<Collective Intelligence>

For further information on CollectiveIntelligence programs offered by Adventure Learning Assocs.,

please fillout our Information Request Form.

Adventure Learning Newsletters

The End of Team Building: Beyond TeamWork and into the future with CollectiveIntelligence!:

We have been in the Experiential Team Work business for over 20 years, in one form or another. In that time we have delivered approximately 1000 programs. During the last 5 years two trends have appeared in almost every group we have facilitated. The first trend is that over half of the participants in every program have taken part in some form of team building previously. The second trend is that at some time during the program (usually at the beginning), someone makes a joke and asks,"When are we going to sing Kumbayah?"

Of the persons who have previously participated in team building, one can easily imagine that a good portion of these people have a negative impression of team building. The comments about Kumbayah are clear evidence of this. There are a number of structural/historical reasons for this decline in the positive regard to which team building is held. These reasons paint a clear path to the future and that future clearly leads to CollectiveIntelligence.

The team building phenomenon was a result of two parallel business trends, the need for speed/flexibility in a rapidly changing global business environment and a resulting increase in non-hierarchical (flat) organizational structures. Creating a flexible organizational environment where lifetime employment and entrenched middle managers were the norm, spawned massage resistance to change. One of the key strategies for dealing with this resistance was team building. Most team building programs of the past era dealt with improving interpersonal communication/process skills. Although these programs left a majority of the participants feeling good (hence Kumbayah), they did little to improve the bottom line or to provide the real flexibility organizations needed to be competitive in a globalfree market environment.

A lot of the sarcasm and resistance to team building can be traced to what these programs (and the companies that delivered the programs) promised, and what they actually delivered. As vendors of these programs we have tried for years to address these shortcomings of our profession while dealing with a client base that often wanted feel good entertainment rather than organizational change. In looking for a model/slash for change that could be duplicated experientially and actually worked, we found ourselves be drawn increasingly to information systems field and it was there we first saw the term Collective Intelligence.

CollectiveIntelligence Development Programs goals/objectives differ from traditional team building in five major ways:

Inter organizational in approach rather than intra group.
Focus is on parallel processes rather than one path to success.
Maximum sharing of informational resources..
Interpersonal communication and collaboration skills are assumed, not focused on.
Improved business/project results are the main foundation of all CollectiveIntelligence programs.

The content and activities within our CollectiveIntelligence also differ from traditional team building in the follow ways:

All activities are complex, interwoven, and have mutiple solutions.
All activities require full information sharing to occur for maximum success.
All activities have built-in parallel procrsses happening simultaneously.
Program goals are not static but may change throughout the program based on changing needs of the participants.
All programs end with business based action planning.

We are excited about these new programs and want them to be experienced by a large section of our potential client base. To enable this to happen we are offering these programs at a substantial discount and with a 100% satisfaction guarantee through June 30, 2004. For a detailed course plan, further information or a proposal please fill out our Information Request Form.