Geoteaming

On Saturday, we had a group activite loosely based on the new sport of Geocaching, which involves hunting for "caches" based on GPS coordinates. It's basically a high-tech treasure hunt. For our group activity, we split into smaller groups, and spread out throughout the whole Microsoft campus (which has upwards of 100 buildings) and hunt for caches. At each cache we could attain "revenue", so we had to develop a strategy to not just go after "low hanging fruit", i.e. the closest cache, but we needed to prioritize where we were going to go next based on the revenue we could receive. Also, we had a goal as a group to hit a certain number of caches, and make a certain amount of "revenue". At the beginning of the game we were trying to keep other teams from finding caches because we wanted to "win", until as a group we discovered we were falling insanely short of our corporate goals, after which point in time we realized we'd lose our group reward as long as we hurt the other competing, smaller groups. It not only was a fun activity, but was a great object lesson for group dynamics. It didn't hurt that it was about 70 and sunny on Saturday, (pretty unusual this time of year in Seattle).