Bay Area Team Building Facebook Gets New World Record!

Bay Area Team Building Facebook Gets New World Record!

Bay Area Team Building is synonymous with high tech and engineers. Located at 1 Hacker Way in the South Bay Facebook stands as a pillar of the high tech culture in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Today they stood tall and regained the World Record robot build time by beating Pandora’s time of 39 minutes and 54 seconds by just over 1 minute. They posted a World Record best time of 38:45!

The team was constructed of engineers responsible for the CDN; Content Delivery Network. These are hard-core coders at the core of what makes Facebook go. it was fascinating to watch the moves they made to regain the throne of best builders. Taking advantage of every possible proactive opportunity in the build cycle allowed them to be prepare meticulously in advance for each part to be added to the robot. The difference between this team and hundreds of others who do not hold the world record is truly in the details.

They began by laying out all of the parts and cataloging what they had, and what it was used for; taking one step back to take two steps forward. Most groups think they are being proactive, but make too many assumptions about the building process and about the actual level of their knowledge. Most teams do not test out what they actually know and do not know until it is too late. This team was extraordinary in testing and preparing each component in advance of installing them onto the built frame. Through this process of intense engagement they did things differently, and in some cases in ways I had not seen before.

Many teams want to do it differently but lack the foundation of understanding first. In other words they want to improvise before knowing what the norm is. This team digested the norms, understood how we wanted you to assemble the robot first, then they continued pressing and asking questions. “Why can’t I do this in advance?” In some cases their knowledge of the norm paid off by finding out why they couldn’t do something before it was too late, and other times it paid off by discovering something they could do for real time saving benefit.

For this Bay Area team building event we were appropriately located at the the Headquarters in a meeting room just a stones throw from one of David Choe’s now famous paintings on the walls of Facebook. David Choe painted murals on the walls at the Facebook HQ when Facebook was just a start-up. Instead of taking a $60,000 paycheck at the time he chose stock. Now that stock is worth 200 million dollars! I am taking stock for my next team building program!

Thank you Facebook for another thrilling Robot Battles program. I look forward to other teams competing for the world record build time and the company record, which will hopefully be one and the same for a long time into the future!