Trail Blazers is an outdoor activity with a theme of interrelated teamwork for a shared win. It offers opportunities to experience the benefits of effective teamwork within and across teams.

Trail Blazers is an orienteering activity, which involves hiking off-trail in a large park using a map and compass to find a series of intermediate locations called waypoints. Teams aim to reach these waypoints en route to a final destination. Orienteering applies distance and direction information in combination with a map and compass to help participants find their way.

When they reach a waypoint, teams also find information and resources they use to successfully complete the activity. This information includes maps, coded messages, word puzzles, and instructions to complete challenge activities, often with other teams they meet along the way.

Successfully completing legs of the route, solving word puzzles, decoding messages, and participating in a challenge activity earns teams pieces to a large jigsaw puzzle. The shared win at the end of the activity involves all the teams pooling their puzzle pieces to assemble and reveal a picture or a message relevant to the activity theme and the organization.

The experience is a real adventure; it’s stimulating, challenging, and unpredictable in fun ways.

Work Applications: The main intent of Trail Blazers is to make a memorable impression on employees from all levels of an organization on the critical need to work to support each other, while they still operate in their own work groups and deal with their own internal challenges. An action planning session after the activity can target specific actions individuals and work groups can take back to work.

Participants Experience and Learn

• The need for and benefits from interrelated teamwork;

• Skills in effective problem solving and communication;

• Elements of trusting relationships, risk-taking, and shared support;

• Team based leadership, personal initiative, and mutual cooperation;

• Fun, camaraderie, satisfaction, and good humor;

• Creativity, serendipity, and the opportunity to be a catalyst for change.

Who Can Benefit from the Trail Blazers Experience?

• Organizations targeting total teamwork;

• Executive decision makers overseeing an enterprise;

• Professionals from throughout the regions or divisions of a large organization;

• Multiple work teams from across an organization.

Program Flow

• Preprogram information for all participants;

• Introductory Session: a 1 or 2 hour session prior to the outdoor activity;

• The Trail Blazers activity, typically 5 hours in a large outdoor setting - about one mile across.

• Action Planning Session: a 1 or 2 hour session following the program.

Program Logistics & Locations

• Participants can number from 24 to more than 300.

• Program length, including in-depth debriefs, can range from 5 to 9 hours over one or two days. (Travel time is not included in this estimate.)

• Distance and bearing information provided to teams are based on the latest GPS and digital mapping technology.

• Budget: program costs range from $20 to $45 per person per program hour. Price varies with size of group, location, and set-up requirements.

• Program sites include locations outside Austin, Houston, New York, and Phoenix. Other sites can be developed upon request.

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