THE RAINFOREST GAME
by Amy Tananbaum

Teamwork Across Boundaries

Working in teams can be a challenging and rewarding experience - but what happens when different teams are asked to collaborate? Often, teams that view one another as competitors have an “us vs. them” mentality that can make it difficult to get the job done together. How can teams cross their organizational and mental boundaries to share resources, ideas, and success? 

The Rainforest Game is an insightful hands-on exercise designed to provide individuals and teams with a realistic experience of collaboration across both internal and external boundaries - and of the challenges they are likely to encounter in the process. 

Separated into groups, participants in The Rainforest Game must work across group boundaries to attain their goal. In the process, they’ll build an awareness of the importance of cooperation, the challenges inherent in inter-team communication, and the significance of creating and sustaining effective partnerships.

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The Scenario

Your organization has joined a worldwide consortium of environmentally-sensitive organizations meeting to discuss its latest cause - the future of the rainforests. In addition, you’re sponsoring one of the rainforest's many endangered species. As part of this initiative, your team has been asked to design a picture that can be used for marketing and fundraising materials. But you can't do it alone. This task requires you to work with other member organizations to complete the picture. Can you work across both internal and external boundaries to make a difference?

Theory

Ron Ashkenas’s The Boundaryless Organization (1995) provides the theoretical basis for The Rainforest Game. He examined how working relationships function across internal boundaries (for example, between departments, disciplines, functions, or distant offices) and external boundaries (groups outside your organization such as customers, partners, and regulatory organizations). He found that organizations that worked effectively across these boundaries were more efficient, more dynamic, and more able to innovate and to respond quickly to change. Ashkenas and his partners identified four skills that successful companies used to bridge boundaries: Reaching Out, Sharing Information, Exploring Alternatives, and Making It Happen.

These four interconnected skills are the keys to effective inter-team collaboration. The Rainforest Game is designed to allow participants to discover and flex these skills and watch as they get immediate results.

About the author

Amy Judith Tananbaum, MBA, MS is the principal of Results by Design. She has a Masters of Science degree in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MBA from Boston University, and a BA in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of expertise include instructional design, facilitation, consulting, and coaching. 

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Learning Outcomes

• Learn how to collaborate effectively within and across groups
  
• Recognize and work together across geographical, organizational, and other boundaries
• Break down communication barriers to find creative solutions to complex problems
• Examine assumptions about how individuals and groups work together
• Learn the four skills for working across boundaries: Reaching Out, Sharing Information, Exploring Alternatives, and Making It Happen.

How It Works

Small teams representing the member organizations of the consortium are challenged to complete the rainforest initiative’s poster, which arrives in the form of a five-foot-long puzzle. Each organization has chosen to sponsor a specific endangered species, so each team has pieces of the overall picture as well as its sponsored animal. But because no one team has all the pieces, they must be able to work collaboratively in order to successfully complete the task at hand.

Following the activity, participants consider their experience in the context of their real-life workplaces. A debriefing session allows learners to discuss the four critical skills needed to work effectively across boundaries and challenges them to think of ways to apply these skills once they’re back on the job. 

Uses for The Rainforest Game 

Perfect as a stand-alone learning experience or as part of a larger training initiative, The Rainforest Game is highly adaptable and flexible. Depending on their organizations’ needs, trainers can customize The Rainforest Game to focus on specific skill sets, including:

• leadership
• communication
• problem solving
• innovation
• teamwork