Unique Team Building Solutions

Trainers are often looking for new team building exercises that they can offer to their business clients. Typically, such exercises should provide the following qualities so as to enhance the team-building experience:

• A challenging task, to focus the participants on creativity or problem-solving
• An element of competition to encourage both rivalry and cooperativeness
• An activity that is both difficult and achievable, to generate interest and the desire to bond with your teammates
• An element of rivalry, to create the desired "us vs. them" mentality needed for team-building activities when working with different groups.

I would like to share with you a unique rivalry from which a very original team building exercise could easily be adapted. You may want to consider substituting some other materials though. These are difficult to obtain.

2007 Black Pudding Champion!

As reported here by the BBC:, contestants around the globe along with thousands of fans have gathered at a pub in the United Kingdom for the World Black Pudding Throwing Championship.

Thousands are watching entrants from as far afield as Hong Kong, Africa and Sweden compete at the Royal Oak Pub in the village of Ramsbottom, Bury, near Greater Manchester.

The bizarre contest celebrates the ancient rivalry between Lancashire and Yorkshire and attracts people from far away as Australia to the small town of Ramsbottom.

Contestants gathered at at the Royal Oak pub to throw black puddings at a stack of Yorkshire puddings piled on a plinth 20ft off the ground.

The rules: You can throw three competition standard 6oz puddings - underarm only. Whoever fells the most Yorkshire puddings is the winner.

Fact File

• Ingredients: cooked pigs' blood, fat and rusk in a length of intestine
• A competition pudding weighs 6oz
• The aim is to dislodge as many Yorkshire puddings as possible
• Contestants must throw underarm
• The event is based on traditional Lancashire/Yorkshire rivalry
• Thrown puddings are swaddled in ladies’ tights!
• Puddings are made by the Bury Black Pudding Co.