How to Play: Team Exercises

Lesley Sager

5 How to Play: Team Exercises

Stoke it Up

Why Stoke?

Stoke activities help teams loosen up and become mentally and physically active. Use stoke activities when energy is wavering, to wake up in the morning, to launch a meeting, or before a brainstorm.

How to Stoke?

Do an activity that gets your creativity going and increases your team members’ engagement with each other. A good stoke activity not only increases energy but also requires each person to actively engage, listen, think, and do. For example, when playing Pictionary, you must watch a teammate drawing, listen to other teammates guessing the answer (allowing you to build on those ideas), think of what the answer might be, and call out guesses yourself. Keep the activity brief (5-10 minutes) and active so you can jump into your design work after. Many improv games are good stoke activities.

Try One of These!

Category, category, die!: Line folks up. Name a category (breakfast cereals, vegetables, animals, car manufacturers). Point at each person in rapid succession, skipping around the group. The player has to name something in the category. If she does not, everyone yells “die!!” and that player is out for the round.

Sound ball: Stand in a circle and throw an imaginary ball to each other. Make eye contact with the person you are throwing to, and make a noise as you throw it. The catcher should repeat the noise while catching, and then make a new noise as he throws to next person. Try to increase the speed the ball travels around the circle. Add a second ball to the circle to increase each person’s awareness.

“Yes, Let’s”: Everyone walk around the room randomly, and then one person can make an offer: “Let’s act like we’re all at a cocktail party,” “Let’s be baby birds,” or “Let’s act like we don’t understand gravity.” Then everyone should shout in unison the response, “Yes, let’s” and proceed to take the directive by acting it out. At anytime someone else can yell out the next offer. The answer is always, “Yes, let’s!”

For more awesome examples, check out:

Stokes from Stanford d.school method cards & k-12 lab methods & more
Improv warm ups Learn Improv & Improvencyclopedia Games

The Best Possible Team

The Best Possible Self exercise is a well-known positive psychology exercise for cultivating optimism. The BPS exercise involves envisioning oneself in an imaginary future in which everything has turned out in the most optimal way. Research has shown that writing about and imagining a BPS improves people’s mood and well-being (King, 2001; Peters et al., 2010; Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006), and increases optimism (Peters et al., 2010; Meevissen, Peters, & Alberts, 2011). The Best Possible Team adapts the original BPS exercise to be used with teams (e.g., work teams, sporting clubs, etc). This exercise first invites team members to envision an ideal version of the team individually; then, team members share their individual visions with each other to find common aspirations and differences in views; then, the team works together to create one best possible team scenario based on the information gathered in the prior steps. This tool was created by Lucinda Poole (PsyD) and Hugo Alberts (PhD).

Goal

The goal of this tool is to develop a new, shared understanding of a team functioning at its best and increase the team members’ optimism.

Steps

Imagine your team functioning at its optimal level, with each of its members performing to the best of their abilities, and the team achieving all the things that it sets out to achieve. Take about ten minutes to write down your thoughts, feelings, and emotions that show up for you when you think about a will functioning team.
Share individual visions with the group. On a whiteboard or piece of butchers paper, draw two columns and label them ‘Similarities’ and ‘Differences.’ As a group, discuss (and write down) the similarities and differences among the individual team members’ visions. For example, if multiple team members mentioned something along the
lines of ‘respectful communication,’ this would be added to the ‘Similarities’ column. If only one team member mentioned ‘more frequent team meetings,’ this would be added the ‘Differences’ common.
As a whole group, integrate your findings from Step 3 to come up with a new shared best possible team. Pay particular attention to the Similarities column from Step 3, as this reflects the group’s common aspirations. Work collaboratively to write down a detailed description of this new ideal team.
Define 3 – 5 core values and what this newly defined ideal team stands for. Write them down in a prominent place.