Challenge-Based Activities For Problem-Solving Team Building
You want to run team building that actually changes the way people act as a group and have them solve problems together. The ideal activities should establish this shared goal, imbue a sense of urgency, and enough stress that reveals what kind of people they are at the point in time of your observation.
Why challenge-based Corporate Team Building Activities work:
In a great challenge, teams are:
Answering the question - What does “success” look like?
Sharing information quickly
Deciding who does what
Testing ideas, learning, and adjusting
A work project without emails, essentially.
Challenge-based activity ideas:
The following are the formats that develop real problem-solving skills:
Escape room-style puzzles (in-person or virtual) – perfect for working together on communication, pattern spotting, and not panicking under time pressure!
Campaign games (LEGO, spaghetti towers) and group builds: Shows planning, iterative implementation techniques for an idea; Team failure tolerances.
Team members treasure hunt/city challenge: Strategy combined with coordination, and leadership rotation.
Case study sprints: These are small groups tackling a fictional business case, presenting how they would like to approach it and the trade-offs.
Process improvement games: A game task where teams reshuffle a broken workflow and then subject it to constraints (time, budget, quality).
Consider Corporate Team Building Activities from 270 Climbing.
To keep it practical:
Select a difficulty appropriate for your team’s energy and access requirements
Avoid silos, so that people learn how each other works
Have a short debrief: Methods that worked, what slowed you down? How do your actions at work differ?
The key takeaway
If you fail to learn anything from the challenge, then this becomes one of those dreaded “team building” exercises. Choose a shared problem-solving activity and use the perspectives to generate one or two simple habits for your team.
