About
Time:
This game can be played in about 60-90 minutes. In total, allowing for discussion and evaluation, we recommend allowing 105-135 minutes.
Aims:
• Raise awareness of the importance of a clear strategy and a shared understanding of their team’s needs and priorities.
• Show participants the importance of working effectively together to agree on a strategy, allocate roles and trust one another to complete their allocated tasks.
• Test participants’ influence and persuasion skills and their ability to think creatively during negotiations.
Skills and Behaviours Tested:
Influence and persuasion, negotiation, conflict resolution, strategic thinking, creativity, teamwork and attention to detail.
Group Size:
You need a minimum of 8 participants for this exercise (4 teams of 2) but 16 is better (4 teams of 4) and more is better still as you can go on adding more teams or increasing the size of the teams slightly. In fact this exercise is ideal if you have a very large group – for example, 50 participants could be split into 10 teams of 5.
Useful For:
Staff at all levels.
You'll Need:
Each team will need:
• A separate area (ideally a separate room).
• A supply of card and/or newspaper.
• A small amount of modelling clay.
• A ball of string.
• Sticky tape.
• Scissors.
• A ruler.
• Toy money to the value of 270 doubloons of various denominations.
• A small roll of kitchen foil.
• A team brief and a supply of sales ledger sheets, which can be downloaded from Trainers’ Library. You will need:
• A separate meeting area.
• A bell.
• A stopwatch or watch.
• Spare doubloons.
• A prize for the winning team.
Notes:
The exercise will typically take about 60 minutes to run but you will need to allow up to 90 minutes if none of the teams fully complete a new ship. Pirate Challenge is a hands-on exercise that is designed to test a number of skills and behaviours including influence, persuasion and negotiation, conflict resolution, strategic thinking, teamwork and attention to detail. For this exercise, the more teams you have, the better, as a greater number of teams increases the trading options available to each team, making this exercise ideal for events where you are working with very large groups. For example, 50 people could be split into 10 teams of 5.
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I ran the Pirate Challenge with 24 people (who all worked in Finance) in 6 groups or "pirate gangs". The delegates were multi nationalities with English being the common language. The exercise was aimed at consolidating the delegates learning in regards to questioning, listening, empathy, working together, teamwork and communication in general. The exercise worked brilliantly! All the delegates threw themselves into the challenge! The brief was clear, all the equipment purchased was of excellent quality and the doubloons can be reused, as could the clay. I would recommend though that less clay is used. I ended up taking 6 packs when in reality probably three would have done for the 6 groups. I also purchased a foam sword so as "Swordfish Charlie" I could encourage them to leave my Inn when the time was up!
There were numerous learning points which came out after the exercise, which included time management as well as planning an effective strategy and preparing questions to ask the other gangs. As the exercise wore on, the meetings at the Inn became quite frantic as each group wanted to have the most money and have the ship completed. I would recommend the exercise as a fun and motivational way to use at the end of a session to pull together key learning points.
There is a fair amount of additional equipment required but some can be reused.
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Carolyn Pickin
rated this item with 5 stars.
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I used ‘Pirate Challenge’ at the end of an influencing and negotiation 2 day course with some middle managers and it went down very well as we'd done a lot of discussion based activities and the hands on materials aspects of this were very engaging (although some rude plasticine figureheads were made!!) but I don't know if this was more by luck than design or facilitation! Some of my groups were quite naughty and resorted to stealing from distracted groups and others were totally shocked and abhorrent when this came to light in the de-brief, but this was brilliant for me as it brought home some powerful messages about organisational politics, naivety etc and some people had real light bulb moments when they applied this learning to memories of situations and people back at work. When I met up with the group again several months later for their next module it was very memorable for them although one of the most innocent participants (jokingly) said she had been 'traumatized' by the revelations!
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Carolyn Blunt
rated this item with 4 stars.
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Just had to write to let you all know about the Pirate Challenge exercise I recently ran. I had been looking for something to run as part of an assessment process for taking on level 3 apprentices. I finally plumbed for Pirate Challenge as it claimed to cover many of the qualities we were looking for. I got all the materials together, card, paper, silver foil and play doh, I didn't have any modelling clay. I even produced some doubloons for added effect. On the day of the assessment I set the rooms up including the Broken mast Inn with sweets and drinks available should they be required. At ten o'clock we started the exercise and I read out the instructions, although I drew the line at doing it in a pirate accent. The groups divided and the discussion began. Initially the discussions between groups, whilst at the Broken Mast, were very good-natured. However as time progressed and strategies changed the discussions became more aggravated as teams tried to outwit and out bid others. Towards the end, normally mild mannered staff were double crossing others as the will to win took over and started to cloud some judgements. By the end, interestingly, the team that had decided from the start that they would just build and adopt an aggressive under cutting policy won the day. In terms of the assessment the exercise was invaluable as the assessor were able to see clearly who was displaying the qualities they were looking for. From a trainers point of view this was a fantastic exercise, enjoyed both by the participants and by myself. I?d recommend you try it, It?ll prove a huge success.
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Richard Linder
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I was recently asked to put together a one day Team Building session with 35 delegates, away from their business. So, I decided to use Pirate Challenge for the main exercise of the day. Each team had a table with all their materials on them, including a large brown envelope which contained their Pirate brief, their doubloons, and their Pirate names – I just chose these so each team could be identified i.e. Flying Dutchman, Black Pearl and so on… Each table also had a laminated name plate which was displayed for all the other teams to see.
I nominated two of the managers to play the Tavern keepers, again, they had a large picture of a skull and cross-bones on their desk, along with a large bell and stopwatch to keep time.
The groups also had to write their sea shanties on flip-chart paper and in their groups, once we had all seen each others ships, they had to sing their shanty, again this was a great giggle and we even had some groups getting into their pirate roles by dancing a jig whilst they sang!!
The day went fantastically well and the feedback I received from the Pirate Challenge was excellent, they all thoroughly enjoyed the session and it got 3 teams, who were not used to working together really working as 4 tight-knit (Pirate) teams. The motivation levels were high in the room, we had a great buzz going and the competition was fierce. At the end of the session they all proudly displayed their pirate ships and they now take pride of place in the middle of their office, as a constant reminder of how important it is to work together as a large team, and not 3 different departments when working towards a common business goal, how imperative it is for us to ask open, probing questions to gain understanding and clarification of a goal/objective. How to negotiate effectively, which we all have to do sometimes in business, whether it is externally with suppliers or internally for a process change for example.
Pirate Challenge, for me really gets the creative juices flowing, I found people who would normally class themselves as quiet, reflectors not being able to draw a straight line on a piece of paper were the most vocal, creative delegates in the room. I have now been asked to run the same session with other business groups and relating it to their department objectives. This session is a great all round learning experience that can be tied into virtually any learning objective/scenario.
A must for any trainer!! It’s an Excellent session to run!!
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Buffy Sparks
rated this item with 5 stars.
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I used the Pirate Challenge for the first time yesterday at a staff conference at the University of Glamorgan. I only had one hour to run a workshop on Personal Skills in Action, so had to adapt the Challenge a little to fit the time we had (less ship's components, less opening and closing of the Inn). So I was a little anxious as to whether it would work, but it went down a storm! I had 30 people in the workshop, so divided them into 6 'gangs' of 5 'pirates', which proved to be a very good number for this exercise. It took them a little while to grasp what was required of them, but once they'd got the hang of it they threw themselves into it with much enthusiasm! There were some quite suspect strategies and tactics ("well, we are ruthless pirates afterall" seemed to be the justification!), but also some demonstrations of excellent planning, team work, creative thinking and negotiating. Several gangs decided (sensibly) to rethink their strategies after about half an hour, which was a very good learning point. There was also a need for some conflict-resolution skills to be practiced, as members of gangs expressed conflicting opinions on how to approach the task. Again, this was a very good learning point. In our discussions after the exercise, we focused on team work - how the gangs had worked effectively (or not!) within their own teams and how they had interacted with other teams. Issues around the importance of every member understanding the team goal and their own and each other's roles were drawn out. I highly recommend the Pirate Challenge. It's not only great fun, but it tests so many skills - planning, time management, negotiation, conflict resolution, prioritisation, communication....the list goes on. I have found it hard to find suitable exercises to run with larger groups, but this one fit the bill perfectly. It requires only easily obtained and cheap resources - another important factor for many trainers on tight budgets! And just finally....Why are pirates called pirates? They just aaaaarr!
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