What were we thinking?

These interactive, team-building activities can help groups accelerate improvement. They are designed to develop communication skills, to model adaptive systems, to shift culture, and to foster innovation, creativity, and thought diversity.

For each activity, we outline its purpose, instructions, time commitment/range, number of participants, resources required, and debriefing notes.

Which activities can help your team?

Good question! We’ve assigned each activity to a category, or categories, so that you can know how it can benefit your team. We also created a matrix to help you choose the best activities for what you are trying to achieve. The activities fall within four categories:

Communication (Blue): Activities that can help your team share information through verbal messages, the written word, or more subtle, non-verbal signals.

Creativity/Innovation (Orange): Activities intended to foster and promote innovation and creative thinking.

Team Building (Green): Activities your team can employ to improve interpersonal relations and social interactions.

Adaptive Systems (Purple): An adaptive system is a system composed of interdependent elements that together form an integrated whole. A change in a single element can have a cascading effect on the larger system. These activities will help your team understand adaptive systems.

A primary category has been assigned to each activity and determines the card’s colour. If more than one category applies to a card, this is indicated beside the    icon.

Legend

      Category Matrix

     Duration of the Activity

       Number of Participants

    Required Tools

Let’s give them something to talk about! The importance of debriefing

Debriefing after each and every exercise is essential to realizing the full potential of these activities. The debrief may take just a few minutes, or it may become an extended discussion. You should absolutely make time for discussion and relate it to the more general purposes of your session. The debrief is where learning nuggets can be found!

Your goals, circumstances, and group dynamics are unique, so it is impossible to provide precise instructions for how your debrief should be structured. Consider the ideas we have provided with each activity as starting points – we encourage you to expand upon them and make them your own.