In Grief Walking, participants offer or receive social support by sharing a loss or walking with the person sharing. This structure is not therapy or an effort to fix something broken.
Instead, it allows us to share gifts of empathy and caring to support each other through a loss or difficult transition.
Grief Walking embodies LS Principle #3, Build Trust as You Go.
Establish pattern to pass in a circle. Create a category that each person has a contribution (ie. breakfast cereals). Add another category.
Frame: Famously utilized by AirB&B to get at the heart of some of their culture issues. The idea is that there are three things that move the needle on psychological safety and team effectiveness:
Outcomes: Creates more honesty and psychological safety; Surfaces crucial issues on the team
I was using this approach when facilitating workshop on Continuous Improvement within my organisation. I saw another approach using this method and continuous with this sharing as I feel it was bringing across different message.
In this interactive, teams will come together to become a human version of the device listed on their index card. This activity is a means to build team dynamics and also a way to address any challenges a team might be working through as this activity is completely dependent on everyone coming together as a group and playing a part.
Robo Word Finder sits your team around a giant letter board where little robots walk the tiles, hunting hidden words together. Everyone draws from a single shared pool of letter picks, so nobody can sweep the board alone β someone spots a word, someone walks it, and the team decides together whether it's worth the picks. Quick to teach and easy to drop in, it's a short, collaborative break for a remote team, with boards in nine languages.
Sync Squad is a cooperative puzzle that only rewards a group that talks. Each player drives one colour-coded robot through a shared chamber, and the exit opens only when every robot stands on its matching goal at the same moment. The catch: each hazard is keyed to a colour, and the thing that's lethal to your teammate is completely harmless to you β so you can never just play your own robot.
Holloway is a cooperative maze that only opens for a team that talks. Your group steps into a shifting labyrinth to find glowing sigils, none of which will lift for a single pair of hands β so you split up, call to each other across the walls, and describe what you see. Roughly once a minute the house rearranges itself, wiping the map in your head, and the only way anyone leaves is together.
ALIGNED is a fast party game about reading each other's minds. Everyone answers a prompt on their phone and the big screen reveals how aligned β or how far apart β the team really is. Short rounds and a lot of honest talking make it a quick, high-energy way to open a session or surface how well a group actually knows itself.
Consensus is a fast social-negotiation game that turns group decision-making into a spectator sport. Each round puts one opinionated question on every phone with four options and a pot of points β but an option only passes on a strict majority, and if the room can't agree, nobody scores. Every player is secretly paid to steer the group toward a different option, so the room has to actually talk, bargain and build coalitions to score at all.
