Games and exercises to energise meetings, build connections, and spark creativity in your workplace.
Take away that awkward feeling of walking into a room full of new people and worrying about coming up with a clever topic to break the ice. This is a particularly great activity for when people are arriving at slightly different times; it gets the conversations bubbling immediately while waiting for the full group to assemble.
Everyone gets a Mingle Bingo template and aims to put a name to each question on the form, striking up conversations and learning names in the process.
This is a great warm-up before a creative session. It can also be a way to highlight that collaboration can lead to unexpected and pretty awesome outcomes. No drawing skills required!
The group builds on top of each other’s squiggles to create a final picture. Works with any size of group, as long as you have enough time and colourful pens to go around.
This is a great game when introducing iterative ways of working, such as Scrum. It highlights the benefits not only of early feedback loops, but also the importance of collaboration, self-organisation and working together as a team. While observing the game, you can learn a lot about the team’s communication and collaboration patterns. It can also be a fun way to create a better understanding of flow and sustainable pace.
The group works as a team, trying to get as many balls as possible through the system in 2-minute intervals. It can be used with any sized group over 5, but we’d recommend to split them into multiple teams if more than 25.
This is an activity for when you want to improve the team’s ability to deal with uncertainty. It can make you more familiar with the fear of looking silly and help you lessen it (by exposure : ) Great activity for team bonding in an established team. It can also work as an icebreaker for a play-friendly group. As these kinds of activity can be intimidating for some, make sure participation is voluntary.
The group creates a scene with 3 people making up poses. Works for any group size over 6, but ideally around 8-12.
When you want the group to learn more about each other, get oxytocin flowing to increase trust and empathy.
You use a set of story cubes and let the images inspire your story-telling – they can be used in many different ways. This activity can work for any small to medium-sized group, and even in one-on-one coaching.
This is an excellent way to end a day of workshops or training, it provides a bit of fun as well as ensuring everyone can contribute with feedback.
Everyone writes their thoughts on a piece of paper, scrunches it up, and then throws the paper balls around before reading someone else’s feedback out loud. Tends to be even better for larger groups.
An icebreaking activity that brings energy and movement into the room. It is also a good way for the group to share their own, and learn about others, experiences and thoughts.
You ask the group to physically rank themselves depending on the questions asked. It can also be done in a circle (also called star formations). Works with any sized group above 4-5, but is particularly good for large groups.
Want to speed up the process of everyone in the group learning each other’s names? This is a fun activity for both learning names and getting the energy levels up.
In a circle, you take turns sharing names and your favourite dance move. This is ideal for a group of 6-12 (to make sure it isn’t too easy or too hard to remember all the names).
When you are running a virtual workshop or meeting with remote team members, this is a great activity to start off with. Apart from the common benefits of icebreaking activities, it will create a better appreciation of the environments that the other participants are in. It might even explain those distracting, weird background sounds (eg is that a dying cat, a kid or what?).
Ask everyone to share their physical surroundings. Depending on the setup you can use video, photos, or simply describe it if it is a phone meeting.
This activity is often used as an icebreaker to encourage team bonding in the group of participants. Great activity for when you are getting a new team together, or you think that collaboration could do with an improvement. You can observe and then highlight patterns in team communication during your debrief.
The goal of the game is for a group to untangle themselves without letting go of each other’s hands, and the extended hand-holding can increase oxytocin levels, which can lead to increased trust. Ideal group size is 8-12 people.
This is a great activity for team bonding and having a laugh together. The participants collaboratively make drawings of each other’s faces and the artwork can be used later on to decorate the team area.
Ideal for a group of between 5-8 people and split the group into multiple teams if larger than this.
For one of the last meetings of the year, run the Christmas Tree Retro to reflect on the year that has passed.
This activity will not only allow you to review the current year but also set you up with goals/objectives for the next one. And in the process, you will create a colourful paper Christmas tree : )
End the year on a positive note — this is a nice way to give kudos for achievements during the year. Give and receive positive feedback or well-wishes by ‘post-it presents’ for the whole the team.
Creative and energetic activity that is helpful when introducing collaborative design, lean development, and customer-centred design. This is also useful for reinforcing concepts such as cross-functional teams, collaboration and incremental delivery.
The group is split into two (or more) teams and everyone is assigned a role to create a zoo model with play dough and craft material. The winner is the team with the most points for their zoo model at the end of the third iteration. You need a minimum of 9 people and this activity works well with larger groups.
This is a fun and energetic activity used for speeding up the process of getting to know each other – inspired by the speed dating technique.
You can use the cards in multiple ways, but the most common is that pairs are seated facing each other. Depending on the instructions of the card they pick, they perform an action or answer a question. After a set time, the pair rotates to get to know another person.