Most of us office-bound information workers would be hard-pressed to describe our jobs as adventurous or risky outside our own Walter Mitty-esque fantasies. Most of the adventure we experience would be intellectual at best and the risks we encounter are thoroughly calculated such as to prevent against failure or to simply cover our rears. This is somewhat unfortunate, though, as it’s hard to replicate the incisive clarity that can result from adventurous, inherently risky activities. Nor are we called upon to stretch the imaginations as much as we might when something important like our safety and the safety of others…

Love them or loathe them, meetings are an inevitability of the business world. Often our negative feelings towards meetings are caused by a belief that they’re ineffective, frustrating, or pointless. Even those of us who have had positive and exciting meetings, we’ve all experienced those feelings at one point or another. Harvard University, in a mission not related directly to meetings, set out to aid schools in getting more value out of their test results through a project called DataWise. As you might expect, this massive project spawned thousands of meetings and a mixed bag of positive progress and static…

All politics aside, ever wonder why it seems so hard for high ranking government officials to come to an agreement? Why is it that these powerful men and women have so much trouble with consensus building? Well, recent research by UC Berkeley researchers Angus Hildreth and Cameron Anderson has shown that power can actually impede performance when it comes to working with others of similar high ranking. In fact, it was found that in groups of low, medium, and highly powered members, only 41% of the high-powered groups were able to reach agreement in experiments, versus 88% of the low-powered…

Delegation is one of the hardest skills to learn – most of us just aren’t very good at it. A 2007 study showed that nearly half of the companies it surveyed were concerned about their employees abilities to delegate effectively, something they deemed essential for their workforce. While sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint delegation shortcomings in ourselves, most all of us have experienced working with a supervisor who did not know how to delegate well. For instance I remember doing a graphic design project for an employer years ago, during which my boss hovered over my shoulder constantly, examining every…

Recently I returned from a lovely week long vacation in Mexico, a country which holds a special place in my heart since it’s where I first studied Spanish full-time. Being able to speak the language while traveling in a foreign country is obviously a valuable skill, but it also makes you more keenly aware of fellow travelers who have a lesser command of the language, or none at all for that matter — something I bore witness to on various occasions during my trip. What’s interesting is the typical approach that people take when they begin to struggle to communicate…

Working at a team building company, it’s easy to put on your rose-colored glasses and believe that everyone finds team building as fun and interesting as we do. However, despite the thousands of converts whose minds we’ve changed, we’re well aware of the stigma that team building carries and how it can elicit eye rolls from more cynical employees—or those that have had bad experiences with cheesy games, over-the-top facilitators, and heavy-handed metaphors such as the universally loathed trust fall. While we’ve got an excellent track record for winning over the most skeptical participants, we realize as a manager it’s…

“For it is in giving that we receive.” – Francis of Assisi You might be surprised to learn that gift givers derive more pleasure from the act of giving than the recipients do from getting the gift. Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School conducted a series of studies which confirmed this fact, in spite of participants thinking the opposite would occur. In one such study, students were given $20 to spend on themselves or on other people, in the form of a donation or charity. Those who spent money on others reported feeling happier at the end of the…

Saying “I don’t know” is often harder than we realize. Think of all the times we say we know when we don’t, both explicitly (saying, “Yeah, I know that”) or implicitly (staying quiet or unconsciously nodding our heads) despite being clueless about the topic at hand. Whether you attribute it to pride, ego, or self-consciousness, this tendency seems to manifest quite early in our lives, and then blossom into full on strategy as we grow older. In children, this tendency has been studied in the work of Dr. Amanda Waterman who found this universal trait in her subject group of…

Here at Adventure Associates we wholeheartedly believe in the value of experiential learning. For years we’ve seen its benefits and the breakthroughs it can create for both individuals and teams. Admittedly, the concept of experiential learning is not a new one, since it appears even Confucius recognized its merits back in 450BC: “Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” Regardless, we often still find ourselves in classrooms and auditoriums, watching slides flit across a screen or someone scribbling furiously on a whiteboard. What’s wrong with these approaches is that…

The written word is a beautiful thing. We string together series of words into sentences and paragraphs in an effort to convey feelings, sentiments, and viewpoints—to paint mental pictures and sway opinions. There’s imprecision to language, though—a flexibility in meaning to words and phrases that allows for interpretation, enabling everyone to experience language in a very different way, just like we do our senses. In literature, this has a marvelous effect, allowing us to create our own versions of an author’s world in our heads. A thoughtful author understands this and relishes in people’s own personal interpretations of their work.

Let’s face facts. You’re addicted to your devices. You use these email and social media umbilical cords every day from the earliest hours of the morning to the wee hours of the night. Can you honestly think of the last time you went one hour without checking your email or social media? Was it two hours? A day? It’s probably been a while. In fact, a poll conducted by TIME found that 84% of its readers said they couldn’t go a day without their smartphone, with a full 25% admitting that they checked their phones every 30 minutes–and I’m guessing…

The word “multitasking” seems ubiquitous these days, especially in the business world. In fact, prior to writing this article I did a search for jobs in New York via Indeed.com to see how many of the listed positions included the term – 811 of them did. Unfortunately, despite our obsession with the concept, multitasking is not well suited to human beings, ie you and me. A computer concept applied to people Did you know that the term multitasking was actually first used to describe a capability of computers? In a 1966 issue of Datamation magazine—a riveting read, I’m sure—you’ll find…

It seems like these days the phrase team building has become an umbrella term for any non-work time spent with coworkers outside of the office. As such, team building is used to describe anything from trivia night at the local pub, to eye-roll-inducing trust falls in a forest meadow, or even a few loops around the local go-kart track. Here at Adventure Associates we don’t deny the joys of coiffing tasty ale while showcasing your obscure knowledge of 80s daytime television, nor do we scoff at the rousing experience of reliving Days of Thunder in a lilliputian sized race-car. (We…

Brainstorming, commonly defined as the spontaneous generation of ideas out loud in a group, is inextricably linked to the creative process and is firmly established in the business realm as one of the best routes to lightbulb moments. It’s a process that has followed me all the way from elementary school science class sessions to upper level marketing classes at university. However, being mildly introverted and not wanting to compete with louder group members, I’d always wondered at the efficiency of this process that we’ve been doing for so many years. And by years, I really mean decades. Brainstorming was…

Stories of competitive workplaces are naturally quite provocative, conjuring up images of high octane law firms or blue chip consulting outfits. McKinsey is famously an ‘up or out’ firm, where if you do not advance, you are counseled to leave. Jack Welch, former CEO of GE also famously promoted a culture wherein the bottom ten percent of employees were let go. This Darwinian approach to human resource management—and corporate culture, really—may be compelling to some managers, especially in light of some of these companies’ successes. However, be cautious when considering introducing competition into your own workplace. First, let’s explore some…