Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Our mail development team is part of a new organization called AOL Services Infrastructure. My boss, Sree Kotay, is really trying to get the leads from each of his new teams to get to know each other on a personal level. In our second onsite in the last couple of months, we really did get to know each other.

It started with a group painting exercise where we broke into small teams and each painted 1/9th of a larger mural. It was a lot of fun seeing how people wanted to organize everyone. Seeing the little ins and outs of how people wanted to do the painting, mix the colors, and even instruct others how to paint. And especially interested in seeing the perfectionists in the crowd repainting areas to touch up the lines a little bit!

We moved onto some outdoor games like MineSweeper (3D), build a box blindfolded, and a maze game. The MineSweeper was the most fun for me. It wasn’t much different than playing the normal game except you were playing by committee. Of course everyone was an engineer and wants to be first to understand the algorithm and tell everyone else why this square or that is OK to turn over (not a bomb). And the others would make that person justify their thinking. It was very healthy and something we need more of in our day-to-day world - open honest, fact based, discourse.

Then we moved onto a team walking race much like a three legged race only it was 12 legs! It was hard to get going but eventually we figured out the coordination aspects and made some progress. We got beat, but not by much :-)

The last activity was the most fun. We played a pirate game similar to a game I got addicted to recently called Settlers of Catan. In the pirate game, the object was to acquire things by trading for them. Some things are worth more than others but you don’t know their worth 100% in the beginning. Along with the items, each pirate has some hints as to what is worth more for different pirates and during different parts of the game. So in addition to trading for things, you also trade for information. I was impressed that some people were able to trade information for huge sums of gold…some even sold worthless information for huge sums!

All in all, it was the best team building day I have had at AOL. Perhaps I have not been involved in many structured days like this (I have been involved in plenty of unstructured beer bashes, picnics, water park, etc days). But this one really had some great activities that let you get to know the others on a more individual level. It was a big success (just click on the last section called Services Infra. Onsite ‘06).