Team Level – Campfire
This powerful, stimulating session gives teams a memorable, in-depth experience of who they are, what their journey has been, how they have handled the challenges they’ve faced and what they vision for the future. The campfire uses story telling to add personal reflection and fun to the workshop, as well as giving people a lot to talk about for weeks to come.
Write the team-work trigger words listed below on post it notes to start the story telling session. Write them on post it notes:
- Motivate, Inspire and Push Each Other
- Achievement
- Confidence
- Respect
- Teamwork means never having to take all the blame yourself
- Together Everyone Achieves More
- Combined Effort
- Common Cause
- Its you and me vs. the problem, Not you vs. me
- Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much
- Post the sticky notes on the sticky wall and give them access to sharpies and post it notes. Tell the participants that this is a workplace “campfire” and the only thing they’re invited to do is share stories back and forth. Show them the wall of words and ask them to take 1 – 3 minutes to look them over and recall a story associated with one of them.
- To help the group warm up, start the storytelling session yourself by removing one of the words on the wall and posting it in a space nearby. Then tell your introductory story.
- Ask for a volunteer to continue what you started by peeling another word from the wall and posting it next to yours. This begins the post it “story thread.”
- Before the first player begins his story, ask him to read aloud the word s/he chose and then instruct the other players to listen carefully to his/her story and jot down a word or phrase on a post it that reminds them of another work-related story. If no words in the player’s story jumped out at them, they are welcome to pull a post it from the original wall of words.
- After the player concludes the first story, ask for another volunteer to approach the wall and to either post her/his own post it note or take one from the “wall of words”. Ask him/her to read his/her word aloud and to then share his/her story.
- Repeat this process until the players have created a snake like “story thread” which acts as an archive of the campfire conversation. Use your best judgement to determine when to end the storytelling session. Before you “put out” the fire, ask the players to lessons learned or final thoughts they want to add.
