Quick Team Building Activities

The Freudian Walk is an activity that helps teach the art of active listening. It can be used during a conflict resolution process or simply as an icebreaker.

Are you a facilitator / manager who wants to build a strong multicultural team? Are you dealing with strong emotions within your team when decisions are being made, but don't know how to help them recognize and understand each other's differences? Clotheslines & Kite Strings helps your group see how complex decision making is, even if it is made quickly AND gives a step by step workshop process you can run with them.

Brainstorming is a structured process to capture a group’s ideas relating to a topic or issue. Having a structured approach to how you brainstorm increases the quality and efficiency of your efforts. The process below gives you that structured approach. If you use it you won't waste your participant's time and you'll get a lot of great ideas.

The Relationship Triangle is a high-impact facilitated discussion that shows how critically important personal relationships are within the team before they can consistently achieve the results they desire. If you’re looking for team building activities this is a great one as most people believe their relationship within a team is stronger than it often is. Or they don’t view the quality of their relationships as important.

Have you ever been in a workshop and needed an activity to lift the mood and inject energy into the group? ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ is a quick icebreaker / energizer that requires attention, listening skills and quick responses from your Participants. It is also 100% guaranteed to get your group laughing together which will help your event achieve its objectives.

When you interact with another person you are normally looking to influence them around to your way of thinking in some way. This activity helps your team or participants learn new powers of persuasion in a fun and creative environment.

Equilateral Triangles Collaboration is an excellent conference icebreaker that highlights how large self-organizing groups can successfully collaborate without the need for stringent rules, regulations and leadership.

Problems have a habit of being discussed to death. Everyone has an opinion. They all think they’re right. And they’re often unwilling to consider other options. Problem Solving Team Building (PSTB for short) is a 30-45 minute activity where the problem ‘owner’ will, with the help of their team, go through a structured process of brainstorming, issue analysis, and action planning to achieve a plausible solution to their issue.

Group Decision Making Analysis is a team building exercise providing an opportunity for team members to discuss and agree how they can improve decision making. Unlike a lot of the tools and techniques on WorkshopBank it focuses on improving only 1 key process – how to make decisions in a better way. Most groups and teams can improve that side of the way they work don’t you think? This process helps them get there quickly.

The Radio Station is an icebreaker where you aim to get your participants to think about group criteria instead of personal interests. The icebreaker comprises of two parts and it’s important each set of instructions for both parts is handed to the Participants separately.

Fun icebreakers are the lifeblood of any successful workshop. How Well Do We Know Each Other gets the group working together very quickly as well as having a few laughs. Participants have the opportunity to be a creative as well as show off about themselves. Some cultures might find the showing off part a little off-putting but don't we all ​need an opportunity to brag a little every now and then? Personally I think it's good for the soul to allow yourself to be impressed by others achievements.​

At the start of a project / program it's important to get a handle on the current situation. Appreciating your strengths, studying opportunities, pinpointing weaknesses and identifying threats is a prudent way to kick you off in the right direction. Otherwise you may stop things that you shouldn't or spend time, energy and money on stuff that you really should be avoiding at all costs. A great activity to run with your team to achieve this is a SWOT Analysis.

This is a suite of creative problem solving tools from Erik op ten Berg - an expert in creative thinking from the Netherlands. His creative problem solving process takes a challenge and finds ideas that are new, useful and meaningful. I guarantee you these activities will help you mobilise your group’s creative thinking skills.

Prioritization Matrix is a fun collaborative prioritization tool to compare the relative merits of alternative actions visually. There are elements of action planning, brainstorming, issue analysis and team building in this activity and one that I often use with teams as the conversation is always extremely focused.

Building a presentation as a group can be a tough challenge. If you're not careful you can end up down rabbit holes discussing details that might, or might not, make it into the final deliverable. To avoid this you should agree the high level points first and leave discussing exactly what content you're going to include until after. When you run this activity at the start of a presentation design process you save yourself a lot of time and energy by getting straight to the point of what matters most.