Team Building #5 : Remember the Future

Today, I present you a very known and very effective Team Building called “Remember the Future” to be able to project towards the future in team.

Estimated time: 30 minutes to 1 hour

Course of the workshop « Remember the Future »

Step 1

The facilitator will begin by drawing a timeline and making a legend around it to explain to the participants the final expected.

Then he will explain the scenario to all participants:

You will project yourself in one year as if you were going
in the future. At that moment, you will define the set
obstacles that you encountered during the last
year as well as the successes achieved. You will also be able to
indicate some key events that had consequences.

It's a positive exercise so we always define a success
after a declared obstacle. It is important to propose
workarounds or resolution of obstacles.

Step 2

The facilitator will give time to all the participants (20 minutes) to fill this timeline of the Remember the future. They will not forget and the facilitator will remind them regularly that they are in the future and that they must think of the past as everything was really done.

It is a collaborative work, so participants will put their ideas progressively. Besides, a post’it represents a single idea; in case of multiple ideas, participants will have to do several post’its.

Step (possible)

When there are more than 5/6 people, I advise to make a timeline by groups of 6 and then to make a complementary step where the groups will confront their ideas.

It is very interesting to see different points of view and sometimes interesting complements.

Conclusion “Remember the Future”

This team building is interesting and can adapt to different contexts: roadmap building, retrospective, partnership seminar … It is true that I use it regularly because it’s very effective.

For my part, I use it even in some personal coaching because it can allow the person to define herself the actions he must take today to go to what he wants to be.

Do you know Team Building that would also be interesting to share with readers of this blog?