Teamwork Activities and Games

Practice deeper listening and empathy by experiencing the same stimulus from two perspectives. Partners sit back-to-back and first listen individually to a short piece of music, noticing their internal experience through body, emotions, and thoughts.

They then describe their experience to each other in detail before listening again — this time through the lens of their partner’s description. By shifting from “my experience” to “your experience,” participants practice perspective-taking, empathy, and disciplined attention.

This simple structure builds the micro-behaviors that strengthen understanding, improve collaboration, and enhance the quality of insight gathered from others.

Inviting a paired walk is surprisingly effective in its simplicity. Going for a walk together increases trust and can help prepare the terrain for conflict resolution, while acting as an energizer at the same time. Make it hybrid-friendly by pairing a person in the room to one joining online!

The Portrait Gallery is an energetic and fun icebreaker game that gets participants interacting by having the group collaboratively draw portraits of each member. The activity builds a sense of group because it results with each participant having a portrait drawn of him/herself by the other members of the group together. It also has a very colourful visual outcome: the set of portraits which can be posted in the space.

In large gatherings that will be stable for a few days or more, you can combine the benefits of having a high number of attendees (e.g. more minds at work!) with the supportive feel of a small group by creating "home groups" or "buddy groups".

In Mad Tea/Calm Tea, everyone rapidly completes sentences related to a shared challenge to quickly provoke a deeper set of reflections and strategic insights among group members. Mad Tea is the louder, more energetic face-to-face version, while Calm Tea is the quieter online alternative. They both get people thinking differently, sharing new ideas, and understanding different perspectives while generating fellowship and laughter. Both bring to life LS Principle #9, Engage in Seriously Playful Curiosity. The questions focus attention and produce a fresh understanding of strategic options and next steps.

This tool gives suggestions for how to do different kinds of check-ins. Checking-in is a simple way for a team to open a session or start a project. Groups go through different stages: when they start; during a project; and when a project ends. You can support the group by asking different questions at different times.

A rapid game of name learning with probably a lot of funny moments. Besides it teaches particiapants how to communicate and strategize in an effective way without being  explicit about these goals.

If I give you a dollar and you give me a dollar, we both end up where we began. But if I give you an idea and you give me an idea, we end up with two ideas each, benefiting from a 100 percent return on our investment.

In One Will Get You Ten, we leverage this principle so that you and all other participants receive a 1000 percent return on your investment on ideas.

You can improve any solution by objectively reviewing its strengths and weaknesses and making suitable adjustments. In this creativity framegame, you improve the solutions to several problems. To maintain objective detachment, you deal with a different problem during each of six rounds and assume different roles (problem owner, consultant, basher, booster, enhancer, and evaluator) during each round. At the conclusion of the activity, each player ends up with two solutions to her problem.

A workshop to support teams to reflect on and ultimately increase their alignment with purpose/goals and team member autonomy. Inspired by Peter Smith's model of personal responsibility. Use this workshop to strengthen a culture of personal responsibility and build your team's ability to adapt quickly and navigate change.

Create a shared visual map of what a group observes, discovers, and plans to act on together. Participants begin by capturing individual observations and patterns related to a question or challenge, then combine (“meld”) these into a collective map that makes insights and action ideas visible to everyone. By moving through stages of noticing what’s present, interpreting why it matters, and identifying next steps, MindMeld helps groups surface rich, shared understanding and align on concrete actions before moving forward.