Powerful Strategic Planning Exercises to Include in Your Courses

Powerful Strategic Planning Exercises to Include in Your Courses

Strategic planning exercises help to re-energise your team and set them on the path of growth. It can inspire teams in any business, boost energy and moral and give a sense of direction to where th...

The Empathy Expedition: Leadership and Change Management Game

The Empathy Expedition: Leadership and Change Management Game

The Empathy Expedition is a dynamic and game-like roleplay exercise designed to develop emotional intelligence, leadership, and change management skills in an engaging and entertaining way. Partici...

Student Group Maker for Teachers: How to Use Group Layouts

Student Group Maker for Teachers: How to Use Group Layouts

Suppose you want to run an exercise in your course and want to divide your class into groups of 4. That is rather straight forward to do for small groups. Now, suppose you want to run another exe...

Agile vs. Traditional Task Management Exercise

Agile vs. Traditional Task Management Exercise

This is a useful exercise in demonstrating the difference between Agile and traditional development environments such as waterfall. It can also help explore concepts such as silo mentality, where e...

Spot the Fake News Exercise

Spot the Fake News Exercise

The advent of “Fake News” means that we are currently going through a major phase in history. Fake news has come to dominate the news, literally. It is sometimes amusing, but most often frightening...

What Does This Picture Say About Your Company

What Does This Picture Say About Your Company

This is a powerful exercise that can help managers to understand what their team thinks of the organisation's structure. Such structures are used by companies in order to communicate their vision w...

A Variation of Chinese Whisper Listening Exercise

A Variation of Chinese Whisper Listening Exercise

This is an interesting variation of the infamous Chinese Whisper exercise. In this variation, some volunteers leave the room and then be brought back in, rather than just whispering a sentence in t...

Active Listening Skills Roleplay

Active Listening Skills Roleplay

This is a highly educational and entertaining exercise on asking open questions. Open questions lead to more information while closed questions lead to a yes/no answer. Open questions are usually m...

Team Building Exercise: Leaky Pipes

Team Building Exercise: Leaky Pipes

This is a classic exercise on team building. It is fun to participate in this exercise and yet it is quite powerful in bringing a team together while teaching communication, leadership and problem ...

Board Games for Team Building and Icebreakers

Board Games for Team Building and Icebreakers

The purpose of icebreakers is to bring people together, familiarise them with each other, put them into the zone and basically break the ice as the name suggests. The purpose of team building activ...

Learn Scrum with an Exercise on Agile Project Management

Learn Scrum with an Exercise on Agile Project Management

Agile project management was popularised by the tech industry and has its roots in Japanese companies such as Toyota, Honda and Fuji. There are many who think agile development can lead to efficien...

Team Self-Reflection Exercise

Team Self-Reflection Exercise

Certain behaviours in a team can affect the trust between the team members and if not addressed properly will have dire consequences. It is essential for a team to self-reflect and to evaluate its ...

Icebreaker: Unusual Experiences

Icebreaker: Unusual Experiences

This light-hearted exercise is guaranteed to break the ice quickly and bring people together. In this exercise you set people a mission to find out about other delegates and to share what they have...

Convergent vs Divergent Thinking Exercise

Convergent vs Divergent Thinking Exercise

A useful distinction in thinking process was suggested by Joy Paul Guilford in 1967. Guilford coined convergent thinking in contrast with divergent thinking. With convergent thinking, you are tryin...

Team Building Exercise: Clock Types

Team Building Exercise: Clock Types

The purpose of this exercise is to show that each person in a team has certain characteristics that can contribute to the team. It is not necessarily about casting each person into an ideal team me...

Chocolate Packaging Design Competition Exercise

Chocolate Packaging Design Competition Exercise

Imagine walking into a supermarket and going to the isle dedicated to sweets and chocolates. Here, you are likely to find a section with a variety of block chocolate bars. These are often presented...

Fishbowl Conversation Technique

Fishbowl Conversation Technique

The fishbowl technique can be used to organise constructive discussions on a given topic. In a nutshell, the technique helps people manage a debate on the topic and keep it under control even if ma...

Teach Why Groups Can Take Too Much Risk While Making Decisions

Teach Why Groups Can Take Too Much Risk While Making Decisions

Is there a difference between people making decisions in groups and individually in respect to the amount of risk they take? To investigate, James Stoner, who was a MIT graduate in 1960s, carried o...