Teamwork Activities and Games

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.

The Team Canvas is Business Model Canvas for teamwork. It is an effective technique to facilitate getting teams aligned about their goals, values and purposes, and help team members find their role on the team.

Practice team-work in a small groups.

Individuals or groups prepare a collage of photos, icons, or quick art that reviews the concepts and skills previously learned in the program. Others interpret what the art and images mean based on their own learning.

The most common causes of dysfunctional meetings can be eliminated: unclear purpose or lack of a common one, time wasters, restrictive participation, absent voices, groupthink, and frustrated participants. The process of designing a storyboard draws out a purpose that becomes clearer as it is matched with congruent microstructures. It reveals who needs to be included for successful implementation. Storyboards invite design participants to carefully define all the micro-organizing elements needed to achieve their purpose: a structuring invitation, space, materials, participation, group configurations, and facilitation and time allocations. Storyboards prevent people from starting and running meetings without an explicit design. Good designs yield better-than-expected results by uncovering tacit and latent sources of innovation.

This step-by-step method is intended to facilitate the co-creation of actual measures and steps towards change within a team or an organisation. All participants are involved and develop all the ideas together. You have idea owners but the content is created through a process where everyone is involved in all ideas.

This teamwork activity requires participants to work closely together to build a tower from a set of building blocks. 

The players need to coordinate their actions in order to be able to move the wooden blocks with the crane they have, and this can only be solved by precise planning, good communication and well-organised teamwork.

You may use this exercise to emphasise the following themes and outcomes:

• In Leadership training: identifying interdependencies in systems, leadership communication, dealing with risk, giving feedback
  
• In Team building: communicating effectively, cooperating, being an active listener, maintaining the balance, working with values
  
• In Project management: simulating strategic planning, working under time pressure
  
• In Communication training: meta communication, facilitating, dealing with different perspectives
  

Use this method if you would like to show the participants the importance of collaboration, team strategy and team effectiveness.

This playful method creates a powerful shared picture of the feelings in the group. Checking-in is a simple way for a team to start a meeting, workshop, or activity. By using the metaphor of a rollercoaster this alternative version supports participants to think differently about how they are feeling. People place themselves at different points on the rollercoaster, explaining their dominant feeling right now.

A drawing exercise that shows us how we can have different perspectives on various subjects and/or objects - demonstrating cultural diversities. It can help us unlock some of our unconscious assumptions and biases. The task is fairly simple to execute and doesn’t require more than 6 A4 pages/or post-its and a pen for each participant, or a Miro/Mural or virtual whiteboard.