Greek history records among the most epic and tactical battles in the history of war - the Battle of Thermopylae which saw the enormously outnumbered Greek military consisting of 300 Spartans defending their lands against the 300,000 soldiers of the Xerxes. After discounting the vast majority of the Greek military, King of Sparta, Leonidas, remains with his 300 finest to defend only to be confronted by the Spartans on another side. Significant damage done to the Persians was seen by this tactically brilliant move. History is full of cases of achievements that are incredible by the absolute pooling together of manpower and resources working collectively as a team.


Now businesses run on an extremely competitive level where the quick rate of the industry, ever changing demands of the customers and quickly progressing technology forces firms to keep a healthy edge to even live in the game of business. This 'conflict' is often fought on the grounds of approaches that are commercial and business strategies. And often the only way is through tactical teamwork. But teamwork is a skill that needs to be developed and does not always come naturally to everyone. This is where businesses have their workers (or managers) participate in experiential learning processes called Outbound Training.


Outbound Training sets their workers in unfamiliar outside environment and has them participate in obstacle courses or challenges that require creative problem solving through teamwork and non-traditional thinking. Commonly merely equipping the participating teams with commonly minimal to zero time and resources does this. This commonly not only encourages teamwork and thinking out of the box but also requires that teams be tactical in the way in which they go about achieving their goals or targets. Depending on the challenge or situation that the team faces, teams will need to set their heads together and improvise in the areas of time-management, efficient utilization of resources, and harnessing skills that are individual to gain an edge over the competing team and win the challenge.


Outbound Training draws on parallels that are good to business scenarios that one can use minus the real world results of a genuine business environment, at work. The training expertise derived from Outbound Training can be diversely useful as can be shown with a few examples:




Companies enormously improve other areas of business and also use the lessons learnt during such tasks to exploit and improve worker efficiency too.