This week I was lucky enough to get to help out running a day of outdoor management training tasks at High Trenhouse. (By the way, High Trenhouse is a beautiful venue, highly recommended!) My friend Joe has been working with them for some years and this week they needed two groups supervising so Joe asked me to help. What fun…
This game is based on the famous Tower of Hanoi which interestingly was the basis for my recursive programming work at university (which, by the way, led on to my building a recursive descent natural language parser :geek: )
The last time I was on a management training course the shoe was on the other foot! It was strange for me being on the other end of one of these days. No longer was it me learning that diving in without a strategy, plan, good communications, etc. was a recipe for failure. Instead I got to observe the results of how a particular set of communications and a rush into action worked out. There were some very funny moments too! 😀
As it turns out I think everyone that goes on a management training event and has to take part in any kind of team based outdoor activity would also do well from running a similar activity. Then perhaps, as in my case, they might even learn more than when participating. Why’s that? Well I found that running the games was an amazing learning experience. Not only did it give me a grandstand position to observe just what happens when people rush in to a task or have weak communications, most crucially I had time to consider the paradigm that the tasks were trying to reflect. For example, how a repetitive task can lead to mistakes or how a stretched resource can lead to errors…