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 fun activity helps delegates to exercise their creativity and use their whole brains (left and right side) to solve the problems presented here. You can also run this exercise as a competition between groups and provide a prize at the end.

This is a physical exercise with an aim to encourage team work and collective problem solving. Use the variations to adjust the difficulty. It also highlights the importance of self-organisation and the necessity for leadership when confronted with challenging tasks.

You can use this exercise to explore teamwork, leadership and the ability to work under pressure and cooperatively to solve a problem.

This is a physical exercise that encourages self-organisation within a team when confronted with a challenge. You can test the group to see how quickly they can come up with a self-assigned leader who would then go on to coordinate the group’s activity to increase their efficiency.

This is powerful exercise in helping people to think out of the box and become more creative. The setup primes people to think creatively about everyday objects and design their own version. This however may not lead to a lot of creative activity as most people will use what they already know or have seen. Next, you will give them a creative task that they are totally unfamiliar with and hence are forced to be a lot more creative and use their imagination to interpret the requirements.

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.

This is a famous entertaining game were a player must guess the name written on a card by asking closed questions where the answers can be “yes” or “no”. The objective is to find the name as quickly as possible. Many variations can be used to bias the exercise based on your specific training needs. A variation of this exercise can be used to teach the importance of asking open questions as opposed to closed questions to maximise information transfer. See Variations for a guideline on this.

This exercise has become immortally famous by Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

This exercise helps delegates to understand the importance of working together and the destructive nature of having hidden agendas which can easily lead to conflicts and confrontations. It addresses many areas such as conflict management, assertiveness and persuasion skills.