are incapacitated and the passengers have no experience at sea. Your only communication with the ship is through the hotel’s fax machine. Can you calm the passengers down enough to help them regain control of the ship? Can you find out where they are and help steer them towards a safe course? It’s just you and the passengers…and your team is their only hope.

To succeed, your team must define roles and responsibilities; design a process to handle all of the information that will be coming at them; establish communication protocols; set goals; determine which activities are important or detrimental to reaching those goals; assign activities to the most appropriate people; balance competition with cooperation; and monitor the feedback mechanisms available to them.

That’s only half of it! They are faced with a variety of fun and challenging tasks intended to highlight the skills of high performance teams. Tasks available to them to complete include building a working prototype of a steamship; erecting a receiving tower made of straws; and solving mathematical, visual, and verbal problems.

Iceberg offers a unique challenge to participants that is sufficiently different from their day-to-day experiences. Yet it highlights and demands the same kind of team and individual methodologies that are required by high performance teams.

Debrief for a powerful learning experience
Iceberg is designed to simulate many aspects of team performance. It is delivered with a structured debrief. Debriefing occurs after the activity and is an important process designed to synergize, strengthen, and transfer learning from the experience to real-life, on-the-job situations.

Sample debriefing opportunities
The debriefing opportunities with Iceberg are abundant. Here are just a few:

• How effective were you in organizing your team for the challenges that awaited you?
• How did you assign tasks?
• Did you make effective use of the feedback mechanism?