Outdoor Education

Forget the white boards and Power Point. An increasing number of meeting planners and venues are offering offbeat, outdoor team-building opportunities for those who want to leave the four walls behind.

By Margaret Littman

A resort in the rainforest of Panama may not seem like a destination likely to offer stress-free event planning. But when Ali Peña needed to find a locale for her client, Canon Latin America, to hold a teambuilding retreat, that was exactly what she suggested.

Canon’s reasons for selecting Panama were varied. Price played a role; all-inclusive resorts in Panama were significantly less expensive than comparable North American resorts. But, more pressing, Canon’s organizers wanted teambuilding to be part of their activities, and the resort’s jungle setting, near the Panama Canal, lent it itself perfectly for a “Survivor”-type exercise.

“Latin American divisions of companies are always looking for some kind of outdoor teambuilding component,” explains Peña, who owns Miami-based Forums Event Design and Production. The firm specializes in planning for Latin American divisions of international companies and organizations. “In Panama, the rain forest location afforded teambuilding activities.”

Ropes courses and scaling wood walls still have their value in the pantheon of teambuilding. But these classics are increasingly used in conjunction with other tasks, competitions and events that take advantage of the great outdoors. As a result, resorts, hotels and other meeting venues are developing varied menus of innovative teambuilding exercises that get participants out of the conference room and thinking outside the box.

“You don’t want to lock people up and have them feel like they could be anywhere,” Peña says of using traditional indoor meeting facilities.

The appeal is not limited to “Survivor”- or “The Amazing Race”-style activities. Even as associations and organizations contemplate scaling back on their in-person meeting budgets, they are still looking to spend on more unusual teambuilding programs. These activities can elevate enthusiasm, cultivate leadership skills, membership and attendance among participants, while helping groups meet their goals in terms of strengthening volunteer and staff teams and developing project-specific skills, ranging from ice-breaking to trust-building to conflict resolution.

It is not just businesses like Canon that are reaping the benefits of these types of activities in the great outdoors. At Adventureworks’ 40-acre campus west of Nashville, Tenn., firefighters, fraternities, sororities and alumni groups have come to kayak, zip-line and participate in other activities in order to strengthen bonds between members, says Adventurework’s Paula Feather. Adjacent to Harpeth River State Park, the facility, designed for daylong teambuilding rather than overnight trips, has three low ropes courses and one high ropes course, as well as a zip-line aerial runway course where participants do a series of eight heart-pumping zips to complete their trek down.

Teambuilding for affinity groups makes sense. In fact, teambuilding may be more important for special-interest groups than it is for businesses, says Nancy Clark, a consultant with Danville, Calif.-based Leadership Dynamics Inc. Members of such groups may have had less opportunity to work together in the past, may not know each other’s management styles and may not have the kind of clear hierarchy as seen in the workplace. Research conducted at Virginia Tech University found that large groups, like many associations and organizations, achieved their goals through teambuilding. Very small groups (just two or three participants) were not likely to be as successful.

Outdoor bound

Those without access to an actual Latin American jungle are not limited, either. Similar exercises can be staged at local zoos or nature preserves, planners say. Oakland, Calif.-based California Nature Treks designs survival-style wilderness events that focus on real-world outdoor survival, not reality-TV “Survivor” principles. In these kinds of exercises, teams need to work together if they want to eat, have shelter and get home. Geocaching (using a GPS as a tool in a scavenger hunt) is an increasingly attractive option for those for whom high-tech is part of their team objectives. Other possibilities run the gamut from raft building, race-car driving and even blindfolded tree hugging. Scottsdale-based Arizona Outback Adventures offers a “Desert Survivor” program that simulates a crash-landing in the Superstition Mountains. Participants must work together to build a camp to survive.

While the high seas, a Panamanian forest or even a state park are appealing locales for outdoor adventure, outdoor teambuilding can take place in urban jungles as well. Cherry Hill, N.J. -based Teambuilding Inc. has helped groups plan “CSI” style events on the streets of large cities. Participants follow in the footsteps of the alleged “criminal” and use collective critical-thinking skills to get to the bottom on the mystery, while navigating the streets of the city. Segway relays, using the funny-little-people-movers, are also popular in urban environments.

Molly Burnside, group sales manager at the Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort in the Pocono Mountains, says that the resort’s short, 90-minute drive from New York City makes the property appealing to special-interest associations and other meeting planners who are trying to attract attendees from various locations on the East Coast. But its location on the Delaware River is what makes it stand out to meeting planners, because the resort incorporates the waterway in its teambuilding exercises.

“You don’t want to have a bunch of people just sitting in a room doing ice-breaking exercises,” Burnside says. Her team’s ability to create successful teambuilding exercises is at the heart of why meeting planners of all stripes book at the property.

At Shawnee Inn her team organizes more offbeat, outdoor teambuilding events, including canoe races and flyfishing courses on the Delaware River, a scavenger hunt that involves all of the different aspects of the resort and even on-stage teambuilding at the well-known Shawnee Playhouse, an outdoor theater. Professional thespians help teams through planning and a final team performance. Also available at Shawnee is an approach course, a nine-hole golf course,
lit for night play, requiring optimum focus and teamwork. Mountain biking, guided hikes and other activities take advantage of both the Poconos and the resort’s team-building expertise.

When a team needs something even more out of the box than canoe races or outdoor theater, planners may consider a serious sailing regatta. This is not a learn-to-sail class, but a side-by-side race of two boats heading into the wind on the open sea.

Miami-based Landry and Kling is an event-planning firm that helps organizations book cruise ships as destinations for meetings, the brainchild of its founding executives who previously had worked in the cruise industry. In addition to booking space on existing cruises, many groups now charter cruise ships as their exclusive meeting destination. (According to Landry and Kling research, a cruise ship meeting bill can total just 40 percent to 50 percent of the cost of a comparable hotel or resort meeting. Costs are lower because the ship already has existing AV equipment for presentations on board; food is typically all-inclusive, and overall costs may be lower in comparison to venues with union staff.)

“Once they set sail, many groups want to take advantage of their unusual situation of being out on the ocean and having a captive audience,” says Ramon Santos, vice president of sales for Landry and Kling. Earlier this year a company set up two races as part of its teambuilding activities associated with the cruise. Participants were assigned one of two teams, given team t-shirts, and dropped off at their boat with an experienced sailing crew. Each person on the 18-person team is assigned a task, be it rigging sails or bartending.

“You do not need to be a sailor to do this,” says firm founder Joyce Landry.

The teams learned to man the boats, which were America’s Cup caliber boats, and raced each other to the finish line.

Landry and Kling also has organized outdoor Jeep rally races, rock climbing and wave-riding team events at various ports along the cruise route.

Close to home

The advantages of the great outdoors can be accessed without setting sail or leaving the country. Sammy Hendrix, director of the South Carolina Highway Division of Carolinas Associated General Contractors, has booked three annual meetings for the trade association at Wild Dunes Resort in Charleston, S.C., because of the pull of the beach to his attendees, as well as the teambuilding opportunities afforded by the resort’s condo and house accommodations. A group of project managers can stay together in one house on the beach, he says, and immerse themselves in their team, rather than in separate hotel rooms where they’d need to reconnect in a common area or conference room.

“The social and work experience is all right there,” Hendrix says.

Be it at home or out amongst the flora and fauna, planners are convinced that fresh air is a crucial element to a teambuilding retreat. But Clark cautions planners to remember the goals that are motivating the decision to hold a teambuilding event. “You don’t want to just go hang from a tree and say, ‘This is fun! We’re outside!’ You need to think through who is a risk-taker and who is not and who should be teamed with whom. Putting it in a richer context gives deeper, broader results.”

Margaret Littman is a freelance writer who splits her time between Chicago and Nashville, Tenn., and wherever else meetings demand. Her work has appeared in American Way, Crain’s Chicago Business, Wine Enthusiast and many other publications. She is the author of several specialty guidebooks, including “The Dog Lover’s Companion to Chicago.”