Client scenario: A consulting firm wishes to break up a week of classroom based new hire orientation classes with an outdoor activity which would help recent college graduates understand their role and responsibility in the organization.

Each new hire “class” is divided into groups of fifteen, and then further divided into three functional roles: six people are designated as “workers,” six are “managers,” and three are “directors.”

The directors are led into a breakout space at least 200m from the job site, where they are given written directions to the activity. Meanwhile, workers are asked to don blindfolds (“special protective eyewear”) and managers are asked to lead the workers to the job site. Once the workers are in position, managers are told where they can find the directors. No other instructions are given.

The exercise itself is a relatively straightforward object retrieval problem, which requires the workers (and only the workers) to remove a bucket of water (“toxic waste”) from a 50’ circle while blindfolded, without entering the circle, and using only the various pieces of rope and rubber cord provided. About one-third of the groups succeed, one-third come close, and one-third fail miserably.

In debriefing the exercise, participants are asked to generate a report by function of things they believe worked, and things they would change. Generally workers report feeling “in the dark” (literally), abandoned (when managers left to meet with directors), confused (when managers offer conflicting instructions), isolated (unable to grasp the “big picture” of what they were doing), and frustrated. This, the company reports unapologetically, is what the role of a junior associate will sometimes feel like.

As discussion continues, however, participants turn their attention to things that workers could do to help themselves AND their senior colleagues. Managers and directors, for example, typically report wanting more input from their workers, wishing workers would think for themselves, preferring that workers continue to experiment in their absence, and most of all wishing that workers would communicate up-line more pro-actively.

Associates participating in a second training program, generally two to three years after this one, consistently describe this activity as one of the most practical components of the weeklong program. As one “worker” wrote afterwards:

“If people pay attention, it should short-circuit any impulse they may have to play the victim no matter how hierarchical [the company] is.”