A Bridge Too Far? . Download training materials and resources.

A Bridge Too Far?

About

Time:
This game can be played in about 45 minutes. In total, allowing for discussion and evaluation, we recommend allowing 90 minutes.

Aims:
• To demonstrate the problems that remote teams encounter when they are collectively responsible for a project.
• To demonstrate the importance of remote teams working effectively together as a single team.
• To demonstrate the importance of communication between teams who work in remote locations with little experience of working together.
• To get teams and participants to quickly identify gaps in resources and come up with solutions to minimise the impact of shortages.

Skills and Behaviours Tested:
Communication skills, leadership, teamwork and collaboration across remote teams, time management, creative thinking, and planning.

Group Size:
This exercise works best when you have more than 12 participants, (and can be used with much larger numbers). It will not work if you have fewer than 8 participants.

Useful For:
Staff at all levels.

You'll Need:
• A separate room or private working area for each of the 4 teams.
• A separate brief for each team.
• Sheets of thin card. (Enough for several sheets to be given to each team.)
• Old newspapers. (Each team will need a few.)
• Sticky tape for each team.
• Scissors. (Three pairs.)
• A 30cm ruler.
• 4 x small ‘Lego’ wheels, or similar.
• 6 x cocktail sticks.
• An (unopened) tin of baked beans (or similar).
• Post-it notes.
• 4 x message boards (flipchart paper).

Notes:
The exercise itself will take 45 minutes to run once introduced. You should allow at least a further 45 minutes for debrief and discussion of the key learning points unless this exercise is forming part of a longer programme in which case you may be able to review the key learning points more quickly.

For larger teams you may want to have additional facilitators. Should you wish to use extra facilitators for this exercise (perhaps taken from the participant group) there is a handy 'Facilitators Brief' that can be downloaded from Trainers’ Library. It is suggested that you allocate facilitator(s) to specific teams where they will be able to answer questions, check timings and observe what happens. You may wish to ask the facilitator(s) to write notes and feedback their comments at the end of the exercise.

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Reviews

I ran this exercise for a company as part of a summer camp which had a theme of collaboration. We had 45 people so ran with large teams. The teams worked completely separately from each other in 4 break out areas and we came back together for the bridge building and de-brief. There were some great insights in the de-brief as the teams worked globally and so we had some great discussions around communication across timezones etc. It was a great activity and I will definitely use it again!

Elaine Stephens rated this item with 5 stars.

I can highly recommend this activity if you are trying to highlight the challenges of communicating remotely whilst having the same goal. I've used the activity with both an HR team, and a large team of technical engineers, both spread across the UK. I've found on all occasions that the most confident, extrovert person offers to be the communications lead and then struggles to manage this role. I've often told teams they have to use the baked bean tin and watched as one team ate the beans so they could use the empty can (I had to walk away!!). I've never yet seen a team succeed but there's always plenty of cheering and loads of excitement at the end. I'd recommend having a few people to ensure there's no cheating and to observe the groups. Things get very frantic towards the end and it's good to have some additional observers to call out some of the behaviours during the debrief. With the HR team, we used this activity at the start of a conference, where one topic was managing change. On arrival, instead of meeting up in the foyer as normal with a coffee, we sent people to different rooms with no explanation. At 9.00, an observer presented them with their instructions and materials. They struggled on many levels: to be in a room with only a few people, to experience something different from what they expected, and then to go straight into an activity. With no brief on arrival, they also found working together much less intuitive and quickly competed with each other before realising they had to work together. The debrief brought out a lot of learning on change as well as working remotely.

Paula Knight rated this item with 5 stars.

This is a fun interactive teambuilding excercise that is simple to set up and can also be used for leadership and great for assessing planning and communication skills too! Highly recommend this activity!
Anjana Rajani rated this item with 5 stars.

I used this exercsie with 40+ gradutaes recently. The briefs for each team were clear and easy to use. The information provided for the facilitators was also clear and helped the additional facilitators enormously. The delegates found the exercise interesting, fun and energising. The learning which was brought out also was very valuable and was developed further during the remainder of the course programme. I can thoroughly recommend this exercise and would only add that it is useful to produce a matrix to monitor which team is meeting with which team to ensure that they do not 'cheat' and try and have more than their allocated meetings!

Carolyn Pickin rated this item with 5 stars.

I used an adapted version of A Bridge Too Far last week at Westward Housing Group's first ever staff conference. The organisation was recently formed through the bringing together of 4 separate housing associations into a group structure and one of the aims of the conference was to bring people together to help them to get to know each other better, understand each others roles, and begin working more effectively together (especially across different departments, functions etc as well as the different organisations within the group).
My teambuilding workshop had to support these overall aims, but was only 1 hour long, and had to be run 3 times during the course of the day, with around 55 people in each session. Fortunately, with such large numbers, I had a very big room with lots of moving around space to do it in.
After an initial icebreaker where I got everyone to stand up and walk around the room and shaking hands and introducing themselves to 4 people whom they had never met before, I introduced the task. Basically I followed the same format as in your instructions except that I reduced the times to 30 minutes to design and build their element of the bridge with 2 minutes to assemble it, and just 15 minutes for discussion afterwards.
Everyone had a sweet on their seat at the beginning with a coloured wrapper and these colours signified the teams people would be in so that they were randomly mixed up and were in teams with a range of people from different parts of the organisation. (I colour coded each team so that all their materials, pens, post-its, instruction sheets, hats etc were all in that colour, which worked really well and helped to give each team an identity. I even gave out appropriately coloured party poppers and indoor sparklers for people to set off at the grand unveiling!)
In order to make it easier to complete the task in the shortened time (and because of the big team sizes) I allowed each team 2 communications experts rather than just one, and I gave them glittery hats to wear (I do find that the prospect of wearing a glittery hat always helps draws out willing volunteers!) I also allowed them to have 2 verbal conversations with other comm.s experts as well as using the message boards (again just to speed up the process slightly without losing too much of the learning). I also adapted the brief, and told them that they were re-building the Tamar Bridge (they were all from Devon & Cornwall) after their organisation had caused its collapse by holding a sponsored event to break the world record for the number of people jumping up and down on the bridge at once and many of them seemed to take on a real responsibility to sort out the problem as though it was actually true!

Anyway, to cut a long story short, despite my worries about numbers, timings etc, the whole thing worked brilliantly, and it was fascinating to see how in each of the three workshops, people dealt with it slightly differently, thus raising different learning points. Overall, the activity really helped to break down barriers and encourage mixing and communicating between different bits of the organisation, as well as resulting in some great discussion about team-working both within and between different teams. The only drawback was that due to the large sizes of the teams (between 10 and 14 in each team) this meant that it was too easy for some people to sit back on not get actively involved (although we did highlight this as a learning point in the discussions).

I'm still waiting for the written comments from the evaluations, but all the verbal feedback was excellent - there was loads of energy and some amazing bridges (even if they didn't stay standing for very long!)

Overall, I just wanted to say that A Bridge Too Far was the perfect exercise for the task in hand. It was easy to adapt to suit timings, numbers etc, and offered lively, participative activity whilst highlight valuable learning points, so many thanks! I will definitely use it again in future.

Nicki Davey rated this item with 4 stars.