Experiential Learning: Team Building, Simulations, & Gamification

About Tirian’s unique team experiences

Our intelligent Team-Building, Serious Games & Experiential Learning programs will help any team discover for themselves their own dynamics,  effective leadership, and communication. Our Simulations & Gamification will also ensure the learning is engaging. It’s possible to integrate the gamification element into any design, from a workshop to a full conference, live in person or on a Zoom / Teams online virtual session. This ensures the learning will be integrated and lasts. We don’t throw around these words loosely, and we won’t insult you by offering childish games, fillers or teadious simulations. Everything we do is focused on achieving the most effective outcomes. Below is our understanding of what this method is all about, and the benefits when implemented properly.

What is Experiential Learning: Team Building, Simulations, Serious Games, & Gamification?

Experiential learning is the overriding term that covers all kinaesthetic team learning experiences (eg  Team Building, Simulations, Serious Games, and Gamification). It involves active doing rather than passive receiving. It provides the opporutnity to practice skills. Experience-based learning becomes “experiential” when elements of reflection, support and transfer are added to the base experience.

Is our ‘team-building’ still fun?

YES! Fun and learning are not mutually exclusive, and in fact the best way to ensure learning lasts is to make the experiences fun and engaging. Getting the balance right is the key. Pure fun can be seen as a waste of time and resources. Dry academic content-focused learning often does not stick.

What is the value of Experiential Learning, Simulations, and Gamification?

Experiential learning and gamification can be used to create “virtual practice fields”. This allows individuals and teams to test assumptions and experiment with ideas without having to face real world reversals or setbacks. Companies need to create practice fields where issues that arise in the workplace can be isolated and focused on. This enables the team to see the consequences of particular actions and incidents that can occur very rapidly in the workplace and ensure they can be examined in more detail. The complexities of the everyday working environment can then be simplified and analyzed.  Actions and attitudes that cannot be reversed or taken back in the real world can be re-tried countless times in a protected environment.

Experiential learning for Team Building is designed to create safe places where people can self-discover and explore ideas and behaviors. Team Building can end with general (personal and/or business) applications, and lead onto deeper applications and Business Facilitation sessions.

What is Debriefing?

In Debriefing sessions facilitators ask participants for their opinions and refrain from making direct statements. In this way, participants learn to think for themselves and begin to take ownership over confronting issues. If they “own” their issues, they are more likely to commit to changing the situation and to following through on their commitments. In a debrief discussion, participants are asked (under the guidance of a facilitator) to reflect on their experiences and to discuss points of learning.

Why Tirian?

We are the original designers of these programs. These unique programs are used internationally under license by many companies.
For more info about how we define: Serious Games, Team Building, Team Bonding, Team Activities, Ice breakers, Interactive workshops, Simulations, and Gamification: see Andrew Grant presenting at the Australasian Simulation Congress AND our ABOUT > FAQs page)

How to ensure Team building programs are effective?

In some polls, as few as 5% of participants say that team building is effective, while 27% say it depends on the activity. Learn more about why this happens, what the stats are referring to, and how to ensure team building is actually effective in this article by Andrew Grant “Why Do Team-Building?”  & Team-Building> FAQs page .

CREATE: A diagnostic game to explore the crime, and scene, to investigate potential psychological and environmental blocks to creativity.

CREATE: A gamified team-building simulation, with a twist, that dives deep into: Customer-Focus, Employee Engagement & Creative Design.

INNOVATE: A gamified table-based global adventure simulation (backed Ph.D. research), that dives deep into: How to Win, who loses and who gets eliminated, in The Innovation Race?

COMMUNICATE: All the fun & engagement of normal team-building, but with outcomes & a memorable theme. To lead and build high-performing teams.

COLLABORATE: A powerful game-theory style interactive session & themed team-building program, where the participants become involved in a social experiment that demonstrates the challenges of collaboration in a competitive environment.

NARRATE: A challenging ‘Apprentice’ ‘Shark Tank’ style program to help teams really understand their brand, values and core vision

NARRATE: Create a movie representation of the company culture, to capture its vision mission and values & present it back in a dinner academy awards show.

TRANSFORM: ‘Building the Corporate Village‘ is a unique team-building development program. This specially designed program includes ‘The Village Celebration’, a stand-alone team-building session, with an optional integrated workshop & keynote ‘Building the Corporate Village’ exploring what corporates can learn about collaboration from a Balinese perspective while building & experiencing an authentic Balinese village. An exclusively designed program that allows for real reflection and analysis of the ways people can work together and create communities and ultimately build a transformational culture.

 Sample ‘Hollywood’ fully themed versions- for a memorable “wow” factor