INSIGHTS DISCOVERY
THE RAINBOW CITY TEAM CHALLENGE
What is The Rainbow City Team Challenge designed to do?
The Rainbow City Challenge has been designed as a dynamic team event for large team meetings and conferences. It works best with teams on large round tables where the team can gather round to focus on the challenge.
This is a highly interactive session that engages large groups of people in a competitive business simulation.
Words are words, promises are promises, only performance is reality. 
What can you use the simulation for and who is the target audience?
The Rainbow City Challenge is an excellent front-end learning experience to any team building, conference, or strategic planning meeting, especially with teams that cut across functional areas such as sales, revenue management, marketing, accounting, human resources and operations. The event works for all levels of participants from entry level employees to the CEO. It can be run for groups of 20 people up to 400 people.
Interested in learning more?
Then get in touch with us today to discuss your Full Circle requirements.
What do participants and your organisation learn and experience?
The Rainbow City Challenge can be tailored to meet specific objectives. It is a stand-alone event, but it has much more value being themed into a bigger event such as a conference. Key themes can be worked into the simulation which can be reflected throughout the conference and into day-to-day business life beyond. We use Insights Discovery and the colour energies as a concept and a framework to help the teams understand how to adapt and connect with each other to work better together.
The key elements participants experience and learn are;
- Why having agreed clear goals shared by all the team drives performance
- Why allocating responsibility for areas of operation optimizes performance
- Why collaborative teamwork and communication are essential to success
- Why all of us working together can achieve more than one person alone
- Why quality planning focused on goal achievement drives profitable action
- Why effective time management is essential in getting results
- Why using information intelligently helps identify danger and opportunity
- Why you must identify areas where you need contingency plans
- Why quality forecasting is essential in business planning
- Why resources need to be budgeted for and used wisely
- Why the whole point of running a business is to produce maximum profit
- Why you only make a profit by satisfying customer needs
- Why the law is the law and some rules cannot be broken
- Why competition means you can never stand still
- Why entrepreneurial creative thinking can give you the edge in business
- Why in business change is a constant we must understand and adapt to
How much time do we need to allocate?
The Rainbow City Challenge is a flexible business simulation. It can be a full or half day event with teams debriefing at the end of the simulation and agreeing what lessons they can take back into their business. The minimum amount of time to allocate would be four hours.
What physical set up works best?
Teams seated on round tables works best. The practical team size is between 5 and 10 people.
What do the participants get?
The simulation starts with a team briefing. Participant teams are given key information to help them mount their expedition. They are also given the geological map and some data that they need to interpret. The clock is ticking!
What do participants do?
‘Words are words, promises are promises, only performance is reality.’ Performance is what business is all about and performance is what The Rainbow City Challenge is all about.
Set in the modern-day wilderness that is the Yukon region of Canada, teams compete to find the ‘Mother Lode’ of gold which will make their business venture profitable.
Each team starts the game with £0 to run their business venture. They also have a geology map. X marks the spot and shows the team where the ‘Mother Lode’ can be mined on the map.
The team have the opportunity to borrow money on a fixed rate of high interest to finance their business. There is risk but great potential reward.
Base camp is Rainbow City, and this is where the team starts. At Rainbow City they can borrow money and buy the prospecting license and supplies they will need to mount their expedition. Their loan will not go very far, so teams need to plan and invest carefully.
Mounting an expedition and finding the ‘Mother Lode’ is hard enough, but there are three other dynamics to consider.
The first is that the company who conducted the geological survey also sold the map to a number of potential prospectors who will also be mounting an expedition. Teams are in competition with other prospecting companies to find and mine the gold. Although teams are led to believe that this is a ‘Mother Lode’ gold runs out, so if other teams get their first, there may be little, or none left for later arriving teams to mine.
The second dynamic to consider is that the value of gold at market depends on supply. So, the first teams to get back to Rainbow City to sell their gold will get a higher price than those teams getting back later.
The third dynamic is the weather. Winter is coming and teams only have days to get to the mine, mine gold and get back to Rainbow City to sell their gold before snow and ice makes travel and mining impossible for 6 months. Come spring there could be hundreds of prospectors to compete with. So, it is now or never! Which team will make the most profit and win?
In the debriefing, we discuss some of the structural factors involved in motivating high performance. These factors include time limits, clear goals, enough resources, leadership support, clear roles, peer support, measured results and a number of other themes to promote discussions about potential workplace changes that would increase motivation, teamwork and results. What does ‘Mining Gold’ mean in our organization? is one of the many interesting debriefing questions that kicks off discussion.
As a team they need to set goals, allocate tasks and responsibility and agree a plan. There is a need to analyse the information available to see how this can be factored into their plan. The team then need to borrow the money required to buy a prospecting licence and the resources they need to mount their expedition. Depending on the route teams choose to get to the X marks the spot gold matrix, then they need to buy different resources.
Each team has the same amount of time to work with 28 days in game time. For each day teams are out in the wilderness they are using up resources such as fuel, food and other supplies. They will also encounter adverse weather such as fog, blizzards and bitter cold as winter draws in. If teams are not back in Rainbow City on or by day 28, they will be trapped for the winter by the winter snow and will need rescue. Very expensive!!!!
The winning team is the team with the most profit! Making a loss is bad news and dying in the wilderness is hard to live down!
What do participants say?
Thanks Martin, you and your team got the conference off to a great start, it was real scene setter, a talking point and dovetailed beautifully with our overall theme.
Robert Crook then MD Interstate Hotels and Resorts
