I've used this activity twice: once as a leadership exercise and once for teambuilding (requiring only a slight change in emphasis on the debrief).

Students want to get straight onto the bridge-building phase rather than spend time on planning their bridge. However, when debriefed, they comment that they understand the importance of planning, and recognise that it's something they perhaps need to do better in their day jobs. This often comes from the team who don't succeed with the task - they acknowledge that better planning (and also leadership) could have helped.

Using it as a leadership activity, you can focus in the debrief on the role of the leader, on leadership styles/approaches, and what it might have felt like had they not had a leader. For teambuilding, you can still draw out issues about leadership (because someone in the group might have evolved as a natural leader, without having been appointed, and this is something you might want to comment on) as well as focusing on the positives of teamworking - so if you are running this activity with a team who are not working well together, you could praise them (without patronising) on how well they worked together to build their bridge.

It can be adapted easily with or without appointing a leader, or observers. I ran it with much shorter time-frames than recommended - only 10 minutes for planning and 20 minutes to build the bridge, but it still worked - it just got participants working harder and faster. There's a real energy in the room as teams strived to build a better bridge than their competitors! (You can always make the point of course, that they were asked to build a strong bridge, not to beat their competitors, but inevitably the element of competition will appear!).

Leave the bridges on show for the remainder of the training course/week - they're a talking point. I even had one team nominating someone to "body pop" underneath the bridge to music from their iPod - real flair, creativity, leadership and teamworking coming out.

I used this exercise very successfully when training a group of new managers on communication styles and teamwork. The exercise was very simple to run and needed very few props - and those which it did need were inexpensive and readily available - perfect!. The groups had a lot of fun and it was really interesting to notice the creative thought process - I guess the exercise could also be used for problem solving situations. We used an observer for each group who was able to give great feedback on the group dynamics and interactions - picking up on key words and phrases used which were useful - and of course, those which were not so useful. The exercise demonstrated the key learning that I wanted to draw out - it was quick - and the group had a load of fun doing it. Can't get better than that really.