1. Human nature, being what it is, will always make team work problematic. This is why there are so many team work training seminars, team building programs and team adventure camps.

2. Not many of these are effective in creating lasting team work.  There are two main reasons for this: First, the off-site team building experience (riding-the-rapids; scaling-a-cliff; role-playing) is seldom repeated in everyday activities. Second, the experience has little, if any, relationship to existing issues back at the office.

3. Furthermore, there is a real danger in forcing people to expose aspects of their individual personalities and behavior foibles to their colleagues. Very often these traits have no impact on work life, but once exposed, can harm existing work relationships. For example, the fact that someone is afraid to scale a cliff face does not make that person less of a team player in developing a new marketing campaign. But the negative perceptions and the negative feelings on all sides tend to linger when the next campaign calls for some risk taking. It should thus be no surprise that many teams return to the reality of corporate life only to be less effective than before.

4. Hence, our belief that the following is required to make a lasting impact on team effectiveness:

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