About this team building
This unique experience requires teams to focus on the task at hand whilst keeping an eye on the bigger picture.
It’s this balance of what’s happening now and what may be happening in the future which is pertinent to businesses today.
Eden is a themed experience where delegates journey to cities all over the world. At each city they are faced with an intriguing challenge to complete. By doing so, teams earn resources to fund their onward travel and develop and build the largest sustainable community they can within the 30 ‘Eden’ days.
There are more cities than a single team can visit, so they must think wisely as to which ones they will choose. In each move they make, teams will also impact the global environment, which poses an interesting moral dilemma – to focus on short term personal gain, or to consider the wider impact of their actions and work with other teams for long term sustainable successes.
What decisions will your team make?
Eden is like no other team building activity. It provokes thoughts that can change values, culture and behaviours affecting individuals, your company and the planet in a positive way. Games are often used as a fun and experiential way of grasping concepts, often with implicit learning. With Eden, Blue Hat has developed a game that raises the issue of people, planet, and profit. The game was developed with consultation from a prominent environmentalist. The result is that ‘Eden’ was developed to provide a fun, intelligent, provocative, informative, rational, believable, and relevant means of highlighting meaningful issues.
During the game, participating teams are in competition with each other, with the goal of creating the largest sustainable community within the given timeframe of the game (30 ‘Eden’ days). The focus of the activities and participants thoughts help participants realise they can be instrumental in creating “communities” in the broadest sense. The team’s ‘community’ is represented by 3D plates that highlight the consumptive needs of that community. For a community to be sustainable, appropriate levels of land and water (represented in similar 3D plates) must be in situ. These land and plates are obtained using resources (which represent time and money and are used as the game’s currency) as in the real world. To earn resources, teams travel to 20 cities around the world and face a fun themed task or challenge. If successful, the team earn ‘resources’ and ‘specialist knowledge’ to help them on their quest.
Team’s travel around the world by surface or air. Air travel uses fewer resources than surface travel (as it is faster), but contributes 3 times more ‘pollution’ towards the global Emissions Gauge. Conversely, surface travel causes an accumulating resource kickback later on in the game…not an immediate benefit, contrary to the instant needs of today’s society. It’s interesting to observe the moral and cultural dilemmas teams face when trying to make decisions.
At various stages during the game, communities surrounded by a ‘green belt’ receive bonus resources in recognition that the team has addressed a socio-environmental issue in their strategic planning.
As the global environment deteriorates consequent to the teams’ decisions on travel, the illuminated light on the global Emissions Gauge moves towards the red danger zone. This illustrates that all individual decisions and actions have an effect that impacts everyone. Should the gauge fall into the red, Negative Impact Cards are drawn that affect all teams. At various times during the experience, representatives from each team are invited to a Forum/ Summit (think “G7”) to agree a remedial agenda. Should the global emissions gauge fall further into the red, Impact cards are irreversible and new rules are permanent; once the polar bear is extinct, it’s gone forever!
The tasks and challenges that accompany the game are all quick-fire, bespoke and standalone. Each specifically highlights an issue, for example; disability, environmental concerns, social awareness, cultural protocol, national identity, pollution, the 3 ‘R’s (Reuse, Recycle, Repair) and more. The activities are deliberately designed to appeal to different skill sets to maximise the spectrum of participant engagement. They are manufactured to a high-class finish,
as is all the equipment from which the game is run. The activity is great fun to participate in and has a built-in hidden agenda, which is to provoke discussion post event.
Although it is important that the teams engage with the event and have a fun time with implicit learning, there is great value to be had in post-event discussion. The provocative and rhetorical exercises, the decision-making and variance in the tasks each team attempted within the timescale, and the potential conflict of interests through the attitudes and choices they made in comparison with their competing teams will create diverse experiences and emotions.
