I used this exercsie with 40+ gradutaes recently. The briefs for each team were clear and easy to use. The information provided for the facilitators was also clear and helped the additional facilitators enormously. The delegates found the exercise interesting, fun and energising. The learning which was brought out also was very valuable and was developed further during the remainder of the course programme. I can thoroughly recommend this exercise and would only add that it is useful to produce a matrix to monitor which team is meeting with which team to ensure that they do not 'cheat' and try and have more than their allocated meetings!

I used an adapted version of A Bridge Too Far last week at Westward Housing Group's first ever staff conference. The organisation was recently formed through the bringing together of 4 separate housing associations into a group structure and one of the aims of the conference was to bring people together to help them to get to know each other better, understand each others roles, and begin working more effectively together (especially across different departments, functions etc as well as the different organisations within the group).

My teambuilding workshop had to support these overall aims, but was only 1 hour long, and had to be run 3 times during the course of the day, with around 55 people in each session. Fortunately, with such large numbers, I had a very big room with lots of moving around space to do it in.

After an initial icebreaker where I got everyone to stand up and walk around the room and shaking hands and introducing themselves to 4 people whom they had never met before, I introduced the task. Basically I followed the same format as in your instructions except that I reduced the times to 30 minutes to design and build their element of the bridge with 2 minutes to assemble it, and just 15 minutes for discussion afterwards.

Everyone had a sweet on their seat at the beginning with a coloured wrapper and these colours signified the teams people would be in so that they were randomly mixed up and were in teams with a range of people from different parts of the organisation. (I colour coded each team so that all their materials, pens, post-its, instruction sheets, hats etc were all in that colour, which worked really well and helped to give each team an identity. I even gave out appropriately coloured party poppers and indoor sparklers for people to set off at the grand unveiling!)

In order to make it easier to complete the task in the shortened time (and because of the big team sizes) I allowed each team 2 communications experts rather than just one, and I gave them glittery hats to wear (I do find that the prospect of wearing a glittery hat always helps draws out willing volunteers!) I also allowed them to have 2 verbal conversations with other comm.s experts as well as using the message boards (again just to speed up the process slightly without losing too much of the learning). I also adapted the brief, and told them that they were re-building the Tamar Bridge (they were all from Devon & Cornwall) after their organisation had caused its collapse by holding a sponsored event to break the world record for the number of people jumping up and down on the bridge at once and many of them seemed to take on a real responsibility to sort out the problem as though it was actually true!

Anyway, to cut a long story short, despite my worries about numbers, timings etc, the whole thing worked brilliantly, and it was fascinating to see how in each of the three workshops, people dealt with it slightly differently, thus raising different learning points. Overall, the activity really helped to break down barriers and encourage mixing and communicating between different bits of the organisation, as well as resulting in some great discussion about team-working both within and between different teams. The only drawback was that due to the large sizes of the teams (between 10 and 14 in each team) this meant that it was too easy for some people to sit back on not get actively involved (although we did highlight this as a learning point in the discussions).

I'm still waiting for the written comments from the evaluations, but all the verbal feedback was excellent - there was loads of energy and some amazing bridges (even if they didn't stay standing for very long!)

Overall, I just wanted to say that A Bridge Too Far was the perfect exercise for the task in hand. It was easy to adapt to suit timings, numbers etc, and offered lively, participative activity whilst highlight valuable learning points, so many thanks! I will definitely use it again in future.