There are many ways to do team bonding exercises for your team for example building spaghetti houses, or debates. However one of my colleagues thought outside the box and decided to exercise us all to venture out into the borough and take part in a scavenger hunt.
Myself including my team were kept in the dark about the event until the day and had no idea how the day would pan out. We had a meeting point on the 6th floor to have the rules explained to us and then also split into two teams: team savage (I was in that team) and team ramblers.
We all got handed these mysterious brown envelopes which felt like it includes some sort of top-secret mission inside. Funnily enough, pulled out the piece of paper inside and the scavenger hunt guide was titled ‘WELCOME TO THE FIRST, BEST AND POSSIBLY THE ONLY GREAT HOUNSLOW BOROUGH COUNCIL TEAM DATA SCAVENGER HUNT’
This followed by some instructions which said we had two hours and that some of the clues are relatively straight forward and that we need to take photos with our phones of what we think is in relation to that clue. Bear in mind that we have to put ourselves into our colleagues’ shoes or more like her brain. We all seemed clueless looking at these clues!
Here are the ‘targets’ below:
TARGETS
1. A photo of your team – as original as possible, please!
2. A photo of the other team taking a photo of a target.
3. 100021547143
4. Gules three Seaxes fessewise in pale proper pommelled and hilted Or points to the sinister and cutting edge upwards in chief a Saxon Crown of the last
5. Streetlife
6. They would not listen, they’re not listening still, perhaps they never will.
7. Wildlife
8. HS6
9. A sarsen stone
10. A replacement for a victim of arson
11. Best.froth.anyway
12. Beauty in ugliness
13. A barber / hairdresser
14. Shiny Shiny Sheppard Robson
15. A memorial
16. A pre-2000 phone number
17. 3132071
18. Is it all going for a Burton? Do you need a little Xtra help?
19. It tolls for thee.
20. Write a Hounslow-inspired limerick.
So fair enough there are some simple clues such as barber/hairdresser, but I had no idea what most of these clues meant. Thank goodness I wasn’t on my own and was in a team where we could figure out what these all meant – also, we were allowed to use Google! Hooray! (-:
All the while, our colleague who created the scavenger hunt was walking around Hounslow trying to find us and take photos of us looking absolutely confused… Team Savage below:
At first, we didn’t know the area range of these clues, but most seemed to span out across the Hounslow High Street. We found out that one of the clues ended up at the Air Quality HS6 in Heston which is a half hour walk away – team Ramblers found their way there!
There were some clues in relation to our project work as well (air quality being one of them), such as 3132071 which is Grove Road Primary School. If there was no context to this photo, it would look weird to take it in front of the school’s sign BUT here is a lovely photo of others in the Data Quality and Science team, Team Ramblers:
This day proved to be such a great learning experience. I have lived in the borough for about 13 years now and have learnt more in a day about the history of our borough than the last 13 years! It really opened my eyes and made me appreciate our culture.
I’m hoping this provides some inspiration for other teams to explore Hounslow in another set of eyes and really get to know the borough.
My highlight of the hunt was spending time with my colleagues, visiting the Sarson stone and the painted house of Vincent Van Gogh.
Photos of the answers
Below is the photos of the answers to the scavenger hunt! Have a crack at it and try and pair these photos yourself with the targets.
Thanks all for reading. If you do plan your own scavenger hunt, let me know how it went and even post your own blog post for us to all read about!