This is an entertaining exercise encouraging delegates to think on the spot, make decisions and self-organise to complete a task. It is ideal for teambuilding and leadership courses to show the value of communication from all members and how a leader can coordinate the activities and information exchange to significantly increase the performance of the group as a whole.

In this exercise, delegates practice working together towards a common goal; making the tallest free standing tower given simple materials. The exercise is competitive and requires creativity as well as good leadership, division of task, resource management and decision making.

This exercise helps participants to practice acting in front of a small audience. The ideal acting is one that conveys information as quickly and efficiently as possible. It is designed to be competitive, so participants are pushed to act better.

This is a fairly flexible exercise you can use to improve delegates’ creativity, decision making and team working skills. Effectively you get the groups to design a game in the given time and later evaluate the process they went through. You can use a number of variations to customise this exercise based on your needs.

This is a creative exercise which can be used to explore topics such as communication skills, leadership, problem solving decision making and perspective taking. Effectively, delegates must work together to sort a sequence of images by enquiring from each other and collectively decide on the best outcome.

In this entertaining activity, delegates get to evaluate each other based on predispositions and assumptions. You can use the exercise for training on diversity and political correctness. It is run in a form of a competition to make it both more exciting and also to examine people’s decision making under pressure.

These days we read a lot. As the content consumption has gone up, our attention span seems to be going down. We might pay less attention to what we read, get less of it in and forget it quickly. In other words, in comes from one side, out goes the other side.

Naturally, this is a waste of our valuable time. If you are reading something, you might as well absorb everything it has. Perhaps you want to explain it to others later, so it pays to know the details but also be able to deliver it quickly depending on how much you have. This exercise helps delegates to increase their concentration while reading articles, reports or any written content.

Being a good person or a leader requires a good vision, persistence, definite plans and an ability to reflect on your current state so you can see what you need to do next to get there. This exercise helps delegates to think about themselves from a point of view placed in the future so they can better see what they want to get and if they are going in a wrong direction.

The purpose of this exercise is to help delegates understand the concept of crowd contagion. This is particularly applicable to business meetings where emotional comments can easily lead to a suboptimal meeting. Crowd contagion captures the idea that emotions are contagious and if not controlled come to dominate a group meeting. If one person becomes angry, others are likely to become angry soon as the emotion is passed from one person to the next.

This exercise aims to introduce an effective method for problem solving and brainstorming within teams. It demonstrates the efficiency of using other’s experiences and expertise in solving problems and dealing with challenging situations.

The digital age has made it possible to multi-task. Multi-tasking increases productivity because you can do more in a given time. But can you? With certain activities, such as driving while listening to an audio book, this is highly productive. With some activities, you may easily end up producing sub-standard quality or finish none at all.

Like everything, if used excessively, it can actually reduce productivity. People who multi-task too much may start to suffer from lack of concentration. For example, you may sit behind a computer and decide to write a report. However, lots of unrelated ideas about you latest emails, browsing, conversations or daily activities can pop up in your mind that constantly slow you down.

It pays to practice concentration, so that when necessary you can focus as if nothing else matters and give a task your 100% effort.

It is famously known that if you want to increase your productivity and quality of your life to 100%, give 100% to every little thing you do. In other words, when you write a report, only think about writing it and when you are on holiday, only think of things you can do to have fun and not about work you left behind, or work that you will have to do when you get back.

This activity contains a series of exercises on increasing concentration. Depending on your course and delegates, you can initiate them during the course or provide them as ideas for post course exercises.

You can use this exercise to get a group of people practice brainstorming and participate in constructive discussions. Delegates will go through a case study which can be applicable to just about anyone while still creating complex challenges. This exercise is also flexible in the choice of brainstorming method used or alternatively you can leave it to the delegates to decide. For example, you can use this exercise after explaining a particular brainstorming method such as mind mapping, six hats, Delphi method, etc., and then evaluate the performance of the delegates based on what you have discussed in the course. This exercise is ideal if all delegates are from the same organisation, though you can also use it when delegates are not from the same place.