Piggybacking on the concept of Spaghetti Marketing that I just read about on Scott Andrew's blog at Arriive Business Solutions, I've coined the phrase "Spaghetti Team Building", which I see a lot of my clients & prospects doing. The spaghetti concept refers to the act of throwing cooked noodles against a wall to see what sticks. In marketing that would mean trying a large number of ideas to see what works and then spending more money on what is actually generating ROI. The downfall of course is that a lot of money gets thrown at ideas that don't work. In their team building efforts, companies will often choose a team building activity or team building provider without spending the time to choose the right activity or the best provider. So again, borrowing from Scott, here is a quick framework that you might use when considering team building ideas: 1. Vision: What do you want to accomplish with your team building? What is the overall reason for doing it? And there may be more than one such as: employee retention, creating a great workplace, improving morale, as a form of employee recognition or reward. 2. Objectives: These should be a subset of your vision. For example, if your vision is to improve employee retention, your team building objectives could be to build relationships, have fun and improve morale. 3. Choose an activity and provider: If you've done a good job of the first two steps you'll be better able to shortlist your activities and providers. For example, doing personality assessments might not meet the need of having fun and going to a hockey game might not meet the objective of building relationships between team members. Being clear on objectives will help you quickly narrow down an enormous array of choices. You don't have the time and money to waste on spaghetti team building. A little bit of planning and thought will save you both. Our sales efforts have changed in past years to reflect this concept. We used to just tell people about our services and how great they are. Now we are more consultative. We spend a lot of time with our salespeople to ensure that they are trained to help our clients identify their team building objectives. And we've been rewarded with lots of happy clients! For such a consultation, visit: www.criticalpathfinders.com or www.scavengerhuntanywhere.com