FTB 2007 (When Things Don't Go According to Plan...)

So I was a faci for this year's SMU Freshman Team-Building camp. I'd gone through hours upon hours of training, and probably twice as many hours of my own planning and dreaming up of how I would craft the experience for my freshies and what I would say to them.

The facis from mock camp group FABS just before we were to receive our freshmen!


Well, it didn't go according to plan :) I did expect that the freshies would be unreceptive to the idea of teambuilding (as opposed to stupid fun like in any other orientation camp), but I didn't expect them to be THAT unreceptive, nor did I expect the team to be so unmotivated on the first day. I tried my best to inject some energy into the team by minimizing debrief sessions to just a few words and playing silly games, but nothing worked... It was even difficult getting the team hyped up during the fun night games.

Fruit-eating: one of the silly night games hehe


But all that changed at the first activity (horizontal spiderweb) on day 2. I managed to psyche the team to wanting to complete the very difficult activity, and was much stricter with constraints than before. I kept giving them benchmarks ("Half the teams can complete the whole challenge", then, "best teams can do it under 3 minutes"), and told them that one touch of the web meant failure. And with that they simply kept trying, even to the point of restarting the whole attempt when the very last person touched the rope on the way out of the web.

It was a certain team pride, a pride that said, "I've come so far, no way I'm not gonna try one more time to succeed. If other teams can complete this, so can my team.", and this carried the team through to success. It was amazing.

The team at the horizontal spider web.


At that point I threw everything I learnt away. I realised that given the team dynamics, there was not going to be time to bring the team through all the stages of team-builing and what not, so I simply scrapped any negative learning points from my debrief, and focussed on their success, to give them a high experience they would remember forever.

The team at sea.


And it worked because the "high" from the integriy, success, and teamwork of the horizontal spiderweb carried on to the next activity, where they had to build a raft from scratch and race with it. And it was with this feeling of success as a team that they came in first in the group - when they had reached the end, ALL the other teams had at most just pushed their rafts to sea.

At the final challenge on day 3!


However at the end of day 2 was the lowest point for me, emotionally. It was the lowest I've felt in a very very long time. Even through the team's successes, I felt there was no bondedness and the team was very fractured into small cliques, and I felt very pressurized to follow the "traditional" style of team-building (sit in a circle and write down your feelings) because the other facis in my section were doing so. The second night was very difficult for me, even though the item the facis put up for the freshis was really hilarious (I was the most funny dancing sleeping bag! and we bit the skin off a watermelon! and the snail race! and the pantyhose fight!).

More of the final challenge!


However when I spoke with the team that night, asked them to share individually how they felt about the camp so far, and shared some of my own feelings, I was very encouraged. Because they themselves felt that the team was very bonded, and they thanked me for not going the "traditional" style of team-building...

Group photo after the final challenge!


Day 3's final challenge (a la amazing race) was simply an acknowledgement that I had a great team under my care. The during and after the challenge, I could see a the unity and the bond that had formed between them. It was the way they held hands and sang songs together as they had to brave freezing hands for a minute, they way they sat together filling up the survey forms at the canteen benches... At the final debrief of the camp, I asked individual freshmen to share what they felt was the one thing they learned from the camp, and most mentioned teamwork. :) I'm pretty proud of my speech to them too, telling them about the importance of setting personal goals, just as the team did at the horizontal spiderweb. :)

4 generations of VJC choir!


Oh and I did manage to do ONE thing I planned: to tell them, at the final debriefing of the camp, to rate the camp while they closed their eyes and I go through with them everything they experienced throughout the 3 days...

It was really a pretty magical 3 days :)