The Escape Room challenge...

I’m sure most of you know I’m a firm believer in the power of a team.  A high performing team can accomplish feats that to others seem utterly impossible.  This year’s Super Bowl winners, my hometown Philadelphia Eagles, are a powerful example of this.  Down several key players due to injury, including their likely league MVP quarterback had he not been injured, they accomplished what most thought was impossible.  They were underdogs in each of their playoff games. With their previously discarded back-up quarterback, they defeated the most dominant NFL team in recent history lead by possibly the greatest NFL quarterback of all time.  Asked afterward, every player cited “team” as the primary reason they prevailed.  I get choked up every time I watch Jason Kelce’s epic speech from Philly’s Super Bowl parade. 

Who wouldn’t want to be a member of that team??

While not super bowl winners, I’ve been fortunate enough to be a member of a few amazing teams in my career. The situation was different for each, but the experience was incredibly similar.  Each required a ridiculous amount of work with an excruciatingly small probability of accomplishing an audacious goal. It sounds like a horrible situation, but each was exhilarating!

Given this, you would logically think I am a proponent of “team building” exercises.  I’m typically not.  But, that requires some explanation...

I don’t dislike the traditional “team building” exercises. Just the opposite, I enjoy them and think they are a lot of fun. Getting together with your colleagues in a social setting to solve a problem outside of the work environment can be a fun and rewarding experience. They help you get to know your colleagues better and give you an appreciation for their style.  

My new Campus Management team enjoyed just such an experience yesterday.  We went to Countdown to Escape in Frisco, TX and attempted the Mafia’s Casino challenge.  I had never attempted an escape room challenge before. For those reading this like me, your team is placed in a room with seemingly a gazillion locked boxes, drawers, doors, cabinets, chests, safes, etc. Some are unlocked with keys, some with 3 to 5 digit numeric tumblers, others with alphabetic tumblers, some via keypads, and others with directional inputs. The room is populated with a plethora of supposedly meaningful clues. Unlocking a lock typically yields more clues needed to unlock another lock. Sometimes you need to unlock multiple locks to open up a single container or door. All this is to solve a puzzle given to you by your proctor at the beginning of the challenge in a fixed amount of time, an hour in our case. You also are granted a fixed number of “hints” that you can ask your proctor via walkie-talkie.

My initial reaction was “this is impossible”. That morphed into “this is stupid” after several minutes of floundering to unlock a single first lock. I started to disengage, but thankfully my team-mates persevered and got that first item unlocked. That injected an energy into the room that never dissipated as the challenge unfolded.

Looking back at this experience, I gotta say the incremental nature of the escape challenge is ingenious. Unlocking a lock injected a new level of enthusiasm into the team. It ramped up the motivation we needed to move forward. I also found it very interesting that there wasn’t a single leader of our team. Different members of the team took the lead on different portions of the challenge.  Some were good on verbal problems, others were good on mathematical, and some were better on visual. Other team members readily yielded leadership to those more suited to the challenge at hand. Over time, we began to divide our efforts by working on multiple challenges simultaneously with the math folks working on a numerical challenge, the spacial folks working on a visual challenge, and others acting as the bridge between teams. We also forgot about how impossible the overall challenge seemed as we focused on the lock challenge immediately in front of us. I doubt any of us realized this during the experience (I know I didn’t) as it all happened so organically.

I had an epiphany after this had sunk in for a day - the above is exactly what happened in each of the amazing teams I mentioned earlier. As my mother would say “Holy Cow”! 

But, was the Escape Challenge responsible for this behavior?  Did it build our team? As much fun as it was, I’ll argue it did not. I’d argue we had all these traits as a team as we entered the Escape Challenge and the challenge merely allowed us to demonstrate them. We were already a team going into this...

We have a mutually developed audacious goal that is statistically improbable to achieve (thankfully we don’t believe in statistics), we check our egos at the door, we trust each other, we recognize each other’s strengths and will defer to who’s best suited for the challenge at hand, and we are willing to put in the effort required. Will we win our Super Bowl? I don’t know, only time will tell. But, I know we’ll hang together as a team and give it our best!

So, back to the Mafia’s Casino escape challenge.  It’s their hardest challenge with only a 20% success rate.  Did we beat it??

Hell yeah - with a whopping 5.19 seconds to spare.  As our ex-Marine, but always a Marine, leader would say “Hoo-rah”!