Purpose

Use this creativity exercise for team building. It is an ideal exercise for a group of people who are already working together or are about to start working together. Groups should work together to create flags that represent their teams, philosophy and their view of how they work together presented symbolically. They can then hang this flag in their environment and more importantly explain it to others to reinforce their thoughts and identity both for themselves and for others.

Objective

Design a flag that best represents your team.

What You Need

• Papers
• Colour pens
• Scissors

Setup

• Divide the delegates to groups with members that are most familiar with each other, work together or are about to work together. If all delegates are participating in a teambuilding course, you can get them all to work as one group.
• Explain the objective to delegates that they must design a flag for their teams. They must decide what defines their teams, their goals and what brings them together. They should then identify symbols that best capture these concepts and implement them in the final design of their flags.
• Allocate 15 to 30 minutes for this activity.
• At the end, get the groups to demo their flags. Other groups can guess what the symbols represent and the group who designed the flag can correct them by explaining the symbols or reveal other symbols that might have been missed.
• Follow with a discussion.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 5 minutes

Activity: 15 to 30 minutes

Group Feedback: 10 minutes

Discussion

Was it useful to define what your team stands for? If you see the flag, would you be instantly reminded of your team’s overall objective and philosophy? Can you think of your flag as your brand? Does the principle depicted symbolically in the flag make you feel proud that you are part of the team? Could you read the symbols designed by other teams? What did you learn about others in your team as you went through the process of flag design? Did other team members think differently to you about the priorities of the team, what the team stood for, or what was important in bringing a team together?