Last month, our office gang planned an offsite to Bangalore’s first and only eco resort, ‘Our Native Village’. It was a journey that took us back in time… to a place where time seemed to stand still…

The Green Activity

Inspired by the fundamental theme of the eco friendly resort ‘Our Native Village’, our team in the office planned this activity to revisit our roots of a simple and green lifestyle. The key goal was to ideate and surface out simple and effective ways to make our workplace greener and eco friendly. We found that, though most of us are usually aware of the simple ways to save energy and optimize the usage of non-recyclable stuff, we tend to ignore them in our daily lives.

This activity was very successful and teams came up with very interesting ideas, which most of us could easily apply in our homes or at the workplace and contribute towards a ‘Green’ environment.

Objectives

• Go back to the basics of rural life and get inspirations from the ‘Native Village Resort’
• Work in teams and come up with ideas on ‘How to make your workspace/home greener and close to nature’
• Share ideas with the teams and identify effective ideas
• Start applying the final ideas and observe the changes

Activity Details

Four teams were formed and asked to join in the complementary tour of the ‘village resort’. Teams took pictures and made notes on various ‘objects of inspiration’, such as Solar Panels, Windmill, Biogas for cooking, eco friendly swimming pool and many more. 

Individual teams then brainstormed on various potential ideas and concepts. We learned that though many concepts were common knowledge for most of us, novel ways of adopting this knowledge to today’s world proved to be an interesting challenge. We used paper sheets to write-down our ideas, a faux pas we later realized, given the theme for our activity, we should have gone for whiteboards instead! Nevertheless, each team came up with excellent and unique set of ideas.

The best part was the final session where we formed two fresh teams, the ‘Good’ team and the ‘Evil’ team. One representative each from the previous four teams formed the ‘Good’ team and the rest formed the ‘Evil’ group. Two people took over the roles of observers, diligently noting down the good ideas that were not dismissed by the ‘Evil’ team. The Goods were brave enough to share their ideas and face the criticism from evils. In the process of convincing Evils, the Goods came up with very good rationales on the ideas and their feasibility.

Outcomes

Many great ideas surfaced out and here is the list of many potential ideas. There are things one could apply on personal basis other are mainly applicable at office facilities level.