Roberts & Kay, Inc. -- Outdoor and Indoor Team Challenge Workshop

Outdoor and Indoor Team Challenge Workshop

RKI partner Steve Kay is trained as a facilitator for Outdoor Challenge work. We have also recently acquired equipment that will allow us to do fun and interesting team challenge work indoors. Although we prefer to work with intact work groups, we have led groups consisting of members from many different workplaces through team challenge workshops with good results.

RKI conducts team challenge workshops for individuals and groups who want to work on and learn more about these issues:

decision-making style and effectiveness
problem-solving approaches and techniques
leadership and team building

The workshop is tailored to build skills most relevant to the work life of the group. Both the outdoor challenge – or "low ropes" course – and the indoor challenge equipment present a set of problems that are designed to be completed through individual initiative and teamwork. The process of working through the problems brings out issues that are real, compelling, and have direct applicability to the workplace. People who have gone through the courses find them fun, interesting, and full of useful insights about how individuals work and how people work together most effectively in groups or teams. Many participants speak of the team challenge experience as their best investment in professional development.

The outdoor workshop typically includes a full day on the outdoor challenge course at Asbury College (Wilmore, Kentucky), followed by a half-day or full-day session that allows for more extensive conversation and debriefing of the previous day's activities. The debriefing session helps people apply the lessons from the outdoor experience directly and usefully to their work together. You can view a design for debriefing the outdoor challenge course that we used in 1999 with the staff of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.

For the lighter side of outdoor challenges, check out "Congress holds weekend trust-building retreat" from humor site The Onion.

Visit descriptions of our outdoor challenge workshops with these clients:

In addition to the clients listed above, we have conducted outdoor challenge workshops for first line supervisors at Kentucky Utilities and for employees of Community Action Council.

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