Published Sept. 2019
About 25 years ago, I participated in experiential teamwork training. One of the activities was Trust Fall, the most parodied of teambuilding exercises. You know the script … a team member crosses their arms and does the Nestea plunge off a platform into the waiting arms of their teammates.
While I vividly recall valuable teamwork lessons from other exercises, I can’t for the life of me remember what the point was behind Trust Fall. Seriously, even the sneakiest snake of a teammate is going to play along with such an obvious exercise.
What I do remember is that after each fall, we performed a quick debrief and, without fail, could identify an improvement to our falling and catching process which we applied to the next iteration:
In our case the platform was a five-foot high tree stump. We often use the cliché “falling off a log” as the epitome of simple. The Trust Fall lesson that sticks with me 25 years later is that there is always opportunity to improve a process … even one as simple as falling off a log.
Image the potential for improvement with our complex work processes!
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