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A Galactic Lesson in Team-Building
Alaska Airlines Improves Team Collaboration
The cavernous meeting room sits in dim light. It is filled with 172 round tables, each covered with a large blue map of a strange distant galaxy. Shiny intergalactic Raiders and menacing solar storms lay poised on each map, ready to attack unwitting travelers who will soon be soaring through the galaxy at light speed in their starships. The doors open as 1,050 Alaska Airlines employees stream in. The overture from “Star Wars” fills the room.
These employees are being “transported” to the team-building adventure called THE JOURNEY HOME™, the Business Simulation International program distributed by Advantage alliance partner, ON TRACK. For the next three-and-a-half hours, they will explore how well they perform as a cohesive team: how prepared they are to share information; value and leverage the diverse skills, ideas and opinions of each team member; and most importantly, step out of the box and rethink their notions about what really constitutes a “team.”
 Breakthrough Thinking about Teams
Alaska Airlines Manager of Career Development Claudia Hage had worked with Advantage consultant Shirley Flaherty and Advantage franchise partner Dan Terry the prior year, and asked them back for an encore. Flaherty says, “This time, the organization wanted to improve teamwork among diverse groups, use resources more effectively, and improve the way people collaborated to share information and solutions.”
The simulation brought those issues alive. “When the program was over, I spoke with a number of people who said they didn’t realize how narrowly they saw the teams at Alaska and how that has probably stopped them from making breakthroughs in their own thinking and performance,” says Hage. “That’s just what we were hoping for from THE JOURNEY HOME.”
The 1,050 Alaska Airlines participants were placed in 13 sectors with 14 starships in each sector. Each starship was told it must reach Earth to save it from a deadly virus, and that during their race across the galaxy, it needed to find the technology that would eradicate the virus. How the teams focused their strategy, used the information available to them, and made decisions would determine their success.
The simulation is energizing, fast, fun, and gets participants actively involved in their own learning. One starship captain said, “I couldn’t believe how little I cooperated when someone from another table came over asking to share our information. I basically told her to go away. If I’d only agreed right then, we would have been able to save Earth much faster than we did.”
Getting Unstuck, Staying Competitive
In simulations like THE JOURNEY HOME, participants are dropped into learning environments that parallel the issues and challenges they face everyday on the job. By placing them in the metaphor of the simulation, they can explore these issues in a low-risk atmosphere. At the end, participants extrapolate what they’ve learned and understand how their performance and behavior affect their real jobs.
Hage says, “Using THE JOURNEY HOME was great for us at Alaska, because we sometimes get stuck in certain modes of thinking when we are rushing along day-to-day. The program has gotten people to look at how they can continue to be innovative and keep Alaska Airlines moving forward faster than our competitors.”
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The Journey Home™ takes employees on an exciting race through space to help them increase team collaboration. |
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