Our Team Building Exercises: What to Expect

This experience may look chaotic, but there are some things that are constant. There are many actions and reactions that happen so regularly we have them timed, and if they aren’t happening, we can influence them to happen by changing tools and music. 

Here are a few you might find interesting:

The Begin stage lasts from 7-13 minutes.

Between 13 and 18 minutes, the team becomes inclusive, with the first participants taking a knee or making room for others.

The Become Stage involves bigger moves, bolder strokes, and more communication. During this stage, the team acts in a more cohesive manner.

The Believe stage begins when the team steps back and agrees the art is done.

30 to 90 minutes after painting the team is the most connected, most creative, and most open to big conversations. 

For at least 24 to 60 hours, the team is still actively talking about the art, often staring into it and using it as a lunch pad for conversation. 

After the event you will often find team members looking at their art and discussing what they decided on the day they created it. These artifacts influence goal creation and company bonds.

What to expect: 

When our mobile art studio arrives at your corporate retreat, school or board room, we are going to cover the walls in plastic, turn up the music, roll out a stream of canvases, and ask your team to do the impossible: create art, together.

Stage one: Begin. When your team enters the room they will hesitate - they aren’t artists, they don’t want to paint, team building sucks.  Then team spirit and curiosity takes over and they Begin.

Stage two: Become.  In this stage there is chaos, there is laughing and groaning, and rapid changes to the art.  The team creates more than art, they create new avenues of communication, new attitudes about change, creativity flows  like electricity. Powerful, energizing.  They Become a team.

Stage three: Believe.  In the end they know that the art, their art, could not have been created without each person’s input.  Just like at work, every person is important to the whole.  If they can make art together, they can do anything…together. We help teams Believe in everyone’s contribution.

Collaborative art, it’s not sip and paint, and it’s not kindergarten smears.  It’s a process, proven time and again, and revealing more about a team in two hours than we can describe here.

We use collaborative art as our main mode because it works every time.  There are no ropes, no crying, no kumbaya, but there is connection, insight, and belief in the power of working together.

We’ve worked with well over 60,000 people with our team building exercises and are on our way to 1,000,000 participants.  Those participants have been as varied as Walmart’s home office, a local body shop, teen leaders, and people recovering from years of bad choices.

We help teams believe in their mission.

What participants find in painting together is connection, appreciation, and the satisfaction of creating something that seemed impossible. Even if the art is not museum quality, it tells the story of a group of people who began slowly, became a team and in the end believe they can do anything…together.

We help teams believe in, well, teams.

Oh—and while we want your team to be happy, we never want to make a custodian mad.  Over 2,000 corporate retreats, and we’ve never left a stain!

We bring the materials, your people bring the results.  

Amazing, spine tingling, results.

Canvas Creek.  We Work For Teams!