Two routes through Doha
Souq Waqif or Katara
What an urban game shows you
Your team gets the work done. The handovers happen, the projects close, the calendar fills up. What a meeting never shows you is how those same people decide when the clock is running and nobody is chairing.
An urban game puts that out in the open. Small teams take a route through a real part of the city with a set of missions, a time limit and points to win. Inside the first half hour you can see who organises, who decides, who walks up to a stranger and asks, and who waits to be told.
In Doha we run it in two places. They are alternatives, and they play differently.
Souq Waqif
The restored market in the middle of the city: narrow lanes, shops, tea houses, and people who work there every day.
The game runs on looking and asking, so a place full of people who know it well is where that mechanism does the most work. Teams come back having talked to strangers, which for a group that shares nothing but a weekly call is most of the exercise. The lanes also do something to the route: you cannot see far ahead, so a team that splits up has to agree how it will find itself again.
Katara
The cultural village on the coast: open squares, galleries, an amphitheatre, the sea at one end. It was built as a cultural district, so the spaces are wide and the routes are clear, which makes a large group easier to hold together and easier to keep track of.
It also has air conditioning along the walkways. An urban game is two or three hours on foot in the open, and in Doha that is the thing that decides whether the day is possible at all. Katara is the route that still works when Souq Waqif would be out of the question.
Choosing between the two
Souq Waqif if you want the city and the people in it inside the game, and the season allows a long walk in the open.
Katara if the group is large, if you want the route more contained, or if the heat would rule the open air out.
What you do not have to arrange
Neither place needs a permit. You pick the date, we build the route.
What it looks like
Filmed at one of our events in Dubai. The city changes, the game is the one we run at Souq Waqif and Katara.
When it makes sense to choose it
It works well if
- it is your first team building and you want something that works almost every time
- the group is large and mixed in age, role and physical condition
- you are in Doha for a convention and want people to see the place instead of hotel, room, hotel
- people from different offices need to meet each other properly
It works less well if
- you have less than three hours, because a compressed urban game loses its rhythm
- the objective is deep work on an internal conflict: the register here is light
The format
Urban Game. Teams, an app, a list of missions, a leaderboard. See how it works.
When what surfaces deserves an afterwards
An activity surfaces a great deal about how a team communicates, decides and works together, and sometimes what surfaces deserves more time, more depth and a method. That is where a Team Coaching path can begin: a different road, to be taken only if it is needed, to turn what the day made visible into a new way of working together.
Let’s talk about your next team building
You don’t need to have picked a format yet. Tell us what you want your team to take home, how many of you there are and where you’ll be, and we’ll do the rest: within 24 hours you get a considered proposal for your case, with the formats that hold up against your numbers, and what each one leaves the team the day after.
Prefer to talk? · info @ teambuilding.qa