Airport Meditation
Saturday, December 20, 2008 by Dave Blum As a “hunt guy”, I tend to travel a lot for my corporate team building activities. On a typical trip, I jet into New Orleans, New York, Las Vegas or wherever, play-test treasure hunt clues, tend to logistics, assemble materials, meet with the client, deliver my team building […]
This Spud’s for You
Friday, December 19, 2008 by Dave Blum Several years ago, at my favorite conference (the annual gathering of the North American Simulation and Gaming Association, NASAGA), I observed the following remarkable icebreaker. It was presented by Ken Bellemare, a Vancouver-based trainer and magician, who proved to me that the mind is stronger than the potato. […]
Treasure Hunt Bar Crawl
Thursday, December 18, 2008 by Dave Blum As much as I’d like to claim that I’m the expert and all my team building ideas arise from the deep, deep wells of my own creativity, the reality is that sometimes clients come up with concepts that blow my own scavenger hunt ideas away. And so it was […]
3 Reasons Sports Teams are Different From Business Teams
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 by Dave Blum It occurs to me that teamwork isn’t taught sufficiently in our school system. From an early age onward through college, we are mostly on our own, working solo to earn good grades and academic honors — often in direct competition with our classmates. During these crucial “development years”, about […]
Mom’s Scrambled Eggs
Tuesday, December 16, 2008 by Dave Blum My mom’s kitchen was off limits when I was growing up. Mom viewed the kitchen as her private domain; she did all the cooking for our family and yes, all the cleaning, too. A pretty good deal for me, my brother and my dad, you say? Yeah, mostly. But looking back, it would’ve […]
Survivor
Monday, December 15, 2008 by Dave Blum As Owner of a company that creates corporate team building activities, I get my team building ideas from a variety of sources: books, articles, movies, pop culture, and yes, television. You can see, why, then, I’d be such a Survivor addict. For much of its ~16-week running time, Survivor is […]
Small Business Tips for Surviving the Downturn
Friday, December 12, 2008 by Dave Blum There’s so much being written these days about the economy and its hit on large companies — Lehman Brothers, Circuit City, the Big Three bail-out, etc. But what about small businesses…companies like yours and mine? How are we supposed to get by? Here’s some advice I’ve been giving myself to help my team building […]
Playing with Status
Thursday, December 11, 2008 by Dave Blum Jen and I had some people over the other night for dinner and games. We like this kind of party because it tends to take the pressure off of the introverts to make dazzling conversation with strangers. Whether it’s for parties, networking events, or corporate team building activities — games […]
Team Efficiency Workshop
Wednesday, December 10, 2008 by Dave Blum One of the things I like most about my job is creating new team building activities –especially when it involves collaboration. For Dr. Clue’s Team Efficiency Workshop, I worked very closely with my two facilitators extraordinaire, Franco Beneduce and Christine McHugh. Christine and I were tasked with sifting […]
Top Five Clue-Writing Tips
Tuesday, December 9, 2008 by Dave Blum Here are my Top Five Clue-writing Tips for creating excellent treasure hunt clues: 1. Use wordplay: I love playing with words when brainstorming scavenger hunt ideas. Anagrams are great — you can send someone to a statue of Ben Franklin, for example, by writing, “Head to the mixed-up ‘Neb […]