A Division of the Office of Strategic Innovation

expedition (ek'spi dish'un) n. 1. an excursion, journey or voyage made for some specific purpose, as of exploration or discovery, to investigate unknown regions in search of something previously unseen.

"Out-of-the-box and into the unknown is where corporations want to go today." says Rolf Smith, Managing Director of the Virtual Thinking Expedition Company (vTx). "We take groups on adventures with their minds, leading them through the unknown with the 7 Levels of Change. They come back as teams with new perspectives and very different results. It works."

Americans strongly identify with new frontiers, challenges, change -- and results. Our history is built on one expedition after another, continuing today as we reach out into the stars.

When have you been on expedition?

Where did you go? What did you explore? What were your objectives? Who were your teammates? What made it a WOW? How did it happen?

Leveraging this American archetype, the Virtual Thinking Expedition Company today designs, organizes and leads exciting problem-solving expeditions into the unknown, exploring new concepts, approaches and technologies, mindshifting into different ways of doing things.

vTx designs, plans and leads Thinking Expedition for project teams and organizations struggling to discover ways to get different results for urgent and critical problems and challenges. Because of the over-riding focus on an urgent problem or "Big Mess" the group comes together as an amazingly energized or re-vitalized team without having to go through any traditional "team-building" exercises. On a Thinking Expedition there are no "exercises" - everything is real work. And the very nature of an Expedition builds a group into a team in fastforward.

Why does it work? To get diffferent results today, both people and companies must do things differently; intuitively they know that. However, before they can do things diffferently, they must first think diffferently - thought precedes action; that is not well understood. And before they can think diffferently, they must think about the way they think - a process that Thinking Expeditions accelerate:

Have you ever thought about the way you think?

Think about your last expedition again

What if you could do it again but diffferent? What if you could turn your job into an adventure? What if your next offsite meeting was an expedition? What if you could go "on expedition" with your project team?

A typical Thinking Expedition team consists of 16-24 participants plus several mindshift guides and a basecamp manager. An intense offsite operation, the route of a Thinking Expedition spans three to five days, each day running 15-18 hours long.

If you need to "build a team" or "do some team-building"...DON'T! Instead try giving them an urgent problem and a challenging mission, demand impossible results in an unreasonable time frame with very short notice - and send them off "On Expedition".

Thinking Adventures are two-day+ or three-day lite variations of a Thinking Expedition that we have created to kick-start newly formed Project Teams or to transform new groups into teams. We use our Team, Inc. process to help the group develop or clarify its mission and vision, draws out and synthesizes corporate values, principles, strategies with individuals' own direction, values and belief structures. We use a variety of inventories to increase the Team's understanding of various differences in personality types, thinking style, and preferences - and to design specific smaller teams for specific applications. Run in Adventure Mode as a journey of discovery, the Team explores the unknowns surrounding "The Mess" it faces. Click here to learn more about Thinking Adventures.

Expedition-Adventures: Or if you have ever dreamed about going on an African big game safari or with a group of friends for dove and duck shooting in Argentina, contact Colonel Dennis Behrens at http://www.expedition-adventures.com. He can make your dream come alive.