We have been trying to get cadets through their blue leadership…
I have been diligently reading the practical task book. My understanding is that cadets have to complete one of these named tasks in order to be awarded their blue leadership
However, I don’t want cadets to get too familiar with a select handful of activities.
But the issue is some of them seem very random for a leadership activity (ie introduce yourself activities)… And others are just ridiculously confusing that even with all the documentation available, no one on the squadron fully understands what the cadets are really being asked to demonstrate.
For example, there is one where you position a laser pen which appears to be pointing down at a grid and the cadets are meant to move something on that grid to spell out a word … but avoid the laser pen… Which is just sat pointing randomly at a grid?
There’s one where they have to apparently look in cone from the top?! I mean I can’t see what’s in a cone if I look from the top!!??
Has anyone done many of these and could potentially facilitate more in-depth discussion about what might be required 
The tasks in the book… Some are definitely not LEADERSHIP exercises, some are “stolen” from a training team without knowledge or input - that team knew how they worked and therefore documentation wasn’t produced with an external audience in mind. And some are a good starting point to give units an initial push.
Stuff like looking in a cone was designed with a specific cone with which this works. Often the solution used is take a photo with a phone on the basis of “never said you couldn’t use equipment we didn’t give you”.
The best inspiration is online - there are reams of free resources from the army, act, and various civvy orgs of you look up “command tasks”, “leadership exercises”, etc.
Others look as well to things like Taskmaster.
If you’re a bit creative, just walk into your stores, pick up some items, work out how they go together, and write something. I was once on a camp and did just that in a supermarket, because we didn’t have resources but wanted to run it.
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I tend to ignore the most faffy ones, and just use the simple ones. But as Giminion said, you don’t have to use the tasks in the book.
They also need to complete (and pass) two tasks, not one.
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If you are wanting to have “new leadership” tasks that might or might not be included in the leadership guide you can easily use AI to develop a task.
Either through Chat GPT or Microsoft Co Pilot just google them to get their links and its free too.
In the search, start typing what you would like to do. I usually start such as the below
I am looking at doing a leadership exercise in a classroom with 10 air cadets, I have 20 minutes to do this and have a plank of wood, 5 cones and 2 volleyballs.
What you are doing is telling the AI bot the number of cadets, the time limit you have and the equipment available, you could also advise it to set-up into teams if you have more cadets. In theory that could be anything you might have/time limits available.
It will then arrange the result into an objective, the materials and set-up, the instructions/rules, how to make it more difficult and the debrief questions. For me with both sports and leadership exercises it makes it so easy to set-up different games and leadership exercises both ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot are available in app form too. But just make sure you read it before dishing it out in case you have either mistyped and the instructions are telling them to do something crazy or the robots are taking over the world and all that.
I get the impression that some of those tasks are in there because they formed part of some kind of wing leadership weekend or similar - and they are indeed icebreakers not leadership tasks.
TBH I tend to use a mix of those and the bronze ones… which are usually much better, although oddly the one thing all of them seem to lack is a SMEAC briefing!
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I think that’s intentional so that the cadets have to process the information and put it into the SMEAC format themselves. Otherwise we’re just giving them the brief they have to deliver, rather than getting them to formulate their own briefing.
There’s probably a good reason for that, what with SMEAC being decades out of date.
Correct. Task appreciation and information extraction.
We know more than they know, they get to know more than the team needs to know.
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But was backwards to what used to be done on ACLC and they got provided the brief in SMEAC, still need to extract information out of it (otherwise you’ll be writing for days)
We’ve put all the blue leadership tasks we use into SMEAC - whether they are ones we used from the provided ones, or ones we’ve created ourselves.
I think that makes it too easy and makes cadets less likely to think about what SMEAC means. The task briefs aren’t that long or detailed so it really shouldn’t take much time for them to convert into the SMEAC format.
My view is they won’t always get their information nearly packaged in a logical format that matches how they want to deliver it, and extracting and formatting information is an important skill.
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I concur with this however at blue level you want them to learn that skill so you walk them through it by having the clearly structured briefs & it’s them into the habit of learning to structure their briefs.
When doing bronze/silver/pre-NCO style command tasks then Start to mix it up a little.
Extracting the information is a skill but you need a spectrum with simple extraction for the entry level second class cadets & complex planning at the other end for you cadet SNCOs.
Indeed, and a particularly useful skill when they need to move on to current practices: rather than thinking it will always be ‘SMEAC’ (as the rest of the world has moved on, many years ago).
This is where our badge chasing “teach to the test” method fails people a little.
Truly progressive training starts with simpler / preformatted briefs and develops into more complex and messy briefs.
But imo this needs to happen at blue, otherwise we aren’t really testing their brief structure, because we’ve given them the answer.
HOWEVER (or “to be clear”)…
That’s not to say a paragraph brief can’t have the information in the right order, testing their recognition. That at least disguises the format enough to not be an obvious roadmap while requiring the extraction of most relevant information.
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What I’d like to ses a bank of more complex exercises that can be used with NCOs and more senior cadets to develop these skills, outside the confines of the now mythical Bronze/Silver/Gold leadership courses.
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A lot of this come down to local inventiveness & focusing on what you want the cadets leading to achieve.
We did one recently where you had the task was simple (collect a ball of a specific colour) but had four teams with each commanded by a Cpl.
& then we added the next level of twist with a Sgt commanding a pair of teams who could then support each other.
Simple task but helped the Sgts learn that 2nd line management.
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Why do you claim them to be mythical, is this a local issue?
Well they don’t exist in our wing - from what I can see there was one bronze almost a year ago, and don’t think it was open to all units.
What’s stopping you from running a bronze course?