ECB Project on Twitter

What lessons can be taken from the humanitarian response to the food crisis in Kenya? UN-IASC release their evaluation http://t.co/iO0YmqiG 10th May

Download Handbook

Building Trust in Diverse Teams:

Concise version

PDF available in these languages:

View the concise version online in French and Spanish:

Get the Guide

Full Version

160 pages

Get Online >

Download Resources

Handout 7a:
Links to the ten criteria for trust

Available in these languages:

English

Handout 7b:
List of questions for treasure hunting

Available in these languages:

English

Tool 7: Treasure hunting

Learning objectives

This tool helps team members get to know each other and to appreciate how diverse backgrounds, cultures and skills offers the team a variety of strengths and qualities.*

It can also help reveal assumptions people hold about others from different backgrounds.

Overall time required	30 minutes
Group size	10 +
Relevant Trust Criteria	Competence, Reciprocity, Accessibility
Resources required	Copies of Handout 7a: Links to the ten criteria for trust Copies of Handout 7b: List of Questions for Treasure Hunting

Facilitation tips

This tool can be used anytime – but it is particularly useful as an ice-breaker in the early stages of a new team’s existence.

When using this tool remember the following:

It is a great way to begin a team session, as it encourages participants to go around the room and introduce themselves to each other, and it immediately gets them to engage with the diversity of other participants.
The exercise is most effective for groups which are diverse in terms of national culture, gender, age, and experience.
This exercise demonstrates how a team from a variety of backgrounds can produce a variety of solutions and ideas for change and also how they have different ways of thinking about those solutions and ideas.
Note that the questions can be adapted to the team that you are working with.

How it works

1. Introduce the exercise with team members standing in a circle.

2. Explain that they will be given a list of questions and should move around the room to talk to other team members to find the answers to them.

3. They can ask anyone they feel might have the answers, but they must not take more than one piece of information from the same person.

4. They are not allowed to form groups of more than three people at any one time.

5. They are not allowed to pass on the answer they have received from one person on a specific question to another person.

6. Now hand out the list of questions to each participant and allow 15 minutes for them to go around the room and find answers.

7. Ask the participants to return to the circle. Go through all the questions and ask participants to raise their hand if they have an answer.

8. Now debrief the activity as follows:

Who feels that they got a unique or surprising answer?
Which questions made you feel uncomfortable when you were asking them? Why was that?
What did you notice about the process you used to find the answers?
How many of you were asked the same question constantly? Why do you think this happened?
Who was asked a question they do not normally get asked? What did that feel like?

9. Finish the process by reviewing the links to the ten criteria for trust (Handout 7a) and then ask the group to reflect on what they have learned from the exercise

* The tool from which we have developed this abridged version had been reproduced and adapted with the permission of CARE International. It is from Promoting Gender Equality and Diversity: A CARE Training Curriculum for Facilitators, Module Three, Managing Diversity, pp.129–30; 157–8 (2005).

Sign up to the ECB e-newsletter