Geoteaming @ Microsoft

Last week, my group at Microsoft had a morale event around Geoteaming. Geoteaming is a corporate team-building activity based on geocaching. Geocaching is essentially a high-tech treasure hunt using GPS devices. In this particular geoteaming event, there were about 25 "caches" hidden in Seattle that the teams had to discover. Using the GPS devices to navigate to the point of interest, and then a clue to find a particular object of interest, we found answers to questions that were each worth a certain amount of money.

The 50 people in attendance were divided into teams of 8. My team, named the "Blue Tsunamies", hustled in the allocated time for the exercise to uncover 16 of the 25 treasures. Our strategy was to target the high value treasures (which we defined as over a million) first and then focus on the smaller ones. We also used a strategy of having 2 sub-teams navigate simultaneously. One sub-team navigated to the current treasure of interest while the other sub-team navigated to the next treasure of interest. That way, as soon as we finished with one treasure, we were ready to navigate to the next one without any downtime. The "Blue Tsunamies" raked in well over $16 million in "cache" value to finish in first place! Our prize you ask? Not quite the $16 million but a handsome $50 gift card to the Cheesecake factory! Not a bad deal if you ask me. Earn money while having fun. Isn't that the way it is supposed to be?

Geoteaming @ Microsoft