“When you train experientially, you link theory and practice and appeal to all the senses,” says Ivar van Asten, entrepreneurial coach and trainer at Brilliant Work. “Research has also shown that from regular training only 15% is remembered, while with experiential training this percentage is at 70% or higher.”
Ivar has been working with experiential training since 2006 and would like to emphasize the added value of this way of training: “If you attend a training in a room, where a PowerPoint is shown and you tell a story, only the brain is addressed for knowledge processing. Because with experiential training you also get to do and experience, the effect is many times greater,” he explains.
It’s more than a team outing
“Experiential training is really different from a team outing. With a team outing, you strengthen the bond between team members, but you don’t work on team relationships and goals,” Ivar says. “A team outing is more about creating a great memory together. During our experiential trainings, on the contrary, you are put in motion to experience, for example, what good cooperation with your team members can be like and where the bottlenecks are.”
“During experiential training, you are called upon to work with your head, your hands and your heart,” he explains. “Through performing an activity, you engage in processes that also take place within the company.” Ivar likes to do this with outdoor activities. “A feature of these activities is that they are designed in such a way that you, as a team, encounter all kinds of bumps in the road when performing them. Then the team needs the commitment of everyone’s qualities to overcome these bumps, but of course this is not always easy. This appeals to everyone’s flexibility and commitment: you will experience what does and does not work and learn from it, and the question naturally arises as to how that team does it in daily work. By creating a stressful situation in a positive way, you are, as it were, thrown back on your original behavior which you show in your work. You then reflect and adjust on this together, making you more valuable as a team and learning from and with each other.”
Experience-based training also provides insight into team compositions
Experience-based training is suitable for both smaller and larger companies, Ivar informs. “Such training is already valuable when you have about six to eight participants. Even with smaller teams, you have to deal with all kinds of processes. By streamlining these processes better, it is in turn easier for a company to grow further, for example.”
“But it’s not just about mapping business processes; it can also help a company better understand why some teams are not yet functioning well,” he says. “You go through this training within the company to see what the qualities of the team members are as well as where the pitfalls are. During the exercises, you see and learn how to strengthen the qualities of each team member and complement the pitfalls. Suppose you have an employee who can plan well, but cannot communicate clearly. This can suddenly surface during an activity such as raft building. We then also work on that so that the team learns from it.”
“In normal day-to-day work, you might not see this so quickly. On the contrary, this can be very enlightening. But it also applies the other way around: perhaps someone is much better at communicating than planning and that was not known. Precisely by building up the activities, you can better enlist each other’s help to further develop or discover qualities and thus make people more broadly employable within a team.”
Shifting through chaos
“Each activity provides learning to develop multiple skills. In most activities, there is a piece of chaos or positive stress that the team faces. So project management, leadership, effective collaboration and communication are most commonly covered. But also out-of-the-box thinking and stress management. There are often team members with skills in this that you would not expect, or see, in daily practice. Some activities are led by a volunteer project leader, who, after the necessary instruction, will lead the team. This sometimes creates chaos, but that also happens in daily work. How does the project leader deal with this and how does it work for the team members? What are possible development points that you can work on immediately? These are all learning points in a positive atmosphere, which only makes learning easier and is also linked to a fun activity. Positive reinforcement is what we call that.”
Being outdoors leads to more room for ideas
Indeed, it seems like everyone has to participate very actively, but this form of training is really suitable for everyone, including people who are less fit or have physical limitations, Ivar explains. “It doesn’t matter if you are physically fit or not. After all, you also need observers watching. Above all, it’s about being outside together with your team. Being outside means that you have fewer limitations and beliefs that get in the way. You are much more creative and step out of your existing patterns more easily. So there is much more room for ideas and you let go of control more quickly, which in turn creates surprising elements.”
Do you also want to improve cooperation between departments or teams within your company? Or can the leadership within your company be strengthened? Then contact Brilliant Work. We have the right training that fits the challenges your company needs.
