Who can forget that game of Twister played in a skirt? Or the failed "trust fall" where the boss ends up on the ground?
Office team-building exercises often create lasting memories — just not necessarily ones you want to remember.
Several years ago Ben Johnson worked at a health foods store in Iowa. He remembers store management stringing up a donkey piata to pump up the workers.
"Pinned to its chest was a name tag for a rival store," Johnson says. "They explained to everyone that this was, in fact, an effigy and that we were going to work together to figuratively, literally destroy the competition."
In lieu of candy, the piata was filled with dollar coins. An overzealous middle manager with a baseball bat was first up and he obliterated it.
"So when this thing explodes, dozens of the dollar gold Sacagawea coins fly through the air everywhere," Johnson says. "Someone in the front row takes one in the face and goes down. They ricochet off the walls. And when the coins finally stop, I emerge from underneath the table, there's just a stunned silence."
The coins are like blood money and no one picks them up. Johnson thinks of the whole fiasco as an omen since the store eventually fell to the competition.
Johnson is now a manager at a library and he says there's an ironic twist: He's been tasked with organizing his own team-building event.
"I'm now that guy; I'm that manager subjecting people to these things," Johnson says.
Around the world, there are thousands of teamwork facilitators. Michael Cardus is one of them. He founded Create-Learning in Buffalo, N.Y. He says the point of trying something new — something that requires cooperation — is to inspire different methods of problem solving.
" 'Hey, this is novel. This is different.' And then you can hopefully have them talk about what worked in that activity and how they can transfer it back to the workplace," Cardus says.
But sometimes it backfires.