Tom Thurmond
Vice President, Team Innovation Program
MDI Contributor
The members of the Team Innovation Program, a part of the MDI International Core Team, are dedicated to helping men from all of MDI experience smoking hot team meetings.
We are the Team Innovation Program, an MDI program designed to help you make your team meetings better, because smoking hot team meetings attract and retain men.
If you have ever experienced an exceptionally great team meeting, you know the power that comes from experiencing one and how that can attract and retain men. Seeing men break through barriers, “pulling arrows out of men” and helping a man transform his life are powerful things to witness.
In addition to working on projects that we intend to roll out throughout the year, we will be sending team leaders proven exercises and rituals on a monthly basis that can be used with their team and that will provide value to the men. These exercises came from other team leaders and have been proven to be great content for a team meeting.
These exercises are not mandatory, just content that has been shown to be valuable to men on teams. Teams can use or lose this material; we are simply providing it as a resource for content for a solid team meeting. The content is available in the MDI Connect website library at the following Exercises, Ceremonies, Games.
(NOTE: See the end of this post if you cannot access this library.)
Send us your greatest team meeting or overnight experiences!
If you have been around even for a minute, you have probably been on an unreasonable team overnight or had an experiential team meeting that was outrageous, crazy or just amazing. If so, and without breaking confidentiality, send us your experiences so we can show team leaders what is possible when men think outside the box and choose the unreasonable.
On a team of 12 men I was on many years ago, we rented a van and drove from Atlanta, Georgia, to Apalachicola, Florida, to a fish camp and went fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, Apalachicola Bay. There were many spot weld moments from this trip, but the best was one of our men going fishing in shorts and a T-shirt in 38 degree weather. The fishing guide felt sorry for him and gave him a yellow raincoat, which did not fit well. We got a lot of laughs about it, but he took it well.
There was also a backpacking trip in North Georgia that the survivors call “Death March II.” Ask Jack Brown, Brian Childers or me about it. We had many crazy things happen along the trail, which culminated in climbing Panther Creek Falls with 40+ pound packs. One participant sold his backpack and all his camping equipment after the trip.
Send us your stories of crazy and unreasonable team experiences! The best may appear in Legacy Magazine. Please remember to respect confidentiality. I look forward to seeing your stories.
You can upload the CPR and how-to document for the exercise at this link: Upload Files Here and clicking the NEW button in the top left corner. We are always looking for great exercises to archive and share with other teams.
If you want to contribute ideas to Team Innovation, send me an email at Tthurmond2003@gmail.com or call me at (404) 797-7673. We are open to discussing all ideas for making better meetings so men get more value.
Here’s to Smoking Hot Team Meetings!
TO VIEW THE LIBRARY
If you click on the links for the MDI Resources Library and can not view it, then change the email address that you have in MDI Connect to a Gmail address and it will sync overnight. Then you will be able to access MDI Resources the next day.
If you want to access MDI Resources with the email you have listed within the MDI Connect site at it is not a Gmail account, you need to set it up as a Google account with your present e-mail.
Use an Existing Email Address
- Go to the Create a Google Account page.
- Enter your name.
- Click Use your existing email
- Enter your current email address.
- Click Next.
- Verify your email address with the code sent to your existing email.
- Click Verify.