Wilderness Drum > Wilderness Writings > Team Building

Team Building in the Wilderness
Steve Beyer

Introduction
Campfires
Conflicts
Confrontation
Cooking
Council
Darkness
Decisionmaking
Development
Drumming
Followership
Leadership
Meetings
Stress
Trust
Wilderness Ethics

Meetings

Good Meetings

Despite differences in both form and content, wilderness teams benefit from meetings in the same way – and to the same extent, which may be a lot or a little – as business and corporate teams. Whatever the format of the meeting, whether council or otherwise, it is important to set out ground rules for how meetings will be run, how team members will interact, and what kind of behavior is acceptable. The following are some of the basics (see Scholtes, Joiner, & Streibel, 2000, pp. 4-37 to 4-38):

Attendance There should be an expectation that everyone will attend meetings. The team should identify legitimate reasons for missing a meeting and establish a procedure for bringing absent members up to speed. There are few excuses in the wilderness for a team member to be absent from a meeting.
Promptness It is disruptive for team members to wander in late for a meeting. A meeting can be announced to the team ahead of time – ”Morning circle in ten minutes, everyone!” Stragglers can be told, politely, that everyone was waiting for them.
Participation While silence is acceptable in council, it should still be emphasized that the team benefits from having everyone's input.
Interruptions While a wilderness team meeting is unlikely to be interrupted by a telephone call, it should still be made clear that camp chores and, especially, personal needs should be taken care of before the meeting begins.
Responsibilities It should be decided before each meeting who will be the meeting facilitator, who – if anyone – will take notes, and who will keep an eye on the time. The logger for the day is often assigned the responsibility of keeping the meeting on track.
Place and time Team members should know when and where daily meetings will take place. There should also be a procedure for notifying team members of a meeting which has not been normally scheduled, since telephone calls and e-mail are not available. Thus, the Boulder Outdoor Survival School (BOSS) has a system of hoots – loud, high-pitched hooo sounds. One hoot is simply a request for other team members to hoot in response, so their locations can be determined – for example, if people become separated on the trail. Two hoots is a call for a meeting. Three hoots indicates an emergency, such as being lost or injured.

Many of the general principles of good business meetings apply in the wilderness as well (on business and corporate meetings generally, see Scholtes, Joiner, & Streibel, 2000, pp. 4-1 to 4-10). The purpose of the meeting must be clear, even in the absence of a written agenda. The meeting should remain focused, with minimal rambling, and should conclude promptly. Decisions and tasks should be unambiguous, with all questions and confusions resolved.

Problem Participants

Scholtes, Joiner, & Streibel (2000, pp. 7-15 to 717) identify three kinds of meeting participants who can create difficulties in achieving true consensus decisions.

Overbearing participants Some team members may have a disproportionate amount of influence in a wilderness team, often because they lay claim to special outdoors experience or expertise. Their insight can be valuable; but at the same time their authority can be intimidating to other members and thus discourage discussion and new ideas. The intimidation can be unintentional – they may just speak with an aura of infallibility – or intentional, as when they dismiss the ideas of others. One way of dealing with such participants is to get their prior private agreement that it is important for all team members to participate in the decisionmaking process, even those who may be less knowledgeable; and to make a point of consulting the expert, or asking the expert occasionally to make a presentation to the team.
Dominating participants Some team members just talk too much – whether in council or in any other kind of meeting. They tell stories; they digress; they are maddening. Such participants can be dealt with, again, by getting their prior private agreement that concision – being of lean expression – is an important virtue; in some cases, a constructive confrontation may be necessary. In some meetings – not, of course, in council – a dominating participant may even be interrupted, politely, and told that the contribution is valued but other people are waiting to speak.
Reluctant participants On the other hand, some team members hardly speak at all. They may be shy; they may be intimidated; they may be loners. It is very important, I believe, not to put reluctant participants on the spot, especially in council or a meeting where deeply personal issues are being dealt with. No one should be forced to participate – or especially to be self-revealing – unwillingly. Yet at the same time the team may be missing a valuable contribution. Again, a private discussion may be held about the importance of getting everyone's thoughts. At some meetings – not, of course, in council – the reluctant participant may be directly involved – "Mary, you've climbed in this area before; how cold do you think it might get tonight?"

Daily Meetings

Wilderness teams should have practice in meetings, whether in council form or not. It is often helpful to meet in the morning – usually after breakfast, so that team members have had food and coffee – to discuss the activities of the day. In this way, group members will have a clear idea of what will be expected of them, questions can be asked, confusions can be cleared up, and stress can be alleviated by accurate information. For example, at the morning meeting on a hike, the navigator can lay out the day's route, describe the location and grade of elevation changes, and anticipate difficult terrain.

The morning meeting can have other purposes as well. It is often useful to have each member give an internal "weather report" on his or her current status – for example, "I'm looking forward to today's hike, but I'm a little worried about the river crossing, so I may need some help on that. I'd say that, for me, it's basically clear skies with a few scattered clouds.” The morning circle may also be a time for low-key cohesion-building work. For example, each team member can be asked to demonstrate his or her favorite stretching exercise, which the group then does together; or, depending on the purpose and makeup of the group, there could be a brief ceremony thanking the spirits of the place for providing a good campsite, or asking for a safe journey during the day ahead.

It can also help to have a debriefing at the end of the day. The group can meet in council and review the activities and decisions and discuss what worked and what did not, what stresses were encountered or avoided, who did a particularly good job, and where the group process needs improvement. If interpersonal stresses have manifested themselves during the day, the evening debriefing might also be a good time for a constructive confrontation, clearing staff, or dyadic council.

Informational meetings

Building a wilderness team often involves the teaching and learning of skills. Informational meetings can be used to teach knots, crevasse self-rescue, first aid, leadership skills, or map reading. The sophistication of the lesson depends, of course, on the skill level of the group. An inexperienced group can benefit from being taught how to light a cookstove or use a cat hole. Indeed, it is often a good idea to make no assumptions about what the group knows; a team member who does not know what to do with used toilet paper may be too embarrassed to ask. Informational meetings also provide an excellent opportunity for each member to make a presentation to the team in some area of interest or expertise; it is a wonderful forum for harnessing the energy of otherwise overbearing participants.

Informational meetings in the wilderness often encroach on very personal subjects. How such subjects should be approached is a matter of some debate. For example, should a discussion of menstruation in the wilderness, or yeast infections, be conducted only among women members? How do you explain to a twelve-year-old boy how to defecate accurately into a cat hole? Do you demonstrate?

Decision Meetings

Many meetings of wilderness groups involve making decisions. Such decisions may be routine – for example, assigning leadership functions for the day, selecting one of several alternative routes, choosing a campsite. Frequently such meetings can be brief, especially if the team has become experienced in group decisionmaking. Indeed, such practice can be essential in preparation for those occasions of crisis when decisions of serious consequence must be made, and often made quickly – whether to evacuate an injured teammate or wait for help, where to go in the face of a sudden brush fire, whether and when to turn back from an ascent as temperatures start to drop.

Whatever the meeting method – whether council or otherwise – the ideal is to reach consensus. Sometimes, in a wilderness emergency, consensus is too expensive in terms of time, and immediate autocratic decisions must be reached, sometimes with transparency reserved until after the crisis is over. Still, building consensus builds teams; a team that is used to achieving consensus is willing to trust, and that trust may be priceless in an emergency.

Consensus is not compromise. In a compromise, each party settles for less than its full needs and desires; each side gives up something in order to end the conflict or resolve the problem. Compromise is achieved by mutual concessions. Consensus is a process that arrives at group solidarity. The process of consensus tends to create closer relationships than does compromise (Bolton, 1979, pp. 236-238, 246). When there has been consensus, everyone in the team understands the decision, can articulate why it is the best under the circumstances, and can live with it. Consensus decisionmaking is a search for the best decision the team can reach; it requires time, active participation, creativity, and skill in communication and conflict resolution (Scholtes, Joiner, & Streibel, 2000, p.4-23 to 4-25).

References

Bolton, R. (1979). People skills. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Scholtes, P., Joiner, B., & Streibel, B. (2000). The team handbook (2nd ed.). Madison, WI: Oriel.

< Previous Next >

Back to the top
Return to Writings Page