I found this exercise great to use with a junior team, fast paced and fun and able to generate plenty of discussion. It needs careful consideration of the logistics and both teams need a coordinated clock to make the time pressure work effectively. Ideally, the Crime Boss/Police Chief should be someone other than the lead trainer as this ends up being mainly an administrative task and the trainer should focus on observing the groups to be able to really add to the debrief.

Although I have only used Police Chase four times in my team building events – it is a fabulous activity that always goes down well with the delegates. Although you need to put the work in up-front to make sure that you are organised and comfortable with it – it is really worth the effort. I think 2 facilitators are needed, especially when there are 2 criminal gangs. If you are running an event with a competitive edge – it is a winner. It explores trust, decision making, time management and leadership amongst so many other things. The delegates always love it - it is like a modern day battleships!

The activity itself proved useful in providing a vehicle for observation of delegates’ team and individual behaviours. By setting the activity in a competitive framework, delegates’ natural behaviours come to the front. It was possible therefore to identify leaders and followers styles and identify passive, aggressive and assertive behaviours.

In this setting, we saw more varied behaviours in the criminal gang simply because we had a split of 6 criminal gang members and 2 police team members. This was just a result of the delegate numbers but clearly with larger groups we would expect to see more from both teams.

The activity needs strong facilitation skills post exercise in order to draw out findings and relate them to the objective which has been set. Because the delegates are so involved with the exercise and having fun, our experience is that they do not notice a lot of the behaviours in themselves or others.

For this reason, we used a video camera during the exercise and were able to run parts of the replay to highlight behaviours. Not only was this enlightening for delegates but it helps the trainers to demonstrate key points without any risk of denial on the part of the delegates! The delegates also find this review entertaining and funny.

Equally we felt that the facilitator should also record this information in the spirit of fairness and accuracy! To help this we designed two sheets for the facilitator as a pre-prepared template to make it easy to record. Ed's note: These have now been formally added to the exercise.

In summary, a useful exercise which can be adapted to meet several objectives involving team and individual behaviours. Good facilitation skills are essential in order to have meaningful discussions and we would also recommend the use of video review.

Our customer has booked another 8 of the courses based on very positive delegate feedback and so we will continue to include the Police Chase activity with these courses.