When experiences are designed well, abstract ideas have the chance to be truly internalized.
Updated: Oct 13
Recently, at the Hong Kong Christian Family Service Center Yue Anhsi, we led a six-color brick experiential team-building event for 117 staff members.
The core of this event was not just team interaction, but understanding the ICF spirit through experience: People-oriented: Focus on overall functioning and life participation, rather than focusing solely on the disease or injury itself.
Holistic Perspective: Connects three major aspects: body structure, individual activities, and social participation.
Emphasis on environmental interaction: Emphasize the key impact of physical environment, social attitudes, and policy support on a person's abilities.
Self-determination: Respect the claims and desires of service users, and encourage self-participation and autonomy.
Even if people from different professional roles have different understandings of the same issue, teams can still collaborate effectively due to shared goals.
There is a task in the event where you build a "wide and tall" wisdom tree using building blocks. Interestingly, the team quickly discovered that despite the same four words, everyone understands 'broad' and 'high' differently. Some first worked on the width of the bottom, others raised the overall structure from the sides, and the final work was highly creative and vividly presented the essence of interdisciplinary collaboration—different paths don't mean different directions.
One observation I am particularly concerned about is:
At first, over 100 colleagues who knew each other well sat chatting, making the scene rather lively; But once the tasks were clear and the groups were well defined, the whole group quickly settled down and threw themselves into the common task.
This reminds me once again that many team problems are not necessarily about "people not engaged," but rather:
- Common goals are not specific enough
- Collaborative tasks are not perceptible enough
- Members remain stuck in their original interaction habits
When experiences are designed well, abstract ideas have the chance to be truly internalized.
The "Work Wishes and Blessing Card" at the end of the event was also very interesting. I requested that the text be over 40 characters. Originally, I just wanted to encourage everyone to write more, but in the end, four participants actually wrote complete and sincere blessings. This shows me that when a team is placed in the right context, the depth of engagement can actually exceed expectations.
This leadership also made me even more certain of one thing:
For interdisciplinary teams such as social welfare, education, healthcare, and caregiving, the value of experiential learning lies not in "livening up the atmosphere," but in turning shared language, role understanding, and work meaning into processes that can be experienced together.
To sum up this event in one sentence:
Be yourself and help others succeed.
If you're also thinking about how to design a more transformative learning experience for your team, feel free to join us.
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