Corporate team building did not start with a single event. It grew from two separate threads, research into how groups behave and outdoor courses for people in work.
Studying groups in the 1940s
In 1946 the state of Connecticut asked the psychologist Kurt Lewin to lead a two week workshop on race relations. He and his colleagues developed what they called the training group, or T-group, in which a small group learned by looking at its own behaviour. Lewin died in February 1947, and his colleagues carried the work on. It is often seen as the start of what became organisation development.
In Britain, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was founded in London in 1946 with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Its early researchers were preoccupied with how groups work. Eric Trist, one of its best known figures, helped develop the idea that organisations depend on both social and technical processes.
Some researchers argue that the Tavistock deserves more credit than it usually gets. That is a minority view. Most accounts still name Lewin as the founder of organisation development.
Outdoor courses for working people
The outdoor thread is separate. Brathay in the Lake District ran a course in 1946 that is often described as the first outdoor course in Britain designed for people in work. Outward Bound began at Aberdovey in 1941 and opened more schools after that.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the schools received considerable sponsorship from business and industry, who wanted to develop young recruits and managers. Brathay’s work with the security firm Securicor is linked to programmes for graduates recruited to management roles.
Reviewing the day
The courses changed in the 1960s and early 1970s. The language moved from “character training” towards personal growth. Kolb’s learning cycle gave trainers a way to review an activity, and John Adair’s writing on action centred leadership gave groups a model to reflect on. Tasks borrowed from army officer training were now called initiatives, and used to illustrate a point of theory.
That mix of a challenge outdoors followed by a talk afterwards is still the basis of many team days.
How well does it work
The evidence is mixed. Christopher Loynes, who has written widely on outdoor management development, notes that the approach has never been proven by research, though a lot of anecdotal evidence supports it. Plenty of people find a shared day out useful, and the research has not caught up with that.
What this means for you
If you are planning a day for a team, ask the provider how they will review it afterwards, and who the day is for. Our indoor or outdoor team building comparison is a good place to start, and our team days page lists providers.
Sources
- Growth and Development, University of Rochester
- Pioneers in the Field of Organization Development, Institute of OD
- Burnes and Cooke (2013), Business History, via IDEAS
- Outdoor management development in the UK, Loynes (1998), University of Cumbria
- Outdoor management development, a critical appraisal, Crawford and Mapstone (1989)
- Outward Bound, Wikipedia
We could not read the full texts of the Loynes and Freeman histories, so the 1960s and 1970s details come from summaries. The exact dates of the Securicor courses are not clear.