Results By Design® LLC builds individual, team, and organizational capability through learning design, coaching, organizational consulting, and facilitation services.
The Rainforest
Game
The Rainforest Game is an insightful hands-on exercise designed to provide individuals and teams with a realistic experience of collaboration across both internal and external boundaries – and of the challenges they are likely to encounter in the process.
An Exploration into Virtual Leadership and Collaboration
Learning Outcomes
- Work more effectively across functions, geography, and distance
- Work through communication barriers
- Creatively solve complex problems
- Examine assumptions about how people and functions work together
- Apply skills for working across boundaries (Reaching Out, Sharing Information, Exploring Alternatives, and Making It Happen) all while Building Relationships and Achieving Common Goals
During game play, participants assume the role of artists—brought together from all over the globe by The Rainforest Collective (an organization promoting endangered rainforest awareness). Their mission is to assemble a mosaic, made of pieces that they and other design studios have created, which is to be displayed at a celebratory art installation for The Rainforest Collective’s annual conference. Participants are organized into subgroups, but since no group has all of the required pieces, they must venture across boundaries and work collaboratively to achieve success.
As participants work both within and outside of their assigned group to complete the activity, they face personal assumptions about intra- and inter-team dynamics. In doing so, they build awareness of the challenges inherent in a virtual environment and how to overcome them.
During the debrief discussion, participants are introduced to the four core skills for working effectively across boundaries: Reaching Out, Sharing Information, Exploring Alternatives, and Making It Happen. Together these skills build lasting and powerful relationships that enable individuals and groups to achieve common goals. An action plan at the close of the workshop allows participants to identify what they will do differently in the future to build partnerships, enhance inter-team communication, and enable greater collaboration across boundaries.
