Team Canvas Session
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.
Teamwork Workshop Activities
Group activities to improve collaboration and help you to build high-performing teams.42 methods
Doodling Together
Create wild, weird and often funny postcards together & establish a group's creative confidence.
Blind Square - Rope game
This is an activity that I use in almost every teambuilding session I run--because it delivers results every time. I can take no credit for its invention since it has existed from long before my time, in various forms and with a variety of names (such as Blind Polygon). The activity can be frontloaded to focus on particular issues by changing a few parameters or altering the instructions.
Trust Battery
This self-assessment activity allows you and your team members to reflect on the ‘trust battery’ they individually have towards each person on the team, and encourages focus on actions that can charge the depleted trust batteries.
Social Virus
We all know how quickly the cold or flu can spread through the office, but we don't often think about how contagious our emotions can be. This exercise provides a brief simulation of how quickly both negative and positive emotions can be transmitted.
One participant is selected to be the Negative Infector General and asked to infect others with a negative emotion. During the next round, you pretend to select another participant to be the Positive Infector General. At the end of the second round, participants are surprised to find out that they became more positive even though no one initiated the emotion.
Letter from the Future
Teams that fail to develop a shared vision of what they are all about and what they need to do suffer later on when team members start implementing the common mandate based on individual assumptions. To help teams get started on the right foot, here is a process for creating a shared vision.
Five ideas
Five Ideas is an activity that encourages participants to go beyond what is good for their team or their department and work on cooperatively achieving common goals.
Teambuilding activities create high-performance teams whose members are extremely loyal to each other and to their team. Sometimes, however, the emphasis in teamwork results in reduced collaboration across teams. Similar problems occur when employees become so focused on their departmental goals that they ignore or downplay the strategic goals for the total organization.
Helium Stick
A great and simple activity for fostering teamwork and problem solving with no setup beforehand.
Marshmallow challenge with debriefing
In eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top.
The Marshmallow Challenge was developed by Tom Wujec, who has done the activity with hundreds of groups around the world. Visit the Marshmallow Challenge website for more information. This version has an extra debriefing question added with sample questions focusing on roles within the team.
Stress Balls
Understanding the importance of communication and teamwork is an important requirement for high performance teams of knowledge workers. This exercise is an effective energizer that requires communication and teamwork.
Ask participants to form a circle and throw a ball around to simulate the movement of a message. Change different variables such as speed, quantity, and complexity to create a mess.
The Highest Tower
This is a game in which participants build “the highest tower”—and explore cooperation and competition.
Birds of a Feather
Participants naturally want to form groups with common characteristics. This exercise illustrates how diverse groups have access to more resources and provide a greater variety of solutions.
Each person is given an index card with a letter on it, and then asked to form a group of five people. Participants assume that they should get into groups with others who have the same letter. However, when the facilitator asks them to form the longest word possible with the letter cards, they realize that it would have been more beneficial to have created a diverse group.