Based on a wealth of experience, many of today’s world wise corporate employees have adopted something of a “been there, done that” attitude about most organizational team building events. Don’t believe it? During your next sales incentive trip or national sales meeting, try telling everyone they’ll be doing a “trust fall,” and see what kind of response you get.

Instead of taking that kind of chance, maybe you should schedule a truly unique team building experience, the kind that gives your salespeople the chance to get out of the hotel room and explore the city where you’re meeting, all while working together to expand their problem solving capabilities and having a whole lot of fun at the same time.

If that sounds intriguing, an organized treasure hunt from the urban puzzle experts at Dr. Clue (www.drclue.com) might be just the boost your team needs. Operating in 93 cities in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, Dr. Clue offers location specific treasure hunts that test teams’ abilities to solve a range of clues.

Company founder and president Dave Blum is quick to point out that treasure hunts are not the same as their more commonplace cousin, “scavenger hunts.”

“In a scavenger hunt, you’re given a laundry list of items that you have to go and collect,” Blum says. “You go get the items, put them in a bag, bring them back, open up the bag, and the team that has the most objects wins. There’s not anything very complex, intellectual, or sophisticated about that, but it does allow people to run around and procure objects. It’s very competitive. But we don’t do that.”

A treasure hunt, by contrast, consists of a series of clues that, once solved, lead the team to a specific destination. Without solving a clue, the team cannot move forward. The variety and complexity of the clues are where the team building elements emerge, Blum says.

“A really elegant treasure hunt clue could involve a word puzzle, some sort of picture puzzle, a math or logic puzzle, or it could be related in some way to trivia,” Blum explains. “Or it could be in code. So as a team, your challenge is to solve all of these clues and to determine who is the best person to solve each particular clue. For example, if you get a clue that is very clearly math related, you’re going to do a survey of your team and say, ‘OK, who here likes Sudoku, who here is the math person?’ And then when you find that person you say, ‘OK, you’re the point person on this clue.’ You wouldn’t want the person who does crossword puzzles every day working on it because that’s a different skill that uses a different part of the brain.”

Unlike scavenger hunts, Blum says, a true treasure hunt leverages the skills and knowledge of every team member, since no one participant is likely to encompass all the strengths necessary to solve the clues.

These exercises typically offer three significant takeaways to participating organizations, Blum says. The first is assessing individual team member’s skills and then delegating tasks accordingly. The second has to do with planning and strategy.

“For example,” Blum says, “you need to figure out what roles people are going to play. Someone’s got to be the leader, someone’s got to be the navigator, someone’s got to be the timekeeper, etc. And then there’s also going to be some ground rules to establish. How long are you going to spend on a clue before you give up? How fast are you going to walk? What is your team’s purpose? What is your decision making process? Are we going to make our decisions by majority rule, by consensus, or by doing rock-paper-scissors? When things are happening kind of turbulently, it’s important to have an established process to draw on.”

The third takeaway, which is perhaps most important for a sales audience, is the element of cross-team collaboration. The way Dr. Clue’s hunts are designed, teams are not capable of solving all the clues without sharing information with – gulp! – competing teams.

“Swapping resources and sharing information become essential to success,” Blum says. “Especially for sales organizations this winds up being a really nice reminder. With sales you frequently have somebody on the west coast and somebody on the east coast and even though they work for the same company, they might not collaborate or share resources, either because they don’t think about it or they’re in a competitive mindset.”

Blum refers to treasure hunts as “silo busters,” because they force people to work together who, under normal circumstances, might not be inclined to do so.

“This is the main issue that every organization has,” Blum says. “They have departments and divisions that don’t talk because of animosity. Human beings are tribal and we go into that reflexively, yet organizations are hoping to break that down. I haven’t found an organization anywhere where that hasn’t been true.”

Beyond all the corporate benefits of increased team unity, better information sharing, and improved decision making, participating in treasure hunts holds another key advantage for participants: it’s a lot of fun.

“This is really something novel,” Blum says. “For a lot of people, it’s their chance to play a reality game. They’ve seen Survivor and The Amazing Race but they know they’ll never get the chance to do something like that. But then here it is; they’re actually solving puzzles, visiting locations, racing against time – it’s a unique experience. Even for people who come in with a healthy skepticism because of all the hokey team building out there – they solve that first puzzle and then they’re hooked.”