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Bushcraft Adventure Overview

Introduction

Bushcraft is the term often given to the necessary skills required to live comfortably in our environment. These would have been second nature to our ancestors but have been lost through the passage of time.

Righttrack’s Bushcraft Adventure is so much more than just a nostalgic nod to the past and a reconnection with nature and our roots. It serves as a reminder of how important team working and the collective sharing of information, ideas, methods and skills are absolutely vital to success of an organisation.

Main Learning Objectives

Team based learning
Working out of comfort zones and thinking beyond normal boundaries
The mutual sharing of information and skills
Teaching and coaching other team members / inspiring others to learn
People’s reaction and ability to manage and cope with change
Increased self awareness of own skills and behaviour
Increased awareness of one’s own ability to learn new skills / knowledge
Creative problem solving and decision making
Awareness of delegate’s contribution to team activity and how teams work – Belbin
Team Roles Questionnaire

Further Detail

The collective sharing of information, ideas, methods and skills are absolutely vital to success of an organisation. How often is information, knowledge and wisdom kept to individuals or propagated throughout your organisation? How often is the ‘wheel re-invented’? How well are tomorrow’s leaders and team members educated, mentored, and developed, so they are comfortable and competent in their environment?

This 2-day programme is designed to help delegates experience the importance of sharing and exchanging information, knowledge and skills, to benefit the whole organisation. The delegates work in small groups of participants learning specific skills from our instructors, and then having to share and teach their fellow team members.

Participants are also asked to complete a Belbin Team Roles Questionnaire to assess their ‘type’ which provides feedback on how they contribute to team work and team activity. This is valuable information which can readily be used back in the workplace. (See below for more information on Belbin Interplace.)

By mutual learning and sharing of skills the group are able to provide everything needed for a comfortable stay in the woods. Throughout the programme the group tackle skills such as:
Shelter Building – improvised and natural
Fire making – traditional and modern methods including friction fire lighting
Food – Cooking over an open fire
Camp food tucker – modern miracles and traditional classics
Safe use of tools – knife, saw, crook knife
Tool making – Mallets, spoons
Making cordage from naturally occurring resources

This provides a very strong experience to review against the issues that helped and hindered the team's and individuals’ overall success. This is achieved on the second day with a comprehensive review facilitated to highlight the key issues observed and experienced. The review will also tie in learning from the Belbin questionnaire.

Parallels are made to the working world – communication and how well information and skills are shared. How well people want to learn new skills and knowledge. How important is attitude and behaviour in a learning environment. The review concludes with participants making their commitments in the form of a personal action plan.

Contact Righttrack to discuss your specific requirements

An Introduction to Team Roles

The research of Dr Meredith Belbin in the late seventies proved the importance of using "balanced teams" to achieve the best results. Dr Belbin identified nine clusters of behaviour, which he called "team roles”, which individuals adopt when participating in a team. During extensive experiments at Henley Management College it became clear that teams comprising of a balanced mix of team roles outperformed unbalanced teams. Subsequent research has also demonstrated that teams outperform individuals when dealing with high risk complex issues, a fact that gave birth to the expression "nobody's perfect, but a team can be".

Today, over 40 percent of the companies quoted in the FTSE and thousands of organisations world-wide have put Dr Belbin's team role model to good use. The original research involved painstaking and laborious observation using Bales analysis to identify a person's natural team role. Today the process takes a few minutes by using the highly developed Belbin Self Perception Inventory and observer assessments that are processed by the Belbin Interplace computer software.