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Why "Reality Check"? |
We adopted the term seven years ago, before it made its way onto everybody´s evening newscast, because it seems to effectively describe what outdoor training can do. Companies and their internal teams, even in the best of cases, seem to lose focus on their primary task, which is to compete in the marketplace. Reality Check´s method is to help maintain teams´ culture and focus directed on making the Big Team, the company, vital and successful.Outdoor training methods give us the opportunity to cooperate with our clients in investigating how they do what they do. Sometimes they don´t communicate as well as they thought. Sometimes one person on a team believes that he or she is somehow bigger than the team is - that he or she always has the right answer, even if nobody else agrees. Sometimes one member of a team will stop a process - even a valuable one - if it feels somehow out of control. Our trainings bring these things to light in a way that doesn´t feel judgmental. The patterns come up and we talk about them. That´s why we called it Reality Check. Everybody gets one. Including us.
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Reality Check´s main thrust is team building and "bonding", but our trainings are also designed to provide insight into the culture and process strategies of any work group. In a volatile business climate, these insights, along with our focus on quality and integrity issues, have proven extremely valuable to companies in transition as well as to any cost-conscious employer. We believe that a team that "feels" like a team is motivated to stay together and to succeed together. In pursuit of this goal, we rely heavily on in-depth processing after each event to isolate and identify patterns of behavior, as well as to provide points of reference throughout the training.
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Every modern business person knows that among the most difficult and challenging issues that he or she faces is the constant influx of new technologies and products into the marketplace. Reality Check believes that Outdoor Experiential Training is the fastest and most effective method by which managers and business leaders can help their teams develop the mind set necessary to keep pace with this huge volume of change. Reality Check´s unique series of activities and process sessions allows teams not only to investigate and refine how they solve problems and adapt, but also to develop whole new strategies for new markets and conditions.
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Reality Check´s basic philosophy holds that teams adopt new paradigms most easily in an open environment outside the workplace. Our method is to take them into an outdoor training facility in which they share activities designed to make them think outside of their normal patterns. From these activities, teams can take learnings and questions back to the office for application to existing problems and challenges. Along with this context of accelerated learning comes the indefinable sense of bonding that team members experience during the high challenge ropes experiences. We´ve concluded, after seven years experience, that Outdoor Challenge Learning not only models the new business climate, it prepares team members in advance for the rapid shifts of focus and thinking style that characterize the modern workplace.
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We create challenges, and then we talk about how we handled them. What comes through after a while is that the way we deal with these "artificial" challenges is the way we deal with everything else. What we do outside is what we do on the job, only more so. If we have weaknesses, or areas where we need new tools for success, we find out where those areas are before they´re exposed under pressure on the job. It may be uncomfortable sometimes, but it´s more comfortable in the long run than working out our problems and differences in "real" time, when real money´s at stake.
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