Teamwork Activities and Games

Purpose: People and Teams need to reflect as part of learning and innovation. Reflection can reveal strengths and areas for improvement. During the transition from one year to the next, we tend to focus on what's coming up in the new year.

Planning ahead and creating goals is important, but let's not forget to reflect on the previous year to learn from our experiences and get focused and deliberate about the future choices we make. After the Reflection, there is a gratitude and intention-setting option.

Arguments, presentations, strategies, or other plans are sent to other teams for deconstruction in order to find gaps or problems.

Use Craig Raine's poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home to spur creative thinking and encourage perspective shifting in a group. After a warm-up, you can then use this martian perspective to describe your product or service and gain new insights and ideas.

The Circle of Trust is a tool that can be used both individually and for groups. You can rate your circle of trust - think of your ‘inner circle’; work, school, or another group - to see how diverse the group of people you trust is.

Even with established teams, it’s important to get people into the holiday mood and encourage creativity and collaboration.

Assign people into pairs or triads and each pair/triad needs to write one pair of rhyme for the music of a popular song. In this holiday-themed version, we'll ask participants to create a version of Jingle bells.

Whatever the occasion or song, it's a nice twist if they incorporate something in the lyrics that is related to your own company and culture.

This a simple game in which participants play in teams and their task is to replicate an image shown to the first team member as they are set up in a chain. The winner is the first team to correctly reproduce the "email"

This fun activity could be used as an icebreaker for people who have just met but it can be framed as a method that shows and fosters team communication, collaboration and strategic thinking as well.

This method gives goal setting or vision sharing into a more creative, associative frame, making participants move out of their comfort zones.

Have your group stand up in a close circle (10 to 16 people is best). They close their eyes put their hands into the circle and find two hands and hold on. Then they open their eyes and the group has to try to get back into a circle without letting go, though they can change their grip, of course.

Scrum is like a house, where the team can be safe and self-organize. They will build trust and continuous improvement. Respect Scrum team as an ecosystem will help the team evolve and build up teamwork, and the values will come Day by Day, Sprint by Sprint.

In every Sprint, Sprint Retrospective is an excellent chance to inspect and adapt the way of working. There are many formats to help Scrum Master facilitates the Sprint Retrospective. But I always think about the format that can focus on the team environment, the ecosystem. I keep thinking and uphold that idea, and I found the inspiration from the "Parable of the Soils”. Borrow that parable; I create the Sprint Retrospective format “The 4 Soils”. The meaning of this format is to focus on how to help the Scrum team define what is the good/ bad impact to the house o of Scrum. From that, team will have the action or change to improve/ maintain the ecosystem.