Activities
Games and exercises to energise meetings, build connections, and spark creativity in your workplace.
Fruit Salad Game
This is a great activity for when you are introducing relative sizing or estimation to a team. It can be used to illustrate how estimations can shake out assumptions, showing the differences in what we believe is needed to complete a task, how to do so, and the risks involved. It can also be used to create your first story point scale for your own backlog.
This version does not actually require any fruit; rather, you use index cards with fruit names. As a facilitator, you act as the Product Owner in the session. The team gives relative estimates for preparing different types of fruits to build the end product: a fruit salad.
Mingle Bingo
Take away that awkward feeling of walking into a room full of new people and worrying about coming up with a clever topic to break the ice. This is a particularly great activity for when people are arriving at slightly different times; it gets the conversations bubbling immediately while waiting for the full group to assemble.
Everyone gets a Mingle Bingo template and aims to put a name to each question on the form, striking up conversations and learning names in the process.
Squiggle to Story
This is a great warm-up before a creative session. It can also be a way to highlight that collaboration can lead to unexpected and pretty awesome outcomes. No drawing skills required!
The group builds on top of each other’s squiggles to create a final picture. Works with any size of group, as long as you have enough time and colourful pens to go around.
Ball point game
This is a great game when introducing iterative ways of working, such as Scrum. It highlights the benefits not only of early feedback loops, but also the importance of collaboration, self-organisation and working together as a team. While observing the game, you can learn a lot about the team’s communication and collaboration patterns. It can also be a fun way to create a better understanding of flow and sustainable pace.
The group works as a team, trying to get as many balls as possible through the system in 2-minute intervals. It can be used with any sized group over 5, but we’d recommend to split them into multiple teams if more than 25.
Make a Scene
This is an activity for when you want to improve the team’s ability to deal with uncertainty. It can make you more familiar with the fear of looking silly and help you lessen it (by exposure : ) Great activity for team bonding in an established team. It can also work as an icebreaker for a play-friendly group. As these kinds of activity can be intimidating for some, make sure participation is voluntary.
The group creates a scene with 3 people making up poses. Works for any group size over 6, but ideally around 8-12.
Cards Against Insanity
When you are running a virtual workshop or meeting, there are so many things that can distract the flow – ranging from annoying to pretty much driving you insane. This is a great activity to run at the start of the session. With a bit of creativity and fun, you can keep your virtual meetings on track.
Everyone creates their own cards symbolising comments, instructions or distractions, such as ‘there is too much background noise, please mute’. They hold them up in front of the camera when applicable.
Switch List
The human brain simply does not know how to multi-task, it can only do one job at a time and switch in between. Context switching is however not simple and takes energy and time. Still, many people struggle with understanding the benefits of limiting how much work you have in progress at the same time.
This is a very simple activity to use when introducing concepts such as sequencing work, limit work in progress (WIP) or even just allowing focus.
The group will write down lists as quickly as possible, in two different ways. First time with constant context switching and the second time allowing more focus.
Storytelling Cubes
When you want the group to learn more about each other, get oxytocin flowing to increase trust and empathy.
You use a set of story cubes and let the images inspire your story-telling – they can be used in many different ways. This activity can work for any small to medium-sized group, and even in one-on-one coaching.
Snowball Fight
This is an excellent way to end a day of workshops or training, it provides a bit of fun as well as ensuring everyone can contribute with feedback.
Everyone writes their thoughts on a piece of paper, scrunches it up, and then throws the paper balls around before reading someone else’s feedback out loud. Tends to be even better for larger groups.
Ranking Game
An icebreaking activity that brings energy and movement into the room. It is also a good way for the group to share their own, and learn about others, experiences and thoughts.
You ask the group to physically rank themselves depending on the questions asked. It can also be done in a circle (also called star formations). Works with any sized group above 4-5, but is particularly good for large groups.
Paper Clip Test
This activity, also called ‘Alternative Uses Test’, can get the creative juices flowing before you need to tackle innovation or problem-solving. Psychologist JP Guilford created this as a test, but it can be used as a simple activity to identify your natural limitations. It’s a great example for illustrating Functional Fixedness – the bias making it difficult for us to come up with novel or left-field ideas. It can also highlight how working as a group increases the number of potential solutions.
In this activity everyone will individually list as many alternative uses for an object as they can think of within a couple of minutes. It works with any sized group.
Name & Dance
Want to speed up the process of everyone in the group learning each other’s names? This is a fun activity for both learning names and getting the energy levels up.
In a circle, you take turns sharing names and your favourite dance move. This is ideal for a group of 6-12 (to make sure it isn’t too easy or too hard to remember all the names).
My Remote Office
When you are running a virtual workshop or meeting with remote team members, this is a great activity to start off with. Apart from the common benefits of icebreaking activities, it will create a better appreciation of the environments that the other participants are in. It might even explain those distracting, weird background sounds (eg is that a dying cat, a kid or what?).
Ask everyone to share their physical surroundings. Depending on the setup you can use video, photos, or simply describe it if it is a phone meeting.
Human Knot
This activity is often used as an icebreaker to encourage team bonding in the group of participants. Great activity for when you are getting a new team together, or you think that collaboration could do with an improvement. You can observe and then highlight patterns in team communication during your debrief.
The goal of the game is for a group to untangle themselves without letting go of each other’s hands, and the extended hand-holding can increase oxytocin levels, which can lead to increased trust. Ideal group size is 8-12 people.
Collaborative Portrait
This is a great activity for team bonding and having a laugh together. The participants collaboratively make drawings of each other’s faces and the artwork can be used later on to decorate the team area.
Ideal for a group of between 5-8 people and split the group into multiple teams if larger than this.
Circle Creativity Game
This activity can be used as a warm-up for a session needing creativity, eg an ideation workshop. It was created as a test by psychologists, but rather than using it to judge an individual’s initial creative abilities, you can use it as a way to identify our natural creative weaknesses and highlight how working as a group increases the number of solutions.
In this activity everyone will individually draw as many solutions as they can think of within a minute, and it works with any sized group.
Christmas Tree Retro
For one of the last meetings of the year, run the Christmas Tree Retro to reflect on the year that has passed.
This activity will not only allow you to review the current year but also set you up with goals/objectives for the next one. And in the process, you will create a colourful paper Christmas tree : )
Agile Manifesto Puzzle
This is a simple exercise to introduce the agile manifesto. It gives you the opportunity to discuss the statements and agile values in more detail, but it also allows you to observe the group’s current understanding.
The group completes the manifesto statements by connecting the sentences that are split in two. The activity works for any sized group, but it is ideal to keep them small (2-5 people).
Challenging Assumptions Puzzle
This activity helps teams to get into the mindset of identifying their assumptions and shows that they may not always be correct or even helpful. It can work as a warm-up before a problem-solving or creative session when you want to illustrate the concept of Functional Fixedness.
The group tries to put the puzzle pieces together. While this appears deceivingly simple, it is actually quite difficult as many common practices and ideas don’t apply to this particular puzzle. Ideally for groups of 4-16 people, but keep each team to 4 or less.
Christmas Stockings
End the year on a positive note — this is a nice way to give kudos for achievements during the year. Give and receive positive feedback or well-wishes by ‘post-it presents’ for the whole the team.
Whose is it?
This is a quick icebreaker and simple team building activity you can do in both a virtual or in-person setting. It helps the team get to know each other on a personal level without requiring high-pressure performance.
Ask for input before the session in the form of photos, images, or answers. In the session, you all guess who the item belongs to.
The Creative Zoo
Creative and energetic activity that is helpful when introducing collaborative design, lean development, and customer-centred design. This is also useful for reinforcing concepts such as cross-functional teams, collaboration and incremental delivery.
The group is split into two (or more) teams and everyone is assigned a role to create a zoo model with play dough and craft material. The winner is the team with the most points for their zoo model at the end of the third iteration. You need a minimum of 9 people and this activity works well with larger groups.
Speed Breaking
This is a fun and energetic activity used for speeding up the process of getting to know each other – inspired by the speed dating technique.
You can use the cards in multiple ways, but the most common is that pairs are seated facing each other. Depending on the instructions of the card they pick, they perform an action or answer a question. After a set time, the pair rotates to get to know another person.
Whose is it?
This is a quick icebreaker and simple team building activity you can do in both in a virtual or in-person setting.
Ask for input before the session, in the form of photos, images or answers. In the session, you all guess who the item belongs to.