Of team building, adventure trips and unexpected challenges

Belief-defying obstacle courses, man-made and natural, belief inducing team building exercises, imagination stimulating games, life in the rural wilderness, a fierce unexpected storm and tough decisions. These pretty much form the outline of a part of the adventure trip embarked upon by the students of XLRI’s GMP batch 2011-2012.

This compulsory trip, organized this year by the Raymond Memorial Welfare Trust, is a part of the General Management Programme and is aimed at fostering team spirit, increasing familiarity and bonding between the relatively new faces in college, bringing out the leaders the group, overcoming fears and instilling belief in oneself and to get out there and take in whatever life in the greenery and the earth has to offer.

Having arrived in the rustic outskirts of the village Tumung, the group of around sixty students set up camp with the aid of the RMWT instructors and launched into a host of adventure sports. The proverbial lap of nature threw up a challenge or two as teams of students tackled group tasks that tested leadership skills and trust levels within a team, imagination, spontaneity through group tasks, the ability to overcome apprehensions and fears as the group egged each other on through incredible natural and artificial obstacle courses. It didn’t matter that age was not quite on the side of many of the participants; the enthusiasm in the group was infectious, energy rubbed off among the members.

The nature-made challenges, however, weren’t restricted to the obstacle course. On the first night at camp incessant rains and cyclonic winds swept the camp relentlessly. Security and health concerns began to crop up as some of the tents were rendered unusable by nature’s fury. The inhospitable conditions tested the batch’s ability to deal with unexpected crises. Some enquiries and a quick survey revealed that there was a govt school building in the vicinity that could be used as temporary shelter until an alternative could be figured out. As there was some uncertainty about availability of shelter for 60 adults, some of the members volunteered to stay back in the tents and thus help ease logistical issues.

Conditions unfortunately did not improve into the next day and the activities had to be called off prematurely. However, the truncated trip was not without its lessons in management for the students.

The trip was a first-hand experience in:

- Realizing what rural India goes through when the weather runs wild

- Working with what you have

- Prioritization – moving people with health concerns to the temporary shelter first

- Work as a team, coordinate with each other

- When the going gets tough, it becomes all the more important for a team to keep the bigger picture in mind at all times and work towards a best possible solution under the circumstances.

- The importance of clear thinking

The adventure trip may not have fulfilled its immediate purpose, but the students did take away equally significant lessons in management. The students learned what it took to deal with a real situation the hard way; something that cannot be fully learnt in a classroom or from books!