The Great Dubai Treasure Hunt SNAFU

Friday, November 7, 2008 by Dave Blum As a trainer of corporate team building activities, you have to be ready for anything. But there’s scrambling and then there’s SCRAMBLING.  And somehow the biggest need for improvisation seems to arrive when you’re on the road. So there I was in Dubai…

If it’s Thursday it must be…

Thursday, November 6, 2008 by Dave Blum …Denver, in fact. My task today was to playtest our two Denver treasure hunt locations: 1) Denver Museum of Nature and Science 2) Denver LoDo District Playtesting is pretty different from scouting.  When scouting a new, potential treasure hunt location, I walk every street…

California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco

Wednesday, November 5, 2008 by Dave Blum A week or two back, I had a chance to scout the new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco as a Dr. Clue hunt location.  What a wonderful place!  As you walk in, the first thing you see is a huge open…

Five ways to use puzzles for teambuilding

Wednesday, November 5, 2008 by Dave Blum We live in a puzzle culture.  Walk into any book store and you’ll likely see an entire shelf devoted to crosswords puzzles, and perhaps a whole section to Sudokus.  Just yesterday, on a flight from San Francisco to Denver, I watched a mother and…

Facilitation vs. Presentation

Monday, November 3, 2008 by Dave Blum Something very unusual is going on in the communication between me and my wife, Jen!  It started a couple of weeks back, when my wife and I were on a plane coming back from Indianapolis, where we had both attended the national conference…

Treasure Hunts vs. Scavenger Hunts: there is a difference

Friday, October 31, 2008 by Dave Blum In common parlance, the terms “treasure hunt” and “scavenger hunt” are used pretty interchangeably.  Both involve going out and searching for something, then getting scored in some fashion for your work output.  However, for people in the “hunt community” — and yes, there…

Lowering the Water Level

Thursday, October 30, 2008 by Dave Blum A useful way of thinking about people is to consider them as icebergs.  As we all learned in school, the majority of an iceberg’s mass is below the surface.  What we actually see as we’re cruising around is only a very small portion of…