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Article • 12 min read

Team Building Exercises – Strategy and Planning

Engaging ways to build core skills.

By the Mind Tools Content Team

strategic planning activities games

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.– Reid Hoffman.

How does your company approach strategic planning?

Traditionally, strategy is developed by an executive team and rolled out to the rest of the company for implementation. But today's rapidly changing commercial environment, coupled with the growing popularity of agile business practices, means that many organizations are now moving away from a formal, top-down approach.

Our current climate calls for a more flexible method that allows teams to shape their own path (while following organizational goals and guidelines). So, it's important that your team has the strategic thinking and planning skills it needs to contribute effectively.

Individuals with strong skills in these areas are also better at aligning their efforts with the broader objectives of the organization, so that their work contributes to a meaningful end goal.

This article explores three team building exercises that can help your people develop their strategic thinking and planning skills.

Strategic Thinking and Planning Exercises

Use the exercises below to strengthen your team's strategic thinking and planning skills. The activities should also help to improve communication and collaboration skills.

You can use them in various ways, for example with a group of new managers, or to refresh the skills of senior leaders.

Exercise 1: Early Bird vs. Second Mouse

This exercise was inspired by the saying (often attributed to American comedian Stephen Wright): "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."

In it, two teams explore the implications of the phrase through presentation, debate and discussion.

This exercise helps teams analyze different strategic positions. It also emphasizes teamwork , presentation , argument and debate, and group decision making .

People and Materials

  • Between eight and 30 people.
  • A presenter from each team.
  • Two flip charts, with pens.
  • Flexible, typically 30-60 minutes.

Instructions

  • Divide the group into two equal teams. Make one the "early bird" and the other the "second mouse."
  • Give both teams five to 10 minutes to develop a short presentation outlining why their strategy is the best for business.
  • A member of each team gives their presentation.
  • When the presentations are over, ask each team to elect someone to debate the question, "Is it better in business to be the early bird or the second mouse?"
  • Combine the teams into one big group and ask for a show of hands to determine which strategy is, indeed, the best.

Advice for the Facilitator

This simple exercise can be adapted in various different ways, depending on your objectives. For example, you may wish to make the exercise about generic business practice or specific to a particular industry or situation. You could also try debating which strategy is best for a particular scenario and then, after the vote, ask if people's opinions would be different if you changed the scenario.

You could ask the group to vote on which strategy is best at the beginning of the exercise and again at the end of the debate, to see if opinions change.

Possible topics for discussion after the exercise include different strategies for different situations, the relative virtues of adaptability versus consistency, how much people's values influence their choice of strategy, and so on.

Exercise 2: United Hearts

In this exercise, teams develop a strategy and compete for points in a card game. The United Hearts Game was published in " Quick Team Building Activities for Busy Managers ," by Brian Cole Miller. This is an adaptation of his original game.

This game strengthens strategic thinking skills. It also reminds players to stay flexible with their strategy and adjust it according to events.

  • Between six and 15 people.
  • One deck of cards.
  • Thirty minutes.

Rules of the Game

The aim is to get as close to 30 points as possible by winning hearts. Aces are low, Jacks are worth 11, Queens 12, and Kings 13 points. All other cards have face value.

Each round begins when the dealer places a heart card face up on the table. Team leaders then pick a card from their own deck and place it face down. When all three have laid down a card, they flip them over and the highest card (irrespective of suit) wins the heart. The rest of the cards from that round are discarded.

When all of the cards have been played (13 rounds in all), teams count up the number of hearts they have won. The closest to 30 wins.

In the event of a tie, the team with the highest value heart is the winner.

  • Put people into three teams of two to five members – group sizes don't need to be equal – and ask each to designate a "leader" who will play for them.
  • Remove the hearts from the deck, and give each team a suit of cards.
  • Explain the rules of the game, and give each team three minutes to plan how they will play.
  • Before the game begins, each team is given time to discuss their strategies but, once it gets underway, discussion is no longer allowed, although team members can indicate which card to play through non-verbal gestures.
  • Interrupt the game after the fifth and ninth rounds to allow the groups to analyze their progress and, if necessary, adjust their strategies.

When the game is over, ask the members of each team to describe what their initial strategy was, whether they thought it was successful, and how it evolved over time.

Discuss how their strategies would have differed if the aim of the game had been to get as high a score or as low a score as possible.

Ask them if other roles, besides leader, emerged within the team. For example, one person may have decided to keep track of which hearts had already been played, while another could have kept track of their competitors' running totals.

Adapted from "Quick Team-Building Activities for Busy Managers: 50 Exercises That Get Results in Just 15 Minutes." by Brian Cole Miller. ©️ 2003 by Brian Cole Miller. Used by permission of HarperCollins Leadership. www.harpercollinsleadership.com

Exercise 3: Capture the Flag

Capture the Flag is a classic outdoor game for larger groups. The goal is to successfully capture the other team's flag, without being caught on "enemy territory."

This game is excellent for building strategic thinking and communication skills. Teams assign roles (such as guards and raiders) and use battlefield tactics to successfully capture the opposing flag. It can be a great exercise to help new teams get to know each other, or to break down barriers between hierarchies or departments.

This game only works if all participants are prepared to play a vigorous outdoor game. You won't build a happy, engaged team if you try to force unwilling people to play.

  • Enough people for at least two groups of five.
  • Two "flags" – anything from a towel to a company flag.
  • Boundary markers (if necessary).
  • A large outdoor space, ideally one with trees, hills or buildings.
  • Flexible, typically 30-45 minutes.

The rules of the game are simple. The group is divided into two opposing teams. Within each team, there are guards and raiders. Guards stay on their own territory and capture any enemies who try to take their flag. Raiders infiltrate enemy territory to locate and capture their opponents' flag. Both roles report to the team leader, who makes sure everyone follows the overall strategy.

Guards capture trespassing raiders by tagging them. The prisoner must then stay where he is put until a member from his own team sets him free by tagging him again. Once a prisoner is set free, he must return to his home territory before resuming play.

If a flag is successfully captured, it must be taken back to the team's home territory. If the flag bearer is caught before she reaches her territory, the flag is returned to its original hiding place, the bearer goes to prison, and the game continues.

  • Begin by dividing the available space up into three parts, with team territories at opposite ends and a neutral "no man's land" in the middle. Mark where each territory begins.
  • Explain the rules, then split the group into two teams.
  • Give each team 10 minutes to choose a leader, assign roles, and discuss their strategy. Teams can decide for themselves how many guards and raiders to have but, once roles have been allocated, they remain for the duration of the game.
  • Instruct each team to place its flag in plain sight. It should present a challenge, but not be impossible to find.
  • Each team then waits in its home territory until you blow the whistle to signal that the game has begun.
  • The game ends when one team successfully brings the other's flag into its home territory. Blow the whistle again to show that the game is over.

Bear in mind that this game may not suit everyone. It can be quite physical, with lots of running and, depending on the terrain, climbing and scrambling over trails, rocks and trees.

It's important that team members approach their roles with sensitivity towards others – both their team members and their "enemies." Make sure that guards understand that they must "tag," not "tackle," enemy raiders, so that no one gets hurt.

Encourage the team to be creative with their roles, so that everyone, regardless of physical ability, can make a positive contribution. For example, some guards could act as "lookouts," while raiders could be divided into "scouts," who use stealth to discover the whereabouts of the flag or prisoners being held captive, and "runners," who create a diversion while others go after the prize.

At the end of the game, gather the group together to discuss how it went. Ask how each person's role contributed to the overall strategy. Examine each team's strategy (or lack of one) and how well it worked out for them, and identify what gave the winning team their competitive advantage.

Team building exercises work best when, as well as improving team work, they help people to develop skills that benefit them in their day-to-day jobs, too. Check out our other team building resources for skills such as creativity , problem solving and decision making , and communication .

Strategic thinking is important for aligning your own and your team's daily activities are aligned with the long-term goals and objectives of your organization.

The games in this article can help your team members learn how to think more strategically, and work together.

Apply This to Your Life

  • Think about how you could incorporate one of these games into your next team meeting, Away Day , or company retreat .

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Icebreaker activities

Got 5 minutes? Then you've got time to start making the personal connections that help us do our best work together. We hand-picked a few that build relationships as well as help move your work forward. 

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Get to know the people you work with and let them get to know you. 

Prime your brains for strategic planning, brainstorming, and problem-solving.

If you're struggling with team cohesiveness , or shared understanding on your  Health Monitor , running this play might help.

User Team

Running the play

Pull these tricks out of your hat when you're waiting for people to trickle into a meeting, or at the beginning of an offsite centered on brainstorming and problem-solving. Have fun!

Whiteboard or butcher paper

  • Index cards

"Dicebreakers" print-out

SUPER QUICK ICEBREAKER QUESTIONS

Got a minute or two while people trickle into the meeting? Toss out a question and have a bit of fun. 

QUESTIONS WITH PURPOSE

What will be the title of your autobiography?

  • Theme: Summarizing complex events or concepts
  • Purpose: Prepare for activities like crafting a vision statement.

What is your superhero name?

  • Theme: Naming stuff is hard!
  • Purpose: Practice packing a lot of info into a single, evocative word or phrase.

Who was your first mentor, and what qualities made them a good (or lousy) one?

  • Theme: Teamwork and support is important
  • Purpose: Reinforce the idea that relying on each other is a part of growth – good for projects or teams with lots of dependencies.

When did you call customer service to complain? 

  • Theme: Empathizing with customers
  • Purpose: Remembering what it feels like to be on the customer side of a bad product or service puts us in a compassionate frame of mind before discussing trade-offs or designing a new user experience.

What is one thing you learned from a project that went wrong? 

  • Theme: Failures are learning opportunities
  • Purpose: Focus on risk identification and mitigation.

"JUST FOR FUN" QUESTIONS

Print and assemble one of our  icebreaker dice   for a little extra fun, or just choose one of the questions below.

  • What animal would you choose to be, and why? 
  • What is the last dream you remember? 
  • How do you let teammates know you're in deep work mode? 
  • Where would you vacation if money were no object?
  • Books, magazines, or podcasts?
  • What car did you learn to drive on?
  • What is one thing you're grateful for today? 
  • When you read or watch TV, do you go for fiction or non-fiction?
  • Coffee, tea, or soda?
  • Can you remember a bumper sticker that made you smile? 

FILL IN THE BLANKS

I have never ________________.

My friends love me for my ________________.

If my pet could talk, it would say ________________.

One ____________ is better than ten ________________.

ICEBREAKER ACTIVITIES FOR MEETINGS, OFFSITES, ETC.

Exorcise the demons (10 min).

Best for groups of 3 or more. Use this activity to juice up your neuropathways before brainstorming or problem-solving, and have a few belly laughs. 

  • Introduce the topic you'll be brainstorming around, or the problem you'll be trying to solve. 
  • Using a whiteboard or butcher paper, ask the group to grab a marker and write down the worst ideas they can think of
  • After a few minutes, step back and take 'em all in (we dare you not to bust up laughing!). 
  • (optional) Ask each person to share their favorite worst idea and why it stood out to them. 

This exercise helps us resist the temptation to self-censor when the real problem solving begins. Because hey: you've already heard the worst ideas the group can come up with. Now that you've flushed them out of your system, you can proceed with your regularly-scheduled brainstorming.

Mystery Person Group Sort (15-30 min)

Best for groups of 20 or more. Use this activity to kickstart creative thinking and see different thought processes in action. 

  • Ask each person to write a surprising fact about themselves on an index card, and drop all the cards into a bag, box, or hat.
  • Each person chooses a card at random. 
  • Now the fun begins. Stand up, mingle, and find cards that align to a theme or are of a type. Keep an open mind when thinking about what constitutes the common threads. It could be "daredevil tendencies", "origin stories", "music", or anything else. There is no limit to how big each grouping can be, but you must find groupings that accommodate all the cards. 
  • Have each group read their cards and share the theme they identified.
  • (optional) Now, having heard the groupings chosen so far, invite the group to stand up and re-sort themselves. Some groupings will likely stay the same, while others will be dramatically different. 

Notice how the point of the exercise was  not  to figure out which fact goes with which person? That's on purpose. In fact, remember to let participants know that at the beginning of the exercise in order to stave off any anxieties around it.

Telephone Charades (15 min)

Best for groups of 10 or more. Use this non-verbal activity to, oddly enough, warm up for a day of listening. 

  • Divide into teams of 5-8 people. 
  • Ask one team to come to the front of the room and stand in a line, all facing in the same direction (it's important that they can't see the person standing behind them). 
  • Show the person at the back of the line a word to act out silently, but don't have them do so just yet. Show it to the "audience" as well so they know what's up, but make sure nobody else in the line sees it.
  • When the person at the back of the line is ready, they will tap the shoulder of the person standing in front of them. That person turns around so now the two are standing face to face (but again: the rest of the line continues facing forward). 
  • The person acting pantomimes the word as best they can. Do it 2 or 3 times so the person watching can really absorb and memorize the movements. But do not tell them the word being acted out!
  • Now the person watching becomes the actor – they tap the person in front of them and repeat the pantomime as best they can. (You see where this is going, right?)
  • Repeat steps 4-6 until everyone in the line has seen the pantomime.
  • Laugh your arse off as the pantomime morphs dramatically from how the person at the back of the line originally acted out the word. 
  • If the person at the front of the line can correctly guess the word, that team scores a point. 

Make sure each team gets a chance to act, and go until you cry "uncle". Looking for words to have the teams act out? Try these: mermaid, lawn sprinkler, firefighter, Gollum, light bulb, snow shovel, jet ski, surfer, walkie-talkie, frying pan.

Three Things (5-10 min)

Best for groups of 5 or more. Use this fast-paced activity to trigger quick, unfiltered thinking before a brainstorming session. 

  • Circle up and choose a person to kick things off – we'll call them Person A. 
  • Person A turns to the person next to them (Person B) and names a category – e.g., "types of sandwiches". 
  • Person B rattles off 3 things that fit into that category as fast as they can. No judgement and no self-censoring!
  • When they're done, the entire group give a clap and yells "Three things!"
  • Go around the circle until everyone has had a chance to name the category and name the three things. 

The point isn't to make sure all things named fit the category perfectly, or to come up with the wittiest response. Just let your brains relax so your neurons can fire quickly. Celebrate even the oddest contributions and set an anything-goes tone before diving into more cerebral, strategic activities. 

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

For more, check out this list of icebreaker games from our pals at Culture Amp. 

If you snapped pictures or grabbed video (especially of Telephone Charades), share them afterward. Try to resist getting a case of the giggles all over again – and good luck with that.

Related Plays

    Rules of Engagement

Want even more Playbook?

Drop your email below to be notified when we add new Health Monitors and plays.

Thanks! Now get back to work.

Got feedback?

Drop a question or comment on the Atlassian Community site.

If you have five minutes, the Icebreaker Activities Play can help you make personal connections and spark the kind of creative thinking that moves work forward.

Clock icon

Run Time 5-30 mins

Connected people icon

People 3-100

Stopwatch icon

What you'll need

  • Video conferencing with screen sharing
  • Digital collaboration tool
  • Dicebreakers cutout
  • Meeting space
  • Whiteboard or butcher paper

Instructions for running this Play

Pull any of the following icebreaker activities out of your hat in any order while waiting for people to trickle into a meeting, during onboardings and trainings, at the beginning of offsites, or any time you want to put people at ease and spark creativity. Have fun!

Super quick icebreaker questions

Have an extra minute or two? These thought-provoking questions make fantastic, fun icebreakers.

Make people think, get conversations started, and warm up before tough brainstorming sessions.

1. What would be the title of your autobiography?

  • Theme: Summarizing complex events or concepts.
  • Purpose: Preparing for activities like crafting a vision statement.

2. If you were a superhero, what would you call yourself?

  • Purpose: Practicing packing a lot of info into a single, evocative word or phrase. This is a killer icebreaker for marketing teams!

3. Who was your first mentor, and what qualities made them a good (or lousy) one?

  • Theme: Teamwork and support are important.
  • Purpose: Reinforcing the idea that relying on each other is part of growth. Use this icebreaker for projects or teams with lots of dependencies, and during leadership meetings.

4. Have you ever called customer service to complain? What happened?

  • Theme: Empathizing with customers.
  • Purpose: Putting everyone into an empathetic state of mind before discussing trade-offs or designing a new user experience.

5. What's one thing you learned from a project that went wrong? 

  • Purpose: Focusing on risk identification and mitigation.

JUST-FOR-FUN QUESTIONS

Spark conversation, especially in less formal meetings. You can also print and assemble one of our dicebreakers for a little extra fun.

  • What's the last dream you remember? 
  • What are your favorite books, magazines, or podcasts?
  • What car did you use to learn how to drive?
  • What's one thing you're grateful for today?
  • Do you prefer coffee, tea, or soda?
  • Can you remember a bumper sticker that made you smile?

Get to know new coworkers or teammates.

I have never ________________.

My friends love me for my ________________.

If my pet could talk, it would say ________________.

One ____________ is better than ten ________________.

Curious how we created these vital signs?

First, we ran organization-wide surveys to gather data. Then, we applied the principles of outcome-driven innovation from Anthony Ulwick’s book, What Customers Want , to give each vital sign an opportunity score.

Icebreaker activities for meetings, offsites, and more

Loosen up and get engaged with these fun icebreakers for meetings. 

Exorcize the demons 10 MIN

Juice up your neural pathways before brainstorming or problem-solving, and have a few belly laughs. Best for groups of three or more.

  • Introduce the topic you'll be brainstorming about, or the problem you'll be trying to solve. 
  • Using a whiteboard or butcher paper — or, for remote teams, a digital collaboration tool — ask the group to write down their worst ideas.
  • After a few minutes, step back and take 'em all in (we dare you not to fall on the floor laughing!).
  • (Optional) Ask each person to share their favorite worst idea and why it stood out to them. 

This exercise helps teams resist the (often strong) temptation to self-censor when real problem-solving begins. After you’ve heard the worst ideas and flushed them out of your system, you can proceed with your regularly scheduled brainstorming.

Mystery person group sort 15-30 MIN

Kickstart creative thinking and see different thought processes in action. Best for large groups of 20 or more.

  • Each person writes a surprising fact about themselves on an index card and drops their cards into a bag, box, or hat.
  • Each person chooses a card at random from the bag.
  • Now the fun begins. Participants stand up and mingle, with the goal of finding cards that align with a theme or are of a similar type. Keep an open mind when thinking about what constitutes the common thread between cards. The thread could be daredevil tendencies, origin stories, music, or anything else. There's no limit to how big each grouping can be, but you must find groupings that accommodate all the cards — nobody gets left out.
  • Each group reads their cards and shares the theme they identified.
  • (Optional) Invite everyone to stand up and re-sort themselves. Some groupings will likely stay the same, while others might be dramatically different.

Notice how the point of the exercise was not to figure out which fact goes with which person? That's on purpose. In fact, remember to let participants know this at the beginning of the exercise in order to stave off any anxieties.

Tip: MAP OUT YOUR DATA

If it’s helpful to visualize each of your vital signs relative to the others, you can plot your results on a scatter plot.

When to remove a vital sign

If average satisfaction is higher than average importance, the vital sign is probably not very important to your team, or your team is satisfied with it already. In the future, you can replace the vital sign with one you want to watch more closely.

Telephone charades 15 MIN

Warm up for a day of listening with this non-verbal activity. Best for groups of 10 or more.

  • Divide into teams of five to eight people. 
  • Ask one team to come to the front of the room and stand in a line, one behind the other, all facing the same direction (it's important no one can see the person standing behind them). 
  • Show the person at the back of the line a word to act out silently, but don't have them do so just yet. Show the word to the audience as well so they know what's up, but make sure nobody else in the line sees it.
  • When the person at the back of the line is ready, they tap the shoulder of the person standing in front of them. That person turns around and faces the person who knows the word.
  • The actor pantomimes the word as best they can two or three times so the person watching can really absorb and memorize the movements. Do not let anyone say the word being acted out!
  • The person watching then becomes the actor – they tap the person in front of them and repeat the pantomime as best they can. (You see where this is going, right?)
  • Repeat steps four to six until everyone in the line has seen the pantomime.
  • Laugh as the pantomime morphs dramatically from the original. 
  • The person at the front of the line tries to guess the original word. If they get it right, the team scores a point. It’s up to you how strict you want to be!

Make sure each team gets a chance to act. You can continue as long as you like. Here are some example words your teams can act out: mermaid, lawn sprinkler, firefighter, Gollum, light bulb, snow shovel, jet ski, surfer, walkie-talkie, or frying pan.

Three things 5-10 MIN

Trigger quick, unfiltered thinking before a brainstorming session with this fast-paced activity. Best for groups of five or more.

  • Circle up and choose a person to kick things off – we'll call them Person A.
  • Person A turns to the person next to them, person B, and names a category, like "types of sandwiches.”
  • Person B rattles off three things that fit into that category as fast as they can. No judgment and no self-censoring!
  • When they're done, the entire group claps and yells, "Three things!"
  • Go around the circle until everyone has had a chance to name a category and three things. 

The point isn't to make sure all things named fit the category perfectly, or to come up with the wittiest response. The point is to laugh and have fun. Let your brain relax so your neurons can fire quickly. Celebrate even the oddest contributions and you’ll set an anything-goes tone before diving into more cerebral, strategic activities.

Tip: DON’T SKIP THIS STEP!

Asking questions and not discussing the outcome is often worse than not asking at all.

35 effective leadership activities and games

strategic planning activities games

Good leaders can make or break a team. While more and more people are being asked to step into leadership roles, the path to becoming a good leader is long and not always straightforward . This is where leadership activities come in.

Leadership activities are a great way of developing the skills and competencies needed to be an effective leader . It's not easy to learn these skills, especially when so many leaders don't receive effective training or support. In this article, we'll explore the leadership activities you should master in order to lead a high-performing team and become a better leader!

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Learning the why and how of being a great leader alongside practical techniques and frameworks is one of the easiest ways to become a better leader.

Anyone in a leadership role has both a big influence and responsibility for their team. Some of the aspects they need to pay attention to in order to be a good leader are:

  • Setting the climate of a workplace
  • Making decisions
  • Inspiring team members
  • Setting values for their team
  • Improving team spirit and cohesion
  • Being responsible for their team’s communication and wellbeing
  • Developing leadership skills in other team members

There are a number of tools to help you with leadership development. Coaching, peer support circles, and leadership development workshops can all help one to become a better leader.

Leadership activities such as those featured here are also effective at introducing leadership concepts and learning how to solve common leadership challenges .

In this guide, we’ve grouped leadership activities by these core competencies, so you can choose the right activity to help yourself or others develop their leadership skills. Let’s dive in!

What are leadership activities?

Leadership activities are exercises designed to help develop leadership skills and enable leaders to be more effective in their roles. They can include activities that help train new leaders and improve core leadership skills like problem-solving, active listening, or effective group management.

You’ll also find that the best leadership development activities give leaders tools and techniques they can use on the job. It’s one thing to know that leaders need to be good listeners, but quite another to be given a framework and toolkit that means you are a great listener who always helps their team feel heard and understood.

The exercises below are not only great to use when training leaders, but they are practical techniques leaders can use with every team member immediately, whatever their leadership style.

strategic planning activities games

What are leadership activities used for?

While managers might approach tasks differently based on their leadership style, there are skills and competencies that all leaders should learn in order to be the best they can be. Learning how to be a good leader on the job can be difficult, so using exercises and activities to improve leadership skills experientially can help leaders be more effective in their role.

If you’re running a leadership development program, you might use these activities during the training program. For example, after conducting a self-assessment and deciding how they want to develop as a leader, participants might work on improving a problem area with these activities.

Whether you’re running such a program and developing managers internally with workshops or simply want to brush up on your own leadership skills, these exercises are a great place to begin.

strategic planning activities games

Leadership activities for setting a great workplace climate

Leaders are role models to their colleagues and organization. Their leadership styles, principles, and values determine the culture that drives their organization’s behavior.

That is why a competitive, paranoid leader can easily create an organization where team members are similarly competitive and less open to collaboration. While a leader who is open and inclusive will create a climate of openness and inclusiveness. How they behave, and what they consider the norm, also affects which kinds of behaviors are enforced and celebrated and which behaviors are punished.

The following leadership activities can help you in recognising important leadership behaviors that result in a productive workplace. They can also be used by leaders to set the stage for team bonding and a great workplace environment with their team. A must for all leaders!

Leadership Envelopes

Leadership games like this help groups translate abstract leadership principles into practical on-the-job behaviors. Participants work in groups to come up with real-life applications of different leadership principles.

The groups conduct multiple rounds of discussion to build upon each others’ ideas, and in the end, evaluate the best ideas to identify the most useful behaviors. This is also a great activity to run with all your team members. Seeing how they consider and respond to different leadership styles can help you focus on the right approach as a leader!

Leadership Envelopes   #leadership   #issue analysis   #thiagi   Leadership exercise in groups, working with practical leadership principles. This activity helps groups to translate abstract leadership principles into practical on-the-job behaviours. Participants work in groups to come up with real-life application of leadership principles. The groups take multiple rounds to build upon the ideas of each other, and in the end, evaluate the best ideas to identify the most useful behaviours.

Your Favourite Manager

In this activity, participants take on three different employee personas and list the behaviors of a positive leader or manager and a negative one from the perspectives of those employees. After some individual reflection, participants compare their lists, first in pairs and then in groups. Finally, they collect the ultimate do’s and don’ts for managers and leaders.

Any activity that encourages deep reflection on your own leadership style and those of your role models is a wonderful way to grow. I’ve been especially inspired by how some of my old bosses approach problem solving while I was a team member working beneath them.

My Favourite Manager   #management   #leadership   #thiagi   #teamwork   #remote-friendly   Participants work individually, assuming the roles of three different people and brainstorming their perceptions of three most favourite managers and three least favourite managers. Later, they work with a partner (and still later, in teams) to prepare a list of dos and don’t-s for improving employees’ perception of a manager’s style.

Leadership Pizza

This leadership development activity offers a self-assessment framework for people to first identify the skills, attributes and attitudes they find important for effective leadership, and then assess their own development in these areas. This framework is also a great tool to set individual leadership development goals in a coaching process.

We love activities that allow team members to reflect on different leadership styles and assess their own skills and preferences. The visual format makes it easy to share and reflect on leadership styles later too!

Leadership Pizza   #leadership   #team   #remote-friendly   This leadership development activity offers a self-assessment framework for people to first identify what skills, attributes and attitudes they find important for effective leadership, and then assess their own development and initiate goal setting.

Heard Seen Respected

Standing in the shoes of others, practicing empathy and ensuring that everyone on a team is able to be heard is a necessity for great leaders and your team in general. In this activity, participants shift between telling stories where they were not heard, seen or respected and then being listeners who do not pass judgment. 

Remember that leadership training should often start with the fundamentals of respect and empathy. If you can’t respect and empathize with your team members, how can you expect them to do the same for you? Keeping things simple with an activity like Heard Seen Respected can be an especially effective option whether you’re working online or offline. 

Heard, Seen, Respected (HSR)   #issue analysis   #empathy   #communication   #liberating structures   #remote-friendly   You can foster the empathetic capacity of participants to “walk in the shoes” of others. Many situations do not have immediate answers or clear resolutions. Recognizing these situations and responding with empathy can improve the “cultural climate” and build trust among group members. HSR helps individuals learn to respond in ways that do not overpromise or overcontrol. It helps members of a group notice unwanted patterns and work together on shifting to more productive interactions. Participants experience the practice of more compassion and the benefits it engenders.

strategic planning activities games

Leadership activities for better decision making

An important aspect of leadership development is learning how to make informed and intelligent decisions while also ensuring you listen to your team. A leader who bulldozes their team into a decision without first listening to their expertise is not going to make their team feel valued.

The outcomes of uninformed decisions are often poor or frustrating for those involved too. While leaders are justifiably responsible for making final decisions, it’s integral to find methods to do so in a well-reasoned way.

These leadership activities are useful when it comes to making good decisions while involving your team members in the process and developing a leadership style that creates space for others.

When solving problems as a team, it’s common to have various options for moving forward. As a leader, it often falls to you to make the decision for which solution or direction to pursue. But how can you do that while also creating space for the opinions of your team to be heard?

Dotmocracy is a tried and tested facilitation method for making informed decisions with the help of your team. After presenting the available options, give everyone on your team a number of dots to indicate which option they prefer. You’ll want to adjust the number of votes based on the number of options there are to choose from. A good rule of thumb is to have fewer dots than there are options, giving just a few for every team member.

Leaders want to be on hand to break any ties and to facilitate discussion around what is chosen, but when it comes to making decisions with your team, this method is hard to beat.

Dotmocracy   #action   #decision making   #group prioritization   #hyperisland   #remote-friendly   Dotmocracy is a simple method for group prioritization or decision-making. It is not an activity on its own, but a method to use in processes where prioritization or decision-making is the aim. The method supports a group to quickly see which options are most popular or relevant. The options or ideas are written on post-its and stuck up on a wall for the whole group to see. Each person votes for the options they think are the strongest, and that information is used to inform a decision.

Impact and Effort Matrix

The hallmark of a good decision making process is transparency. Leaders should know why a decision is made and should be able to clearly explain their thinking to team members. As such, the best decision making activities make the process open and easy to understand.

Start this activity by creating a 2×2 matrix and then place possible options on the matrix based on the expected impact and effort it would take to achieve them. This makes it easy to prioritize and compare possible decisions while also including team members in the process.

An inclusive leadership style means bringing your own knowledge to the table while also listening to the opinions of the team. When running this activity, be sure to combine these aspects to ensure items are placed in the appropriate place on the matrix.

Impact and Effort Matrix   #gamestorming   #decision making   #action   #remote-friendly   In this decision-making exercise, possible actions are mapped based on two factors: effort required to implement and potential impact. Categorizing ideas along these lines is a useful technique in decision making, as it obliges contributors to balance and evaluate suggested actions before committing to them.

Level of influence

Making the right decision is often a process of weighing up various factors and prioritizing accordingly. While there are many methods for doing this, being an effective leader often means making this as simple as possible.

We love this decision making activity because it asks the group (and its leader!) some simple questions to narrow down possible options and makes it easy to prioritize too. Start by asking the level of influence a team has to make possible actions happen and ranking them accordingly.

Next, choose those items that you have the most influence on and then prioritize the ones you really want to happen. This simple, two-step process is a great activity for leadership development as it is something any leader can use with ease!

Level of Influence   #prioritization   #implementation   #decision making   #planning   #online facilitation   This is a simple method to prioritize actions as part of an action planning workshop, after a list of actions has been generated.

Leadership exercises for improving team collaboration

Whether you’re leading a small group or working across a massive organization, part of your role of a leader is to help their team work together more effectively. Removing any obstacles to effective collaboration and creating frameworks for better teamwork is something you’ll be doing as a leader.

Use the activities below to develop the skills necessary to facilitate team building and bring team members together to collaborate effectively.

Circles of Influence

Effective teamwork is often about identifying where each member of a team can have the most impact and use their skills best. Leaders often need to find ways to identify where to direct their team and consider how different skills and working styles fit together to make a cohesive team. This activity makes it easy to facilitate this process and encourage employees to reflect and be proactive too!

We love that this leadership exercise encourages every team member to take responsibility and action. When looking for leadership qualities in a group and considering who you might want to develop into a future leader, this is also a great place to start!

Circles of Influence   #hyperisland   #team   #team effectiveness   A workshop to review team priorities and made choices about what to focus on individually and collectively. The workshop challenges members to reflect on where they can have the most impact and influence. Use this workshop to refine priorities and empower ownership among team members.

Team of Two

Whether you’re leading a team of just a few people or hundreds, the reality is that many of your discussions and interactions with the people you will lead will be interpersonal and one-on-one in nature. Developing the skillset you need to solve issues in your team when they arise and finding ways to ensure these conversations are productive is one of the most important things you can do as a leader.

Use Team of Two whether working online or as part of an in-person session to help your working pairs and interpersonal relationships go from strength to strength. By articulating needs and consequences clearly, this leadership exercise helps people communicate efficiently and see the results they need – a must for anyone in a leadership role! 

Team of Two   #communication   #active listening   #issue analysis   #conflict resolution   #issue resolution   #remote-friendly   #team   Much of the business of an organisation takes place between pairs of people. These interactions can be positive and developing or frustrating and destructive. You can improve them using simple methods, providing people are willing to listen to each other. “Team of two” will work between secretaries and managers, managers and directors, consultants and clients or engineers working on a job together. It will even work between life partners.

What I Need From You

One of the most important leadership skills to cultivate is clarity: being clear in what you expect and need from others in your organisation or group is an integral component of high-functioning teams. With What I Need From You, each team member involved in the exchange is given the chance to articulate their core needs to others and respond in a structured way.

This kind of clear, direct action is great at unblocking conversational roadblocks in both large and small groups, and is something all leaders should have in their toolkit.

What I Need From You (WINFY)   #issue analysis   #liberating structures   #team   #communication   #remote-friendly   People working in different functions and disciplines can quickly improve how they ask each other for what they need to be successful. You can mend misunderstandings or dissolve prejudices developed over time by demystifying what group members need in order to achieve common goals. Since participants articulate core needs to others and each person involved in the exchange is given the chance to respond, you boost clarity, integrity, and transparency while promoting cohesion and coordination across silos: you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again!

Team Canvas

When it comes to enabling true collaboration throughout your organization, it pays to involve your team members in helping shape the way you want to work together. Different leadership styles may call for a different approach to this process, but it’s always helpful to see a complete example of how you might define your team culture and working processes.

In this workshop template, you can see a complete agenda for a team canvas workshop. This will take a team through a process of co-creating and defining everything from your goals, values, assets, and rules. Effective leadership often means tapping into group intelligence and enabling your team to take shared ownership of their success. Team Canvas great way of achieving this!

Team Canvas workshop

Leadership activities for inspiring others

Great leaders inspire others. However, there are many different reasons why someone will find a leader inspirational. Developing the skills to inspire team members and lead with this energy is important, whatever your leadership style.

In order to grasp what facilitates inspiring leadership, try the following exercises. You’ll be surprised at how thinking more deeply about your own role models or what your values can help you in all of your leadership interactions!

Leadership Advice from your Role Model

Everyone is asked to think of a role model they look up to and ask themselves: If a young person would ask these role models for leadership advice and what kind of advice that would be.

Facilitate a group conversation where these pieces of advice are shared and contradicting points are discussed and reconciled. Given diverse enough responses, this structured sharing activity might be a good introduction to the concept of situational leadership.

Leadership Advice from Your Role Model   #skills   #leadership   #thiagi   #role playing   This structured sharing activity provides a faster, cheaper, and better alternative to buying and reading a lot of books: You tap into the wisdom of the group—and of their role models.

Living Core Values

The core values of your organization are a great place to look when you want to inspire your team members. Leaders should be involved in defining and exemplifying their core values and also helping create space for the team to share how they’re living those values. The result is an inspiring leadership exercise that allows a leader to help the group celebrate their wins and also suggest places for improvement.

Start by choosing one of your core values and asking activity participants to share a story of how they have been practicing this core value. After sharing, ask the team to reflect on what inspired them from the story. As with any leadership development game, be the first one to share a story to help guide the discussion. Running this exercise will not only help inspire a team to greater heights but also surface any areas that need improvement – it’s a great method to have in your leadership toolbox!

Living Core Values   #culture   #values   #core values,   #connection   #inspiration   #virtual_friendly   #team   #team alignment   #energizer   #remote-friendly   For use with a team, organization or any peer group forum. Can be done in person or virtual This is designed to create a conversation that brings Core Values alive. This is great for a team that knows what values they stand for. Through this exercise they will celebrate their values in action and therefore be energized to magnify them further. It will also help bring along anyone that is new so they can understand that the group really walks the talk

Throughout human history, stories have been a consistent source of inspiration. Whatever your leadership style, finding time to share more about your own story and create space for others to share theirs can be massively useful as a leader.

In Campfire, start by creating a selection of 10-20 sticky notes relating to a concept you wish to explore with the group. Put these on the wall and then invite your group to review them and consider stories they might tell related to one of those words. Start the storytelling session yourself and think about how you might inspire and elicit further stories from the rest of the team before passing the torch to the next person around the campfire!

This is a great activity to run during leadership training or when team building. Creating safe spaces for people to share their experiences is a leadership skill you absolutely want to cultivate and practice!

Campfire   #gamestorming   #team   #remote-friendly   #storytelling   Campfire leverages our natural storytelling tendencies by giving players a format and a space in which to share work stories—of trial and error, failure and success, competition, diplomacy, and teamwork. Campfire is useful not only because it acts as an informal training game, but also because it reveals commonalities in employee perception and experience.

Letter from the Future

Leaders are often called upon to inspire their team members about the future of their product or organization. Employees who are excited about where you’re going are more likely to work together well and be energized to see results. This activity is useful for helping inspire a team, or even just to inspire yourself as a leader and get your vision for the future down on paper!

Begin by asking your team to speculate on what the world will look like in five years. Next, ask them to write a letter from the future detailing what the group has accomplished in that time and how they overcame any challenges.

Share the results to inspire the group for what you might accomplish and also start creating plans for how you’ll create your desired future. You might even find that running this activity solo is effective when thinking about how you want to develop as a team leader!

Letter from the Future   #strategy   #vision   #thiagi   #team   #teamwork   Teams that fail to develop a shared vision of what they are all about and what they need to do suffer later on when team members start implementing the common mandate based on individual assumptions. To help teams get started on the right foot, here is a process for creating a shared vision.

Leadership activities for personal development

A good leader is one who helps uplift and upskill the members of their team. These leadership activities are designed to help you encourage participants to be more autonomous, take initiative and work on their personal development.

If you’re new to a leadership role or trying on various leadership styles, these can also be great activities to practice on the road to leading a team. Growth and development is a vital aspect of employee happiness and fulfillment – be sure to bring ideas for enabling others to your leadership role.

Roles in a meeting

Learning by doing is an important aspect of effective leadership. Sometimes, you have to try something new and approach the task with an open mind while working to the best of your ability. This simple method is a great way of encouraging participants to take an important role during a meeting and also take part in developing and refining those roles.

If you’re running a leadership development program and want to start upskilling participants, this is a great way of delegating some simple leadership roles. Plus, it helps encourage the group to contribute and engage with how a successful meeting is put together too!

Roles in a meeting   #meeting facilitation   #remote-friendly   #hybrid-friendly   #skills   Organize the day’s meeting by co-creating and assigning roles among participants.

Alignment & Autonomy

One of the most impactful things a leader can do is get out of a team’s way and allow them to perform more autonomously. Doing so effectively means people can take ownership of their work, be more invested, and develop their skills too. But how can you do this without creating chaos or misalignment?

In this activity, you first help every team member align on your goals and then reflect on where they can take more ownership and be more autonomous in their work while still contributing to the goals of the team. Not only is this a great way to help your team develop, but it also takes work off your plate as a leader and can enable you to get out of the trenches if necessary.

Alignment & Autonomy   #team   #team alignment   #team effectiveness   #hyperisland   A workshop to support teams to reflect on and ultimately increase their alignment with purpose/goals and team member autonomy. Inspired by Peter Smith’s model of personal responsibility. Use this workshop to strengthen a culture of personal responsibility and build your team’s ability to adapt quickly and navigate change.

15% Solutions

One of the biggest barriers to personal development is being overwhelmed by what you need to do to achieve your goals. As a leader, you can help your team by enabling them to take the small, important actions that are within their control.

Start by asking participants to reflect on where they have the discretion and freedom to act and how they might make a small step towards a goal without needing outside help. By flipping the conversation to what 15% of a solution looks like, rather than 100%, employees can begin to make changes without fear of being overwhelmed.

15% Solutions   #action   #liberating structures   #remote-friendly   You can reveal the actions, however small, that everyone can do immediately. At a minimum, these will create momentum, and that may make a BIG difference.  15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. They help people pick it up a level. They get individuals and the group to focus on what is within their discretion instead of what they cannot change.  With a very simple question, you can flip the conversation to what can be done and find solutions to big problems that are often distributed widely in places not known in advance. Shifting a few grains of sand may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape.

The GROW Coaching Model

The best leaders are often great coaches, helping individual team members achieve their potential and grow. This tried and test method is a wonderful way to help activate the development of everyone from a new start to an established leader.

Begin by teaching your mentee or group the GROW acronym (Goal, Reality, Obstacles/Options, and Will.) and guide them through a process of defining each section and collectively agreeing on how you’ll make progress. This is an effective leadership activity that is great for leadership training and is equally useful when it comes to help any team member grow.

The GROW Coaching Model   #hyperisland   #coaching   #growth   #goal setting   The GROW Model is a coaching framework used in conversations, meetings, and everyday leadership to unlock potential and possibilities. It’s a simple & effective framework for structuring your coaching & mentoring sessions and great coaching conversations. Easy to use for both face-to-face and online meetings. GROW is an acronym that stands for Goal, Reality, Obstacles/Options, and Will.

Leadership exercises for setting team values

Usually, the values of a leader are mirrored in the organization. If shortcuts are common practice for the leader, then she will see shortcuts made by her team members all across their projects. But if learning and self-improvement are important to the leader, then this will be a good foundation for these values in the whole organization, too.

To be more aware of your own values as a leader and then bring these ideas to your team, try these leadership exercises!

Explore Your Values

Explore your Values is a group exercise for thinking on what your own and your team’s most important values are. It’s done in an intuitive and rapid way to encourage participants to follow their intuitions rather than over-thinking and finding the “correct” values.

It’s a good leadership game to use to initiate reflection and dialogue around personal values and consider how various leadership styles might chime with some values more than others.

Explore your Values   #hyperisland   #skills   #values   #remote-friendly   Your Values is an exercise for participants to explore what their most important values are. It’s done in an intuitive and rapid way to encourage participants to follow their intuitive feeling rather than over-thinking and finding the “correct” values. It is a good exercise to use to initiate reflection and dialogue around personal values.

Your Leadership Coat of Arms

In this leadership development activity, participants are asked to draw their own coat of arms symbolising the most important elements of their leadership philosophy. The coat of arms drawings are then debriefed and discussed together with the group.

This activity works well with equally well with leadership and team members. Creating a visual representation of what you stand for in the form of a coat of arms can help create a memorable asset you can refer to and rally behind in the future.

Your Leadership Coat of Arms   #leadership   #leadership development   #skills   #remote-friendly   #values   In this leadership development activity, participants are asked to draw their own coat of arms symbolising the most important elements of their leadership philosophy. The coat of arms drawings are then debriefed and discussed together with the group. After the exercise you may prepare a coat of arms gallery, exhibiting the leadership approach and philosophy of group members

Team Purpose & Culture

Ensuring all group participants are aligned when it comes to purpose and cultural values is one of the jobs of a leader. Teams and organizations that have a shared and cohesive vision are often happier and more productive and by helping a group arrive at these conclusions, a good leader can help empower everyone to succeed. Even with multi-discipline teams and organizations with different leadership styles, this method is an effective way of getting everyone on the same page. This is a framework you’ll likely use again and again with different teams throughout your career.

Team Purpose & Culture   #team   #hyperisland   #culture   #remote-friendly   This is an essential process designed to help teams define their purpose (why they exist) and their culture (how they work together to achieve that purpose). Defining these two things will help any team to be more focused and aligned. With support of tangible examples from other companies, the team members work as individuals and a group to codify the way they work together. The goal is a visual manifestation of both the purpose and culture that can be put up in the team’s work space.

Leadership games for team building

Every leader has an integral role in the formation of the teams they work with. Whether you are consciously working on it or not, your attitude and actions as a leader will significantly influence team cohesion, communication and the team spirit of the people you work with.

This comes through in small everyday actions, the way you share responsibilities, the way you empower colleagues, and the way you foster a cooperative work environment as opposed to a competitive one.

Sometimes, it can also be effective to run team building activities with your company that are expressly focused on helping teams come together and bond. Try using the following team building activities with new teams, or groups that need to spend a little time getting to know each other better.

Marshmallow challenge

The Marshmallow Challenge is a team-building activity in which teams compete to build the tallest free-standing structure out of spaghetti sticks, tape, string, and the marshmallow that needs to be on the top. This leadership activity emphasizes group communication, leadership dynamics, collaboration, and innovation and problem-solving.

It’s a wonderful game that allows participants’s natural leadership qualities to shine through, and it helps teams have a lot of fun too!

Marshmallow challenge with debriefing   #teamwork   #team   #leadership   #collaboration   In eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. The Marshmallow Challenge was developed by Tom Wujec, who has done the activity with hundreds of groups around the world. Visit the Marshmallow Challenge website for more information. This version has an extra debriefing question added with sample questions focusing on roles within the team.

Crocodile River

The Crocodile River is a team-building activity in which group members need to support each other in a task to move from one end of a space to another. It requires working together creatively and strategically in order to solve a practical, physical problem. It tends to emphasize group communication, cooperation, leadership and membership, patience and problem-solving.

Crocodile River   #hyperisland   #team   #outdoor   A team-building activity in which a group is challenged to physically support one another in an endeavour to move from one end of a space to another. It requires working together creatively and strategically in order to solve a practical, physical problem. It tends to emphasize group communication, cooperation, leadership and membership, patience and problem-solving.

Chinese Puzzle (Human Knot)

This is a simple game to help team members learn how to work together (better). It can also focus on the group’s understanding of communication, leadership, problem-solving, trust or persistence. Participants stand in a circle, close their eyes and put their hands into the circle to find two other hands to hold. Then they open their eyes and the group has to try to get back into a circle without letting go, though they can change their grip, of course.

Chinese Puzzle   #energiser   #icebreaker   #team   Have your group stand up in a close circle (10 to 16 people is best). They close their eyes put their hands into the circle and find two hands and hold on. Then they open their eyes and the group has to try to get back into a circle without letting go, though they can change their grip, of course.

Leadership activities for better communication

Leaders are usually viewed as the parents of the organization. It is expected from them that they take care of their people and make sure that proper norms and rules are followed. One of the key areas where a leader has a large influence is the style and amount of communication between people.

strategic planning activities games

Active Listening and giving effective feedback are critical skills to have as a leader but are also crucial for your team members. In fact, the issue that leaders rank as one of the biggest barriers to successful leadership is avoiding tough conversations, including giving honest, constructive feedback .

Develop good communication practices with the following leadership games and activities.

Active Listening

This activity supports participants in reflecting on a question and generating their own solutions using simple principles of active listening and peer coaching. It’s an excellent introduction to active listening but can also be used with groups that are already familiar with this activity. Participants work in groups of three and take turns being “the subject” who will explore a question, “the listener” who is supposed to be totally focused on the subject, and “the observer” who will watch the dynamic between the other two.

Active Listening   #hyperisland   #skills   #active listening   #remote-friendly   This activity supports participants to reflect on a question and generate their own solutions using simple principles of active listening and peer coaching. It’s an excellent introduction to active listening but can also be used with groups that are already familiar with it. Participants work in groups of three and take turns being: “the subject”, the listener, and the observer.

Trust battery

Every time you work together with someone, your trust battery – the trust you have towards a certain person, or the ‘emotional credit’ that person has in your eyes – either charges or depletes based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise and the social interaction you exhibit. A low trust battery is the core of many personal issues at the workplace.

This self-assessment activity allows you and your team members to reflect on the ‘trust battery’ they individually have towards each person on the team and encourages focus on actions that can charge the depleted trust batteries.  It also works great when promoting virtual leadership and working with online teams!

Trust Battery   #leadership   #teamwork   #team   #remote-friendly   This self-assessment activity allows you and your team members to reflect on the ‘trust battery’ they individually have towards each person on the team, and encourages focus on actions that can charge the depleted trust batteries.

Feedback: Start, Stop, Continue

Regular and constructive feedback is one of the most important ingredients for effective teams. Openness creates trust, and trust creates more openness. This is an activity for teams that have worked together for some time and are familiar with giving and receiving feedback. The objective of Start, Stop, Continue is to examine aspects of a situation or develop next steps by polling people on what to start, what to stop and what to continue doing.

For those in charge of online leadership, it’s vital to find ways of having difficult conversations in constructive ways virtually – try this method when working to resolve issues with your distributed team!

Feedback: Start, Stop, Continue   #hyperisland   #skills   #feedback   #remote-friendly   Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be conducted with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics. This is an exercise for groups or teams that have worked together for some time and are familiar with giving and receiving feedback. It uses the words “stop”, “start” and “continue” to guide the feedback messages.

Reflection: Team

All leaders know the value of structured and considered reflection. Teams that take the time to reflect and improve are those that can grow and by creating an environment of reflection, team leaders and managers can help their group move forward together. This method is effective for both offline and virtual leadership development. It helps a group progress from individual reflection through to full group discussion in a way that encourages constructive thought and minimizes potential frustration or antagonistic conversation. 

Reflection: Team   #hyperisland   #team   #remote-friendly   The purpose of reflecting as a team is for members to express thoughts, feelings and opinions about a shared experience, to build openness and trust in the team, and to draw out key learnings and insights to take forward into subsequent experiences. Team members generally sit in a circle, reflecting first as individuals, sharing those reflections with the group, then discussing the insights and potential actions to take out of the session. Use this session one or more times throughout a project or program.

Leadership activities for resolving team conflicts

One of the most important leadership skills you’ll want to develop is the ability to mediate and resolve team conflicts. Even the most connected and effective teams can run into conflict and it will fall to managers and team leaders to help get things back on track.

Even for established leaders, navigating conflict can be difficult! These leadership development activities are designed to help groups manage and resolve conflicts more effectively.

Giving leaders a framework they can trust and use with their team right away is always a good use of time, and we’d recommend teaching these methods to all new leaders!

What, So What, Now What?

It’s easy to get lost in the woods when it comes to managing conflict. Helping a group see what happened objectively and without judgment is an important leadership skill, and this framework helps make this process easy.

Start by working with the group to collect facts about what happened before moving towards making sense of them. Once everywhere has been heard and given space to process these facts, you can then move towards suggesting practical actions. By following this kind of framework, you can manage a conflict in a pragmatic way that also ensures everyone in a group can contribute.

W³ – What, So What, Now What?   #issue analysis   #innovation   #liberating structures   You can help groups reflect on a shared experience in a way that builds understanding and spurs coordinated action while avoiding unproductive conflict. It is possible for every voice to be heard while simultaneously sifting for insights and shaping new direction. Progressing in stages makes this practical—from collecting facts about What Happened to making sense of these facts with So What and finally to what actions logically follow with Now What . The shared progression eliminates most of the misunderstandings that otherwise fuel disagreements about what to do. Voila!

Conflict Responses

All of us can be guilty of handling conflicts in a less than ideal manner. Part of developing as a leader is identifying when something didn’t go well before finding ways to do things better next time.

In this leadership activity, ask the group to provide examples of previous conflicts and then reflect on how they handled them. Next, ask everyone to reflect on how they might change their behavior for a better outcome in the future. As a leader, use this opportunity to lead the way and be honest and vulnerable. It’s your role to provide a model for interaction and its always worthwhile to see how you can do better as a people manager dealing with conflict too!

Conflict Responses   #hyperisland   #team   #issue resolution   A workshop for a team to reflect on past conflicts, and use them to generate guidelines for effective conflict handling. The workshop uses the Thomas-Killman model of conflict responses to frame a reflective discussion. Use it to open up a discussion around conflict with a team.

Bright Blurry Blind

Finding opportunities to reframe conflict as an opportunity to solve problems and create clarity is a very useful leadership quality. Often, conflict is a signifier of a deeper problem and so finding ways to surface and work on these issues as a team is a great way to move forward and bring a group together too.

In this leadership activity, start by asking the group to reflect on the central metaphor of bright to blind issues or topics, based on whether the problem is out in the open or unknown. Next, invite small groups to ideate on what issues facing the team are bright, blurry, or blind and then discuss them as a group. By working together to illuminate what is blurry or blind, you can create a one-team mentality and start resolving problems that can lead to conflict too.

Bright Blurry Blind   #communication   #collaboration   #problem identification   #issue analysis   This is an exercise for creating a sense of community, support intra and inter departmental communication and breakdown of “Silos” within organizations. It allows participants to openly speak about current issues within the team and organization.
The Art of Effective Feedback Workshop

All leaders will need to give effective feedback in order to help their team develop and do great work. The best leaders also solicit feedback from their direct reports and use this is an opportunity to grow. But how can you teach these feedback skills and help leaders develop this important skill?

Check out our Effective Feedback Workshop template for a complete agenda you can use to develop this leadership skill. You’ll find a ready-to-go workshop with a guide and PowerPoint presentation you can use to help anyone in a leadership role give and receive better feedback.

Leadership games for developing leadership skills

When it comes to developing leadership skills, you can go the obvious route of training courses, books and development programs. These work and you should absolutely use them.

But what if you want to try identifying future leaders in a more light touch, experiential way? How about if you want to help teams develop skills in leadership while also having fun? These leadership games are ideal for identifying and growing leadership skills among team members and are often a lot of fun too!

Blind Square Rope Game

This activity is a tried and tested game that asks teams to communicate well and solve a problem as a team. Not only is this a fun team building activity, but it’s a great way for potential leaders to step up and help their team win! Start by tying a length of rope into a circle and then instruct participants they will have 20 minutes to turn it into a square, with fifteen minutes to plan their actions and five minutes to implement. Here’s the catch – no one may touch the rope until you begin, and every team member is blindfolded during implementation. This is an effective leadership game that is great with both small groups and larger teams separated into breakouts.

Blind Square – Rope game   #teamwork   #communication   #teambuilding   #team   #energiser   #thiagi   #outdoor   This is an activity that I use in almost every teambuilding session I run–because it delivers results every time. I can take no credit for its invention since it has existed from long before my time, in various forms and with a variety of names (such as Blind Polygon). The activity can be frontloaded to focus on particular issues by changing a few parameters or altering the instructions.

Tower of Power

All leaders need to work closely with other members of their organization in order to succeed. This leadership game encourages groups to work together in order to build a tower with specific (and sometimes tricky!) rules before than reflecting on what worked, what didn’t and what they would do next time.

It’s a wonderful activity for leadership training, as it provides an experiential way to explore leadership concepts, all wrapped in a fun game!

Tower of Power   #team   #teamwork   #communication   #leadership   #teambuilding   #skills   This teamwork activity requires participants to work closely together to build a tower from a set of building blocks.  The players need to coordinate their actions in order to be able to move the wooden blocks with the crane they have, and this can only be solved by precise planning, good communication and well-organised teamwork. You may use this exercise to emphasise the following themes and outcomes: In Leadership training : identifying interdependencies in systems, leadership communication, dealing with risk, giving feedback In Team building : communicating effectively, cooperating, being an active listener, maintaining the balance, working with values In Project management : simulating strategic planning, working under time pressure In Communication training : meta communication, facilitating, dealing with different perspectives

When teams work together well, something magic happens. But what elements constitute a high performing team? As a leader, how can you help ensure those conditions are met? In this leadership game, participants must work together to get every team member across an obstacle while blindfolded.

It’s a simple concept that creates a perfect space for exploring how teams operate and the role leaders have within them. Bring plenty of fun obstacles (squeaky toys are best) and encourage groups to think strategically for best results!

Minefield   #teampedia   #teamwork   #action   #team   #icebreaker   A fun activity that helps participants working together as a team while teaching the importance of communication, strategy and trust.

Workshop design made easy

Designing and running effective workshops and meetings is an important leadership skill; whether it’s staying organized and on time during your daily stand-ups or planning more involved sessions.

With SessionLab, it’s easy to create engaging workshops that create impact while engaging every member of your team. Drag, drop and reorder blocks  to build your agenda. When you make changes or update your agenda, your session  timing   adjusts automatically , saving you time on manual adjustments.

Collaborating with stakeholders or clients? Share your agenda with a single click and collaborate in real-time. No more sending documents back and forth over email.

Explore  how you and your team might use SessionLab  to design more effective sessions or  watch this five minute video  to see the planner in action!

strategic planning activities games

Now over to you…

I hope you have found some useful tips for leadership development workshops above. Now we’d love to hear from you!

What are your favorite leadership workshop ideas and training exercises for leadership development? Did you incorporate any of them into your facilitation practice?

Have you tried any of the activities above? Let us know about your experiences in the comments.

23 Comments

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Thank you for sharing such great activity ideas. It is greatly appreciated and a perfect example of how the internet can and does serve the greater good!

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Thank you, Jeanne! Great to see that you have found some useful ideas here!

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Thank you this is very helpful in building new activities and revitalising teaching.

You’re welcome, Christine! Great to see that you’ve found the post helpful!

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Thank you for the magnanimity of sharing these activities. We will choose and run and I am sure they will be very effective.

You are welcome, Roofi – enjoy using these activities at your sessions!

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Thank you for sharing such great activity ideas. I will use in my leadership training programme

You are welcome man, happy to see that you’ve found some useful inspiration in this post!

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Awesome resources for leadership coaching. Thank you so much! Cheers Marion (From Australia)

You’re welcome, Marion! I’m happy to hear you’ve found interesting the techniques above :-)

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Thank you so much . I am really having a hard time thinking about what activities to include for my leadership training talk . This is of great help .

That’s nice to hear – I hope your training talk with go great! :-)

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These exercises sound great. Does anyone have any feedback as to how these exercises have worked with their teams? Thanks!

Thank you for the question, Jennifer. We’ve used some of these activities at our own team meetings at SessionLab, and I’ve used other ones earlier on at different training workshops. Which one would you be interested to hear more about?

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Thank you for these activities, I have used some of them already in my classes when teaching about leadership and leadership styles. Köszönöm!

That’s great to hear, you’re welcome, Réka! If you have any suggestion on how to tweak or run better these activities, we’d love to hear your thoughts :-)

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Thank you for these activities. I was struggling to find activities to work on with groups as small as 1-5, but this should work well.

You’re welcome, Albert – Indeed, most of these activities do work well in small groups as well. Wishing best with your next sessions!

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wow! this great! very helpful for trainers like me…. thanks you for sharing …

You’re welcome, I’m happy you’ve found these activities useful!

' src=

Hi I am trying to find an online simulation for a course I am designing for a college in Ontario, Canada. I am hoping to find something like your Leadership Envelope but in a virtual format or game. The ’rounds’ aspect is particularly interesting as I would like the students to work with one team over 14 weeks and then submit assigned work based on their experiences related to the course concepts.

Please let me know if you provide something like this or can help in any way.

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Hey Rick! Thanks for your comment :)

Leadership Envelope is a great method! Sadly, there’s nothing quite like it in our remote-friendly section of the library currently, though there are a heap of virtual team building activities that could be adapted to go for multiple rounds.

We did have some thoughts on how you might perform the Leadership Envelope in a remote format, which I hope will help!

– Use breakout groups in Zoom for each group. – Have each team pass their virtual “envelope” with responses to the facilitator, either over Slack, PM or email – The facilitator then “passes” the leadership principle to the next team, though keeps the responses back – Play continues, with the facilitator collecting the responses under each leadership principle for later distribution – we’d recommend setting these up in an online whiteboard such as Mural or a Google Doc so teams can review them during the evaluation round – In the evaluation round, share the online whiteboard/Google Doc with the teams – they can then score them in the shared online space and present back to the group from there :) – For the final round, everyone returns to a single Zoom session, each team reclaims their cards (or the facilitator can distribute them back) and then you can debrief :)

Hope that helps, Rick! Using a shared online space such as Mural is also a great shout for an ongoing course, as you can collect and display artifacts generated by the teams throughout :)

Let us know how you get on!

' src=

Thank you for having the time and effort on sharing this amazing blog with us! I’ll probably read more of your articles.

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strategic planning activities games

How does learning work? A clever 9-year-old once told me: “I know I am learning something new when I am surprised.” The science of adult learning tells us that, in order to learn new skills (which, unsurprisingly, is harder for adults to do than kids) grown-ups need to first get into a specific headspace.  In a business, this approach is often employed in a training session where employees learn new skills or work on professional development. But how do you ensure your training is effective? In this guide, we'll explore how to create an effective training session plan and run engaging training sessions. As team leader, project manager, or consultant,…

strategic planning activities games

Effective online tools are a necessity for smooth and engaging virtual workshops and meetings. But how do you choose the right ones? Do you sometimes feel that the good old pen and paper or MS Office toolkit and email leaves you struggling to stay on top of managing and delivering your workshop? Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools to make your life easier when you need to facilitate a meeting and lead workshops. In this post, we’ll share our favorite online tools you can use to make your job as a facilitator easier. In fact, there are plenty of free online workshop tools and meeting facilitation software you can…

cycle of workshop planning steps

Going from a mere idea to a workshop that delivers results for your clients can feel like a daunting task. In this piece, we will shine a light on all the work behind the scenes. On a good day, facilitation can feel like effortless magic, but that is mostly the result of backstage work, foresight, and a lot of careful planning. Read on to learn a step-by-step approach to breaking the process of planning a workshop into small, manageable chunks.  The flow starts with the first meeting with a client to define the purposes of a workshop. In other words, we are working on the assumption that the facilitator has…

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Games Can Make You a Better Strategist

  • Martin Reeves
  • Georg Wittenburg

strategic planning activities games

They offer cheap, real-time learning.

Play has long infused the language of business: we talk of players, moves, end games, play books and so on. And now we hear often about the “gamification” of work—using elements of competition, feedback and point scoring to better engage employees and even track performance. Even so, actual games are still taboo in most organizations—the stereotype of the work-avoiding employee cracking new high scores in Minesweeper has given gaming a bad name. And the corporate executive playing games to improve his or her strategy-making skills is still rare. This is unfortunate. We think that games have an important place in cultivating good strategists, and that now more than ever games can give executives an edge over their competition.

strategic planning activities games

  • Martin Reeves is the chairman of Boston Consulting Group’s BCG Henderson Institute in San Francisco and a coauthor of The Imagination Machine (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).
  • GW Georg Wittenburg was the main architect of the companion iPad game, Your Strategy Needs a Strategy , and is now CEO and co-founder of Insightfully, an automated analytics start-up based in Berlin.

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18 Fun Leadership Games to Build Skills

Here is our list of the best leadership games .

Leadership games are fun challenges and activities designed to help players learn essential skills and become better leaders. Examples include 60 seconds story, guess the drawing, and the blindfold game. These games aim to identify potential leaders in a team or help existing leaders develop essential traits like decision-making, trust, and communication.

These games are similar to leadership activities and can help in professional development . Also, the challenges can help participants learn essential leadership skills and become good leaders .

This list includes:

  • free online leadership games
  • leadership games for adults
  • leadership games for employees
  • workplace leadership games
  • leadership games for kids
  • leadership games for high school students
  • games to build leadership skills
  • leader games

Here we go!

List of leadership games

Games are fun recreational activities but can also be a great tool to train leaders and build necessary leadership skills. From the tallest tower challenge to guess the emotion, here are fun leadership games to help leaders build skills:

1. Survival Island

Survival island is one of the most fun workplace leadership games. Players will try to find ways to escape an island in the game. Participants must imagine that limited survival items, like water, food, guns, torches, and boats, are available.

The team must agree on a strategy to escape the island without leaving any player behind. Players can appoint a captain to lead the team and assign different roles to teammates. Examples include the player in charge of guns to protect the team from wild animals, night guards, and team members in charge of food and water.

While thinking of a plan, participants will most likely have points of conflict. However, this game tests players’ leadership ability to agree on a strategic survival plan. For a more fun experience, let your group play in different teams. Then you can compare all the teams’ strategies at the end and have non-participating team members vote on the best. This game builds leadership qualities like decision-making, management, and strategic thinking skills. Also, participants will be able to assess each other’s weaknesses and strengths, particularly when assigning roles.

2. Tallest Tower Challenge

The tallest tower challenge is among the most fun leadership games to play with employees. This challenge inspires creativity, strategic planning, and teamwork. To play this game, team members have to work together to build a tower out of items like:

  • Uncooked spaghetti
  • Marshmallows

Before the game starts, ensure that you specify the rules and give the participants the needed materials. After building the tower, the goal is to place a marshmallow on top without destroying the structure. The team that makes the highest-standing structure wins the game.

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3. Escape Rooms

Escape rooms are fun games that inspire leaders in a group. Players escaping the room must work together to find clues and solve puzzles. This game is a great way to identify which of your team members have the potential to lead a team. Escape room games also help teammates develop essential leadership skills. While playing, players can exhibit their best management traits, ranging from strong communication to problem-solving skills.

Furthermore, you can use escape rooms to determine the players capable of motivating the entire team while working under pressure.

Here are DIY escape room ideas .

4. Draw Yourself

Draw yourself is one of the most fun leadership games for kids. The idea is for kids to make sketches that best represent their personalities. You can guide the players by asking them to describe themselves in the best way they can. For instance, a kid can say words like “I love dogs” or “I love playing soccer.” Then ask the children to express their likes and dislikes through drawings. Be sure to prepare paper and coloring pencils for the kids.

To further challenge participants, divide the kids into pairs. After, ask pairs to exchange their drawings. The kids will then try to figure out what their partner likes. Based on the sketch, the kids can ask their partners questions like “do you love dogs?” “is that a ball?” and “does that mean you love soccer or own a red ball?”

This game can be a little challenging for younger kids and preschoolers. However, older children will find this game helpful in building their communication and observation skills.

5. Guess the Emotion

If you aim to build empathy in kids, then you can play guess the emotion. You will need printed emotion cards and a band to play this game.

You can follow these steps to play:

  • Assign numbers to participants in order of how the kids will play
  • Prepare the emotion cards
  • Turn the card downs so the kids will not see the emotions on any card
  • The first player will pick a card without looking at the picture
  • Assist the player in attaching the card to their forehead with a band
  • The idea is for other kids, except the player who picked the card, to see the emotion
  • The player will ask the kids questions that describe the sentiment on the card
  • After, the player can attempt to guess the emotion

Be sure to instruct the player to refrain from asking questions with specific words like angry, happy, or sad. Instead, the player can ask leading questions like:

  • Will I feel this way if I lose my favorite toy?
  • Will I feel this way if I win a soccer match?
  • Will I feel this way if I get injured?

Then the children will answer “yes” or “no.” The players who guess their emotions correctly in a round win a point. When the game ends, sum up the points and announce the player with the highest score as the winner. As young leaders, this game helps kids understand different situations that can make their friends feel a particular way. In addition, the game helps children communicate their feelings better and build their emotional intelligence.

Here are ways to express empathy at work .

6. 60 Seconds Story

60 seconds story is one of the most exciting free online leadership games. You can play this game on a video conferencing platform or message group with voice note features. First, look for topics your team members can relate to easily. Then let participants take turns recounting a personal experience related to the topic.

Each participant must recount their story or experience within 60 seconds. The story must be clear enough for everyone in the group to understand. You can award points to players who can tell a complete story before time runs out in each round. The player with the most points wins. This game challenges participants to test their communication skills. The game also develops storytelling skills, which is essential for leaders to inspire followers.

7. How Are We Different

How are we different is an exciting game to develop leadership abilities in children. As the name implies, the game requires kids to identify their differences. For instance, the kids can point out differences in hair color, clothing accessories, or height. Being able to recognize individual differences and uniqueness is crucial for leaders.

To play this game, split the kids into teams. Then let the kids communicate and try to figure out simple differences. This exercise is also one of the best free leadership games you can play online. You should send the teams into breakout rooms to enhance their communication. Aside from body features, participants can also figure out differences in work and personal lives. In the end, announce the team that figures out the most differences as the winner.

8. Blindfold Game

The blindfold game is one of the most fun leadership games for adults. The game’s objective is for a blindfolded player to navigate through obstacles in a field successfully.

  • Find a free space, whether indoors or outdoors
  • Place items like sticks, folded paper, and chairs to represent the obstacles
  • Divide the group into teams
  • Ask each team to present a volunteer who will wear the blindfold and move through the obstacles
  • The non-blindfolded teammates will act as the volunteer’s eyes and give instructions on free paths to walk through to avoid obstacles
  • The goal is for the volunteer to reach the finish line without stepping on any obstacles

Also, note how long the volunteers from each team took to reach the finish line. The team whose volunteer took the least time wins. This challenge improves communication, teamwork, and trust, all essential in leadership.

9. Capture the Flag

Capture the flag is a fun sport where two teams compete against one another for a flag.

To play capture the flag:

  • Divide players into teams of equal numbers
  • Find an ample space, preferably or field or arena
  • Divide the space into two equal sections to mark the territories of each team
  • Give each team a flag to keep in their respective territories
  • Then a team will try to take possession of their opponent’s flag
  • A team that successfully brings the opponent’s flag to their own territory while also protecting their flag wins

You should set the rules of the game before playing. For instance, players can “tag” an opponent who steps on their territory. The tagged player can join the opponent team, freeze, or leave the game depending on your game rules. Capture the flag builds critical thinking skills, which is essential while leading. Players can test their leadership skills by building a defense and attack strategy. The best part is that you can play this game indoors or outdoors. For a more fun experience, you can organize the game in a paintball arena.

10. Cross the Bridge

Cross the bridge is one of the most exciting leadership games for employees. The game requires forming a scenario where players are crossing a bridge filled with crocodiles or even lava. Participants can cross the imaginary bridge by stepping on items placed on the floor. Whether you put pieces of wood or stones on the ground, be sure that participants can conveniently stand on the items.

First, divide the group into teams. Then have players in a team stand in a straight line. The first player on the line will act as the leader whose steps the other teammates will follow. The team will start over if a teammate falls into the river. Furthermore, the first team to cross the bridge without falling wins the game. This game stresses the responsibility of leaders in leading a group and the need to think critically.

11. Tug of War

Tug of war is one of the most fun leadership games for work. The game teaches participants essential leadership skills like coordination, alignment, and endurance.

  • Divide the group into two teams with an equal number of players
  • Each team will stand in a straight line, facing their opponents
  • Mark a line between the two teams to define their territory
  • All participants will hold one long rope
  • Once the game starts, both teams will pull on the rope to their respective territory’s directions
  • The team who pulls the opponent into the former’s territory wins the game

Tug of war is a fun game that also depicts leadership realities. Leaders engage in tugs of war with competitors and various challenges in their leadership journey. In this game, the team that aligns their effort by pulling at the same time and angle will likely win. Therefore, the game shows that with coordination and alignment from the entire team, a leader can guide the group to success.

12. Balloon Chain

Balloon chain is one of the most exciting leadership games for high school students. In the game, players will form a chain connected by balloons. Then the team must drop all the balloons inside a basket without breaking the chain.

You can follow these steps to play balloon chain:

  • Split the group into two or more teams
  • Ask teammates to stand in a straight line, with a little space between each player
  • Place a balloon between each teammate
  • A team will have to move around with the balloons firmly placed between teammates’ chests and back
  • Players cannot touch the balloons with their until the team is ready to place balloons inside a basket
  • The first player on the line with hold the basket
  • Then the teams must walk to the finish line without breaking the chain and having the balloon fall out of place
  • If the balloon falls, then the team must return to the starting line to begin all over again
  • Once the team reaches the finish line, the leader must figure out how to drop the basket without breaking the form
  • Starting from the last teammate on the line, players will take turns passing their balloons to the leader without disrupting the chain
  • The leader will then throw the balloons inside the basket

The first team to drop all the balloons inside the basket wins. This game stresses how teamwork, communication, and strategic thinking are vital to lead a group. Balloon chain works best for large groups with around five or more players in each team.

13. Guess the Drawing

Guess the drawing is a game that can inspire leaders to build their observation skills. To play this game, divide the group into teams of two players. Also, prepare words or samples of sketches. The two players on a team should stand in a line while facing the same direction.

Next, the last player on the line will use their finger to write a word or draw invisible sketches on the back of the second teammate. On the other hand, the second teammate will try to replicate the invisible sketch on a piece of paper. The teammate who writes out a word or sketch wins a point for the team.

14. Charades

Charades is a popular game to play during an informal gathering with colleagues. While many folks play charades for fun, you can use this game to build your group leadership skills. Rather than having players gesture prompts from popular ideas like movies, songs, or celebrities, give participants scenarios of different situations and challenges in your office. Then each group will take turns acting out and guessing the situations. This game teaches your team how to recognize and handle difficult situations as leaders quickly.

To play this game:

  • Ask each team to present a volunteer who will act as the actor
  • Before the game starts, come up with a list of challenges often experienced at work, such as employee burnout, low engagement, and difficult clients
  • The host should privately assign a challenge or situation to the actor
  • Then, the actor tries to gesture the situation
  • To win a point, the actor’s team must guess the situation correctly before the set time runs out
  • The team can further provide solutions on how to manage the situation
  • The other teams will also take turns gesturing and guessing assigned situations
  • In the end, the team with the most points wins

Charades is among the best workplace leadership games. The best part is that you can play charades in person and online. Also, the game can improve employees’ communication and observation skills.

15. Leadership Race

A leadership race is among the best games to play with leaders in an organization. This game lets leaders reflect on their leadership abilities and become aware of weak points to address.

To do a leadership race, first, compile a list of leadership-related prompts, such as

  • I can motivate my team while working under pressure
  • I am a good storyteller
  • I know how to persuade my group to make a critical decision
  • I get compliments regularly about my communication skills

After, assign a designated caller to read out each prompt. Participants will take a step forward for every relatable prompt. The first player to reach the finish line wins the game.

16. Blindfold Animal Game

Blindfold animal game is one of the best leadership games for kids. The host will assign an animal type to each participant. Once the exercise starts, participants will make sounds imitating their assigned animals. The goal is for participants to find other kids with similar animal types.

You can cover each participant’s eyes with a blindfold to make the game challenging for older kids. Also, set a time limit for participants to find kids with the same animal type. This game helps kids develop active listening skills, which are essential for becoming a good leader. In addition, the game works best for medium to large-sized groups.

17. Water in the Bucket

Water in the bucket is a fun leadership game you and your team will enjoy playing. To play this activity, divide participants into teams. Then set up chairs in straight lines, depending on the number of players on each team. Also, prepare empty buckets for participants. Each team gets to decide on the first teammate to start the game.

Next, let participants sit down on the chairs and hand over a bucket to each player. Then blindfold all participants and fill the bucket of the first players on each team with water. The game’s objective is for the first player to pour the water inside the second player’s bucket without standing up. Next, the second player will repeat the same step to the third player. The water pouring continues until the last player’s bucket becomes filled with water. Chances are that players will spill all the water even before reaching the last player.

In the end, compare the quantity of water each team’s last player has in their buckets. This game reveals a leader’s responsibility to lead a team and must therefore be critical in any decision-making. In the game, the amount of water each player carefully and successfully pours into their teammates’ buckets determines whether or not the team will win.

18. Spot The Difference

Spot the difference is one of the best games to build leadership skills, particularly observation traits, in kids. To play the activity, show participants two versions of the same pictures. The pictures can be of different ideas, ranging from a living room to a busy road.

However, one version of these pictures should have subtle differences. For instance, printed words on both pictures can be different. Also, the pictures may have a similar object with different colors in both versions. The participants have to spot these subtle differences in the pictures. You can let participants know the number of differences to find. The first player who finds all differences wins the game. This leadership game helps kids concentrate better and develop their observation skills.

Playing leadership games is a great way to identify participants capable of leading a team. The games let players channel their unique leadership abilities, such as effective communication, strategic planning, and good observation. Also, you can use these games to train team members or leaders to become better in the leadership field. There are many leadership games to play, with each exercise focusing on different skills. Therefore, if you want to pick a leadership game, then consider the leadership qualities you would love to build. The best part of playing these games is building your team while developing leadership skills.

Next, check out the roles of team building leaders and valuable signs of leadership . You can also check these signs of bad leaders .

FAQ: Leadership games

Here are answers to questions about leadership games.

What are leadership games?

Leadership games are exercises and challenges that can help leaders develop essential skills like good communication, motivation, and time management. These games are fun to play and help leaders become more effective while carrying out their responsibilities.

What are good games to play with groups of leaders?

Good games to play with a group of leaders include escape rooms, leadership race, capture the flag, charades, tug of war, balloon chain, and tallest tower challenge.

How can games help leaders build skills?

Games help leaders build skills by identifying the areas that the leader needs to improve. A leader will most likely not have every single leadership trait. But by playing games, leaders can identify and improve their weak traits. Also, the games let leaders practice their best skills and perform more effectively in real-life situations.

Author avatar

Author: Grace He

People & Culture Director at teambuilding.com. Grace is the Director of People & Culture at TeamBuilding. She studied Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, Information Science at East China Normal University and earned an MBA at Washington State University.

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Best Strategic Planning Activities for Your Organization

Strategic planning is the process of developing a long-term vision for an organization and creating a plan to achieve that vision.

It involves analyzing the organization’s current situation, including its internal and external environment, identifying its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and setting goals and objectives that will help it achieve its vision. Strategic planning is important because it helps organizations adapt to change, stay competitive, and achieve long-term success.

In order to make effective strategic planning, it is important to break it down into different stages of activities that are well structured and then build an iterative process.

Basic Activities of Strategic Planning

First of all, the strategic planning process typically involves four basic activities:

Strategic analysis

This involves analyzing the organization’s current situation, including its internal and external environment. This might involve conducting a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, gathering market research, and reviewing financial data. The goal of this activity is to understand the organization’s current position and identify any potential challenges or opportunities that may impact its ability to achieve its vision.

Setting strategic direction

This involves using the information gathered during the strategic analysis to set goals and objectives that will help the organization achieve its vision. It might also involve identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure progress towards those goals. The goal of this activity is to create a clear roadmap for the organization to follow as it works towards its vision.

Action planning

This involves developing a plan to achieve the goals and objectives that were set during the strategic direction-setting activity. This might involve creating a roadmap with specific action steps, assigning tasks and responsibilities, and setting timelines. The goal of this activity is to create a concrete plan of action that will help the organization achieve its goals.

Strategy evaluation

This involves regularly reviewing and evaluating the progress of the organization towards its goals and making adjustments as needed. This might involve collecting and analyzing data, conducting stakeholder interviews, and reviewing feedback. The goal of this activity is to ensure that the organization is on track to achieve its goals and to make any necessary adjustments to the plan as needed.

Strategy evaluation

Fun Strategic Planning Activities

As we can see, strategic planning can be a complex and challenging process, so it is important to keep it engaging and enjoyable for all participants. Some fun activities that can be incorporated into a strategic planning process include:

  • Creative brainstorming sessions: These can involve using techniques like free writing, mind mapping, or problem-solving games to generate ideas and think creatively about the organization’s future.
  • Team building exercises: Activities like trust falls, problem-solving puzzles, or team sports can help build trust and improve communication within the team. These activities can be customized to fit the needs and goals of the organization.
  • Vision boarding workshops: These activities involve creating a visual representation of the organization’s vision and goals. Participants can use images, quotes, and other creative elements to create a visual representation of what they want the organization to become. This can be a fun and interactive way to involve all team members in the strategic planning process.
  • Gamification: Using games or other interactive activities to make strategic planning more fun can help engage and motivate participants. Gamification can involve creating a game or quiz to teach participants about the strategic planning process, or using games as a way to brainstorm and generate ideas.

Fun Strategic Planning Activities

Virtual Strategic Planning Activities

With the current COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have moved to virtual strategic planning activities, and here is some guidance on how to conduct effective online visual strategic planning:

  • Virtual brainstorming sessions: We can use a variety of online collaboration tools to organize an efficient brainstorming workshop, like Google Docs or the VUCAC Whiteboard. These tools allow team members to collaborate in real time and share ideas, even if they are not physically in the same location.
  • Virtual team building exercises: There are many online resources available that offer virtual team building activities, such as virtual escape rooms or virtual trivia games. These activities can be conducted using video conferencing tools like Zoom or Google Meet and can help build trust and improve communication within the team.
  • Virtual vision boarding: We highly recommend you build vision boards with a digital whiteboard. For example, the VUCAC Whiteboard allows team members to create and share digital vision boards in real-time based on pre-built professional templates. You can turn this session into a fun and interactive experience to involve everyone in the whole strategic planning process.
  • Virtual gamification: There are many online tools and platforms that can be used to gamify the strategic planning process, such as Kahoot. These tools can help engage and motivate team members and can be customized to fit the needs and goals of the organization.

VUCAC Template

Virtual strategic planning activities have several advantages, including the ability to involve team members from different locations, the convenience of not having to physically meet, and the ability to save time and resources.

However, it is important to ensure that virtual activities are designed and facilitated effectively in order to maximize participation and engagement. This might involve providing clear instructions and guidelines, setting clear expectations for participation, and using tools and platforms that are easy to use and accessible to all team members.

Strategic Planning Activities Examples

Here are a few examples of strategic planning activities that organizations might consider incorporating into their process:

  • Customer segmentation: This activity involves dividing the organization’s customers into different groups based on their needs, preferences, or other characteristics. This can help the organization tailor its products or services to better meet the needs of each customer segment.
  • Competitive analysis: This activity involves analyzing the organization’s competitors and understanding their strengths and weaknesses. This can help the organization identify areas where it can differentiate itself from its competitors and develop a competitive advantage.
  • Market analysis: This activity involves analyzing the organization’s target market and understanding the needs and preferences of its customers. This can help the organization develop marketing strategies that will be effective in reaching and engaging its target market.
  • Resource allocation: This activity involves determining how the organization’s resources (such as money, time, and personnel) will be used to achieve its goals and objectives. This might involve creating a budget, allocating staff to specific tasks, or identifying outside resources that will be needed to achieve the organization’s goals.

Strategic planning is an important process that helps organizations develop a long-term vision and create a plan to achieve it. It involves analyzing the organization’s current situation, setting goals and objectives, developing an action plan, and evaluating progress.

There are many different activities that can be incorporated into the strategic planning process, including basic activities like strategic analysis and setting strategic direction, fun activities like brainstorming sessions and team building exercises, virtual activities like virtual brainstorming sessions and virtual vision boarding, and specific activities like customer segmentation and competitive analysis.

It is important for organizations to choose the strategic planning activities that best fit their needs and goals in order to ensure a successful strategic planning process.

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Become A Strategic Thinker with Creative Thinking Games

  • Author: Belinda McLeod
  • Professional Development
  • Leadership ,
  • Management ,
  • Strategic Thinking

You probably wear many hats as a leader in your organization. In fact, we’re sure it’s easy to get bogged down by all the different roles you play. Additionally, you may feel overwhelmed by the minutiae and repetitive tasks associated with your job.

If this describes your situation, we encourage you to hit the pause button for a moment. Consider how you spend your time each day and determine if those actions help you hit your high-level goals for the company.

For example, you may be approving your employee’s expense reports in record time. But are you doing anything to encourage innovation, experimentation and free-thinking in the workplace ?

You may be logging into your Zoom calls, answering your hundreds of emails and completing the required tasks to ensure that your business is functioning as it should. However, what are you doing to ensure that you will be ready to face tomorrow’s business decisions?

If you feel that you are spending too much time on emails and other low-level tasks. We would like to help. Schedule some time each week to learn how to be more of a strategic thinker.

Let’s learn what it means to be a strategic thinker. We will also give you some ideas for strategic thinking exercises to help you approach work with a real strategy in mind. Finally, we will provide you with some resources to share with your fellow leaders and employees to encourage creativity and strategic thinking at all levels of your company.

SAVE $10 AND TRAIN ON THIS TOPIC TODAY

What is a strategic thinker.

As the name implies, strategic thinking involves creating a strategy to solve a problem. If you are a strategic thinker, you see the big picture, plan ahead and put your thoughts into action. When done well, the result of strategic thinking is to gain a competitive advantage in your business. And additionally, you may learn how to streamline your tasks so that you can spend more time with those you love.

Perhaps you’ve been told you need to become a more strategic manager . Maybe you’ve heard that strategic thinking will help your career. But can someone really learn to be more “strategic”?

The good news is that, like any skill, strategic leadership can be learned and honed through training and – most importantly – practice.

How to Become a Strategic Thinker

Before you learn how to become a strategic thinker in the workplace, you may need to review your organization’s mission, goals, objectives and structure. In addition, you might need to look at the measurement tools used to show that your goals and objectives have been met.

While reviewing this crucial data and “big picture” items doesn’t ensure that you will automatically be a strategic thinker, it’s the first step of the process.

Once you have reviewed your organization’s high-level goals, you are ready to complete some exercises that encourage creativity and innovation. These exercises may help you look at your work from a unique perspective so that you can evaluate your company’s current strategies.

Exercises to Become a Strategic Thinker

We all have different learning styles. If it has been a while since you have explored this concept, consider taking a learning style quiz to see how you best learn. This may help you choose a strategic thinking exercise that will work best for you (whether you are an auditory or kinesthetic learner.)

Lorenzo Del Marmol of the Creative Corporate Culture blog shares these exercises you can try any time you face an issue or decision on the job. At first, you’ll need to make a deliberate effort to think through the exercise’s suggestions. Over time, however, the strategies will become easier and your favorite forms of creative association will flow into your decision-making processes naturally:

  • Use all of your senses –Pause to take the time to soak in your environment. Touch, feel and even smell any objects that grab your notice. Then let your mind wander to your problem and see if these new sensations or observations generate new ideas.
  • Create an analogy – Describe your problem in terms of a story, a symbol, a natural phenomenon, etc. “That client is like a tornado – he gets us going around and around and causes nothing but destruction.”
  • Create a mind map – Whether you use software such as ConceptDraw or a whiteboard, a mind map can help you brainstorm quickly without worrying about structure.
  • 500 Words – Write about your problem until you reach 500 words without editing or censoring yourself. Sometimes getting words out of your head and onto paper creates more room for more valuable words to appear.
  • Think like someone else – Roleplay and ask yourself what you would do if you were Gandhi? Or Bill Gates? Or Queen Elizabeth? Or your client. And so on…
  • Be contrary – Think about what most people usually do in your situation. Then imagine (or even execute) a scenario where you do exactly the opposite. [1]

A strategic worldview cannot be left at the office. Being a strategic thinker means you are constantly interpreting your environment creatively. To help develop that imaginative outlook, here is a list of games and online resources to rev up your brain and get those strategic thoughts flowing. You might also have a little fun with these exercises!

  • Lumosity – Lumosity currently leads the market in “professional” brain training education. You’ll have to shell out money for a subscription, but you get a customized brain training experience. A similar site, Fit brains , is created by the Rosetta Stone company and offers a free (for creating an account) brain training option.
  • Archimedes’ Laboratory – This site is packed with “Mental & Perceptual Activities that Enhance Critical and Creative Thinking Skills.”
  • Top 10 Mind-Bending Strategy Games – Are you the type who is always looking for an excuse to justify that time you spend on your Xbox? This article catalogs ten strategy-oriented games that could increase your creativity and strategic thinking skills.
  • Brainzooming – Brainzooming offers many online exercises and “questions” that demonstrate the company’s coaching methodology. The blog-style posts include scenarios and questions in a cluttered but information-packed presentation.
  • CreativityGames.net – This site posts a new brain challenge on Monday of each week. Start your week strong by waking up your brain with a creative challenge.

Group Games

  • Carpenter Strategy Toolbox – This site is an open-source wealth of exercises and video tutorials for teaching strategic management with a class or a group.
  • Team Building Kits – Team Building Kits is an immersive mystery game designed to combine fun and bonding with teamwork productivity.
  • Corporate Castaways – Corporate Castaways is an outdoor team-building activity. Groups will be asked to tackle physical and mental challenges and compete in a competition inspired by the “Survivor.” This team-building exercise will be one that your employees will talk about for years.

It may be that developing your strategic thinking skill is more fun than any other skill you’ll work on!

How Pryor Learning Can Help You Become a Strategic Thinker

While we have certainly given you actionable strategies to become a more strategic thinker in the workplace, the next step in the process is a doozy. How do you apply what you have learned in these strategic thinking exercises to create a more purpose-driven workplace?

Thankfully, Pryor Learning has been helping business leaders become more creative and strategic for decades. Here are three ways that Pryor Learning can help.

Begin the learning process by enrolling in Strategic Goal Setting . In this course, you’ll learn how to successfully set, plan and accomplish your goals. From setting individual goals to working within the framework of a team environment, we’ll help you get past both internal roadblocks and external issues that may have hindered you in the past.

Once you have established your goals, learn more about team leadership in Creative Leadership . One of the goals of this class is that you will learn how to encourage strategic thinking from your employees. While at the same time, you’ll learn to be more creative in solving problems and building morale.

Finally, we encourage you to enroll in Strategic Problem Solving for Better Decision Making . There, you will learn

  • The difference between making a decision and developing a strategy
  • Five benefits of strategic problem solving
  • Six habits of strategic thinkers
  • How to strategically think about tomorrow’s business decisions
  • A 7-step approach to strategic problem solving

Since 1970, Pryor Learning has helped more than 13 million people and 3 million businesses reach their career goals by offering comprehensive, affordable and convenient business, compliance and safety training. Pryor Learning provides training for individuals as well as teams in 20 different categories, including strategic thinking strategies.

Learn more about how Pryor can help you develop critical thinking strategies by visiting Pryor’s website.

[1] http://www.creativecorporateculture.com/creativity-exercises-improve-lateral-thinking/

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80 Funny Strategic Planning Activities and Ideas!

Book , Packages , Scheme , Tools , Creativity , Performance , Fun Strategic Planning , Strategic Planning , Strategic Thinking , Collaboration

Do you dread strategy meet, especially the ones lacking any fun tactical planning activities ?

Very, we’re amidst my, so you can can whole truthful int your answer: Do them REALLY, REALLY ANXIETY strategy meetings?

Of course, you dread your. Anyone executive dreadlock strategic planning. I know I do.

The reason is while it your important for organizations, participants hardly ever see the connection amid participation and positive modifications available branding and customers.

fun strategic planning activities , inspiration, and food

For a strategic planning process may promise to deliver real objectives and tactics, it often never happens as pledged. Senior executives can say people want disruptive ideas, although they really want ideas that are easy to grasp the fit the current system. And who wants to waste precious time on attempted go imagine and blueprint things an arrangement should trace but final never will? 4 Strategic Planning Practice That You Should Do Annually | Entrepreneur

The is why cover strategy meetings in generate thinking exercises and the appropriate lot is fun and diversion is optimum.

80+ Fun Strategic Planning Activities press Ideas!

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We’ve since facilitating fun strategic planning activities for years, so it's good to delimit how we think nearly it. 

Fun strategic planning is an experience that :

  • Is strongly collaborative among engaged groups
  • Is spiritual stimulating for everyone any participates
  • Fosters populace who are eager to become in future strategic planning initiatives
  • Leads to promotion and results 

While that definition may sound impossible, it's absolutely ampere reality when i approach strategic planning in a fresh way.  Throughout unsere client engagements , here are links on 80+ activities additionally ideas for take strategy more fun!

10 Junctures Begging for Fun Strategic Planning

11 boring details for making strategy konzeptuelle fun, 4 things to always have ready used fun strategic planning activities, 11 things about toy during strategy planning meetings, 3 stuffed toys is are ideal for strategies activities, 4 times to elude toys, 6 last-minute creative ideas for fun strategy exercises, 9 ways to keep business meetings fresh, 12 notions available seasonings up scheme meets in the boardroom via aforementioned bedroom, 11 ideas for entertainment strategic planning recent, 8 icebreaker activities, 5 fun strategic planning activities, 3 short, funny strategy questions, 7 types of strategy planning fun, 11 fun strategic planning browse that are no stuffy for works, 7 ways groups can collaborate on fun strategic planning, new way to proficient convert fun strategic planning activities up virtual and hybrid conferences.

Same though fun strategy meetings seem elusive, we routinely produce them productive, enjoyable, and enjoyment in the organizations, elderly senior, and teams in which we work. Enjoy this go into our most successful basic.

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Date published: 03/31/22

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Future-Proof Your Mindset: 20 Strategic Thinking Exercises

20 Essential Strategic Thinking Exercises for Maximum Impact

Last Updated on September 14, 2023 by Milton Campbell

Strategic thinking is a crucial skill for business leaders, managers, and employees in today’s fast-paced, competitive world. It involves generating long-term goals, anticipating trends, and making informed decisions to gain a competitive advantage. In this article, we will explore various strategic thinking exercises that can help you and your team think more strategically, strengthen your strategic thinking skills, and become a strategic thinker.

The Importance of Strategic Thinking Exercises

Strategic thinking is essential for leadership, creativity, and achieving an organization’s goals and objectives. It allows business leaders to analyze their company’s position, envision new ideas, and develop a strategic plan to execute those ideas. By encouraging strategic thinking, managers can foster an environment where employees are continually seeking new ways to improve the organization and achieve positive outcomes.

strategic thinking exercises.Chess board with a black and white knight facing each other.

Exercises to Enhance Strategic Thinking Skills

In this article section, we will explore 20 exercises specifically designed to enhance your strategic thinking skills. Strategic thinking techniques are essential for leaders to navigate complex challenges, make informed decisions, and drive organizational success.

These exercises will help you sharpen your strategic thinking abilities, expand your perspectives, and unleash your creativity. By engaging in these exercises, you will cultivate a strategic mindset and develop the skills necessary to tackle the ever-evolving business landscape. Get ready to strengthen your strategic thinking muscles as we dive into these 20 exercises!

1. Scenario Planning

Scenario planning is an exercise that encourages participants to envision various future scenarios for their organization. By brainstorming potential situations, team members can anticipate potential challenges, develop new ideas, and create actionable plans to tackle those challenges. This exercise helps to improve strategic thinking skills by allowing participants to analyze trends, evaluate the possible outcomes, and customize their approach based on the insights gained.

2. Brainzooming

Brainzooming is a team-building exercise that promotes strategic thinking by challenging participants to generate new ideas and solve problems creatively. In this exercise, team members are encouraged to think outside the box and explore new perspectives. By combining creativity with strategic thinking, participants can develop innovative solutions that deliver a competitive advantage.

3. SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool that helps individuals and organizations identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This exercise allows participants to evaluate their current situation, anticipate future trends, and develop strategies to address potential challenges. By understanding their organization’s position, participants can make informed decisions and execute plans that align with their goals.

4. Objective Setting

Setting clear objectives is a critical step in strategic thinking. This exercise involves establishing specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your organization. By focusing on your goals and objectives, you can ensure that your strategic thinking efforts are aligned with your organization’s priorities and desired outcomes.

5. Competitive Analysis

Understanding your competitors is essential to strategic thinking. In this exercise, participants are encouraged to analyze their competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. By evaluating the competitive landscape, team members can develop strategies to differentiate themselves from their competitors and gain a competitive advantage.

6. Trend Analysis

Trend analysis is an exercise that focuses on identifying emerging trends and understanding their potential impact on your organization. By staying informed about industry trends, participants can anticipate changes, adapt their strategies, and capitalize on new opportunities.

7. Communication Skills Development

Effective communication is vital for strategic thinking. In this exercise, participants are encouraged to practice their communication skills by presenting their ideas, engaging in discussions, and collaborating with others. By improving their communication skills, team members can better articulate their strategic vision and gain buy-in from others.

8. Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a visual tool that helps individuals and teams organize their thoughts, ideas, and information. By creating a visual representation of your ideas, you can better understand the relationships between different concepts and identify new connections. This tool can be particularly useful for brainstorming, problem-solving, and strategic planning sessions.

9. PESTLE Analysis

PESTLE analysis is a strategic tool that examines the external factors affecting an organization. It stands for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental factors. By assessing these factors, you can identify potential opportunities and threats in the external environment and develop strategies to address them. This analysis helps to broaden your perspective and consider various external influences on your organization.

10. Gap Analysis

Gap analysis is a tool that helps you identify the difference between your organization’s current state and its desired future state. By understanding the gaps in performance, resources, or capabilities, you can develop targeted strategies to bridge those gaps and achieve your goals. This tool can be useful for strategic planning, resource allocation, and performance improvement initiatives.

11. Game Theory

Game theory is a strategic tool that examines decision-making and interactions between different players in a competitive environment. By using game theory, you can understand the potential outcomes of various strategic decisions and develop optimal strategies based on the behavior of other players. This tool can be particularly helpful for understanding competitive dynamics and developing strategies to outperform your competitors.

strategic planning activities games

12. Balanced Scorecard

The balanced scorecard is a strategic management tool that helps organizations track their performance across multiple dimensions, including financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth perspectives. By monitoring performance across these dimensions, you can ensure that your strategic initiatives are balanced and aligned with your organization’s overall objectives. This tool can be useful for performance measurement, strategic planning, and decision-making.

13. Porter’s Five Forces

Porter’s Five Forces is a strategic analysis tool that helps organizations understand the competitive forces within their industry. The five forces include the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, the threat of substitute products or services, and the intensity of competitive rivalry. By analyzing these forces, you can develop strategies to enhance your competitive position and achieve long-term success.

14. Reverse Brainstorming

Reverse brainstorming is a creative problem-solving exercise that involves identifying potential problems instead of solutions. By focusing on potential issues, participants can gain a deeper understanding of the challenges they face and develop strategies to prevent or mitigate them. This exercise encourages strategic thinking by requiring participants to anticipate potential obstacles and develop proactive solutions.

15. The Six Thinking Hats

The Six Thinking Hats exercise, developed by Edward de Bono, is a technique that encourages participants to approach problems and decisions from different perspectives. The six hats represent different modes of thinking: white (facts and information), red (emotions and feelings), black (critical judgment), yellow (positive aspects), green (creativity and new ideas), and blue (process and organization). By switching between these different modes of thinking, participants can develop a more comprehensive understanding of the situation and develop well-rounded strategies.

16. Role Playing

Role-playing exercises require participants to assume different roles within a hypothetical scenario. By stepping into the shoes of others, participants can gain a better understanding of different perspectives, anticipate potential reactions, and develop strategies that consider the needs and motivations of various stakeholders. This exercise enhances strategic thinking skills by encouraging empathy and a broader understanding of the situation.

17. The Five Whys

The Five Whys exercise is a technique used to identify the root cause of a problem by asking “why” five times. By continually asking why a problem exists, participants can uncover the underlying issues and develop targeted strategies to address them. This exercise encourages strategic thinking by requiring participants to analyze problems deeply and develop long-term solutions.

18. Pre-Mortem Analysis

A pre-mortem analysis is an exercise that involves imagining that a project or initiative has failed and then identifying the reasons for the failure. By anticipating potential pitfalls and challenges, participants can develop strategies to prevent or mitigate those issues before they occur. This exercise promotes strategic thinking by encouraging participants to think critically about potential risks and develop proactive solutions.

19. Blue Ocean Strategy

The Blue Ocean Strategy exercise encourages participants to identify untapped market spaces and create new demand by developing innovative products or services. By focusing on differentiation and low cost, participants can create a competitive advantage and achieve long-term success. This exercise enhances strategic thinking skills by encouraging innovation and the exploration of new opportunities.

20. The Four Quadrant Matrix

The Four Quadrant Matrix is a strategic decision-making tool that helps participants prioritize tasks or initiatives based on their importance and urgency. By categorizing tasks into four quadrants (urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important), participants can allocate their resources and time more effectively. This exercise encourages strategic thinking by requiring participants to evaluate priorities and make informed decisions.

Encouraging Strategic Thinking in Your Organization

To encourage strategic thinking within your organization, consider implementing workshops, team-building exercises, and brain training activities that focus on strategic thinking skills. Providing employees with the tools and resources to think strategically can lead to increased innovation, improved decision-making, and a more successful organization.

In conclusion, strategic thinking exercises are essential for developing the skills necessary to become a strategic thinker. By practicing these exercises regularly, individuals and teams can improve their ability to anticipate trends, evaluate potential challenges, and develop innovative solutions to achieve their goals. Take the time to invest in your strategic thinking skills and watch your organization thrive in today’s competitive landscape.

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Future-Proof Your Mindset: 20 Strategic Thinking Exercises

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Fun Strategic Planning Is Possible !

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7 essential tasks for a strategic planning facilitator.

Businessman beside productivity concepts drawn on a board

As the strategy leader, you have seven activities to which I recommend you pay close attention to build a strong strategy that has full buy-in and commitment.

Gain your team’s commitment and buy-in to the process

If your leadership team members are like most with whom I have worked, they are stretched for resources and have more on their plate than they can likely accomplish with the time they have. Therefore, for many of them, the prospect of taking valuable time and resources to develop a plan that will come up with more to add to their already over-loaded plates is NOT a welcomed idea.

So how do you gain their commitment to planning and their buy-in to a planning process such as The Drivers Model? With a management briefing, you will have your team identify the most critical issues facing the organization; then they will make adjustments to the planning process as needed to ensure that the process addresses those issues. The management briefing increases commitment to planning by providing your team with a road map that shows how what is important to them will be covered during the strategic planning sessions.

Ensure All Voices Are Heard

The fundamental secret of facilitation indicates that you can increase buy-in and commitment by having those impacted by the plan involved in the creation of it. However, everyone in your organization will be impacted by the strategic plan. Does that mean everyone should be at the table creating the plan?

No, of course not. Nor is it necessary. Involvement does not necessitate being at the table. There are several ways to provide people the opportunity for involvement in the plan as described in the table that follows.

  • For some, just giving them a chance for input through a survey or a suggestion box will be adequate.
  • For others, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, or other methods for gaining in-depth input may be more appropriate.
  • And for others, their responsibilities, influence, expertise, or perspectives are so important that it will make sense to have them seated around the table.

One of your important roles is to determine who should be at the table and to put in place other avenues to ensure all voices are given the opportunity to be heard. Providing the opportunity for input is essential to a facilitative approach and to gaining the level of buy-in needed for successful implementation across the organization.

Ensure key information is brought into the room

You may have been in the room when a team has made a decision based on the best information available, only to discover that if they had been aware of other information that had not been brought into the room, they would have likely made a different decision. Sound familiar? Well, part of your role is to ensure that this doesn’t happen with your planning activity.

My company’s work in the area of consensus building has shown that one of the primary reasons people disagree is due to a lack of shared information. Many disagreements can be resolved, and even prevented, by making sure all parties have the same information.

With the Drivers Model, the briefing book serves the purpose of ensuring all your team members start with a common set of information

Get your ideas on the table without overpowering the group

As indicated earlier, it is important that all voices be heard, and that includes yours. Unfortunately, if you are like most leaders, your voice comes with considerable baggage. When the boss speaks, people listen. And they listen differently from when other people speak.

Sure, there will likely be some people in the room who treat your voice like every other voice in the room. Whether the idea comes from you or a first-year manager, these people will state their agreement or disagreement with the idea in the exact same way, regardless of the source. Unfortunately, this probably isn’t the case for most of the people at the table. When you speak, most may be quick to respond when they agree, and very, very slow to respond when they disagree – so slow, in fact, that sometimes they may never get around to it!

As a result of the lack of challenge, many leaders experience within their own walls, the views of the leader can easily overpower the group. And even when someone dares to challenge with a question, some leaders, often without knowing it, respond with statements that belittle the questioner or not-so-subtly communicate that challenging the boss is not welcome.

Ensure that the plan components meet the quality checks

With the Drivers Model, each component is dependent upon the components that came before it. So, for example, if you do a poor job of defining your mission and vision, your goals and objectives will reflect this. Likewise, if your goals and objectives are misaligned, your critical success factors and barriers will also be off. If your critical success factors and barriers are inadequate, your strategies and action plans will be inadequate as well. Therefore it is essential that you do a quality job every step of the way through the planning process.

The Drivers Model is designed to help you do this. From vision and mission to strategies and action plans, the Drivers Model provides a specific quality check for each component of the strategic plan. These quality checks help ensure that your plan is comprehensive, robust, inspiring, and implementable. As the leader, it is your role to ensure that each component of the plan passes its quality check. Below I have summarized one or two key elements from the quality checklist for each of the components of the plan.

Follow through and hold people accountable

If you have been involved in strategic planning processes, you know that far too often it is a game in which considerable energy is placed in developing a plan that is then put on the executive’s shelf, only to be looked at when it is time to do strategic planning once again.

The Drivers Model strives to end this game. Assemble a detailed process for aligning the organization and ensuring monthly check-ins, quarterly reviews, and an annual update to the strategic plan. This structured monitoring process is intended to help ensure that the plan moves from paper to implementation.

Decide if an outside facilitator would be helpful

With an activity as critical as strategic planning, it is essential that the effort be facilitated by someone who is skilled in facilitation but also has considerable experience guiding a team through strategy. Some organizations have internal resources with both facilitation and strategy expertise. However, others choose to bring in outside professional facilitators with years of training, experience, and proven results.

When should you bring in an outside facilitator? It is your role as the leader to make this call.

__________________________

Michael Wilkinson is the CEO and Managing Director of Leadership Strategies, Inc., “The Facilitation Company” and author of Amazon best-seller “ The Secrets of Facilitation ”, “ The Secrets to Masterful Meetings ”, and the brand new “The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy.” Leadership Strategies is a global leader in facilitation services, providing companies with dynamic professional facilitators who lead executive teams and task forces in areas like strategic planning , issue resolution, process improvement, and others. They are also a leading provider of facilitation training in the United States.

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Michael Wilkinson

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Mistakes Made by Strategic Planning Facilitators

Here’s a list of the biggest mistakes that I have seen made by strategic planning facilitators over the years: 1. Not getting sufficiently trained on how to do facilitating, e.g., planning the meeting, goals, ground rules, which techniques to cultivate complete participation, doing interventions, managing conflict 2. Not learning a variety of strategic planning models, …

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LinkedIn founder and triple billionaire Reid Hoffman has two endearing mannerisms that reveal the way he sees–and reasons with–the strategic environment. First, he peppers his statements with the word so. Almost a verbal tic that would grate on a speaking coach like the overuse of the dreaded uh … but he uses it more like …

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Ten Strategic Planning Activities

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Ten fun activities which challenge established ways of thinking and involve strategic planning, problem solving and innovative thinking.

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Gamestorming

Category: Games for planning

strategic planning activities games

Polarities live as interdependent pairs that need each other to exist, for example inhaling & exhaling.  One pole is not valued as better than the other.  Polarities have an enduring quality, they are unavoidable and unsolvable.  Polarities live everywhere from our internal dialogue to external patterns of relating in society and within organizations.  Overfocus on any one pole leads to the breakdown of the system as a whole.

Object of play Simplify complex problems by identifying underlying patterns of tension in the system called polarities. Striking a dynamic balance between seemingly competitive forces – accomplished by observing and analyzing the paradox with a BOTH/AND lens – unlocks benefits otherwise concealed by the system.

Number of players 1-20

Invite players who are part of the system you would like to study.  This game can be played as an individual examining one’s internal landscape or external environment, or invite players from across your project team or larger organization.

strategic planning activities games

Duration of play 1 – 4 hours

Material required To run a good session, you will need:

  • An A4 (8.5”x11”) copy of the template for each player, or
  • an A0 size copy of the template for the room, or 
  • a digital copy of the template, or 
  •  each player may hand draw their own
  • Pens and markers
  • Post-it notes
  • Camera to capture the results

An example of Even Flow facilitated virtually. Zoom in to see the flow.

How to Play

Step 1: Become aware

  • Tell the players that we’re going to explore states-of-being or actions that appear to be opposites of one another. 
  • For additional examples to share, visit https://assessmypolarities.com/  
  • Ask the players to make a copy of the template for their personal use – draw it or copy/paste it, depending where you are.
  • Ask the players to select one pair of opposites to continue with and and place one polarity on each of the sign posts in our framework. Consider using a Dot Vote. 

Step 2: Map the system

  • Repeat for the other pole

Step 3: T une in

Assess the current state of the system.  Tune into the flow of energy between the poles.  

  • What are you experiencing right now in relationship to either of these poles?
  • Determine your location on the spatial continuum between the poles.  
  • What benefits are you seeing?  
  • Are there any indications that negative consequences are emerging?
  • Ask the players to present their thoughts to the group.
  • Remind the group that overfocusing on a particular pole will lead to negative outcomes – avoid the rocks near the shore.  Focus on a pole to realize the benefits – catch some lovely fish! But remember that overfishing has consequences.
  • As the players to identify which benefits and hazards are alive in the system by highlighting them.  Use both qualitative and quantitative data to guide your responses.

Step 4: Honor the energy

Let the results of the assessment guide behavior and decision-making.  Reduce focus if early signs of negative outcomes emerge.  Move in the other direction.

  • Ask the players to take a few minutes to individually brainstorm what action steps might optimize benefits and reduce risks. What they might Start, Stop or Continue doing? One thought per post-it note. 
  • Have each player present their thoughts to the group. 

Step 5: Map the future

Use the framework to guide you through future situations that arise within the tension of the polarity.

  • Set up a monitoring cadence to revisit and reassess the direction of the system.

Strategy It’s common to view polarities through an EITHER / OR lens, but this methodology works through a BOTH / AND lens (i.e. you need both INHALE and EXHALE). Critical pieces of the strategy include accurately defining the polarities and ensuring that poles are value-neutral.  A breakdown in the system occurs when one pole is devalued and our energy rushes toward the preferred pole.  

In organizations and teams, course corrections may take time to manifest.  Make changes proportionate to the signals received.  Don’t oversteer by making dramatic or violent changes toward the opposite pole when negative outcomes are observed.

Ideally, keep the map visible in the environment.  Communication that includes these visual mapping references will help reinforce the strategy and thinking.

Complementary Games Friend or Foe – organizational design analysis

Who do  – identify what you need from each of your stakeholders

Empathy Map  – get inside their heads to understand their pains and gains

Game inspired by Barry Johnson, Polarity Partnerships: https://www.polaritypartnerships.com/

Visual Metaphor by Troy Schubert

Facilitation Advice From the Gamestorming Community

an overflowing inbox, full of your advice

On May 4th we asked for your help: to share wisdom with students preparing to facilitate their first workshop. Your response flooded our inbox; it was reflective, generous, vulnerable and helpful. Thank you scrum masters, designers, authors, consultants, coaches, teachers, students and Gamestormers all over the globe.

Common themes:

Prepare to improvise Write your word-for-word script, rehearse even the jokes but prepare to throw it all out as you walk into the room.

Clarify your role As the facilitator you are not responsible for the answers, only to shape the journey on the way to their discovery.

Establish your emotional state The room will follow your cues – what do you need them to be?

Set the tone Be thoughtful with your first activity, it is the foundation for the rest of the workshop.

Connect with the workshoppers Collective and individual connection will energize the room and put you in tune with the path you’ll need to follow.

But read for yourself.

We’ve credited sources where possible.

Be thoroughly prepared and be fully prepared and willing to let go of all your plans and preparations to go with whatever happens and is needed at the time. Materials and preparations are a back up plan, follow your intuïtion and look for what the group needs at that specific moment; what are they not doing by themselves, what is the next step they are not taking. Focus your efforts there. -Gamestormer
Remember to create personal connection and learn to listen more intently to voice, not only words. Moderate activities to Energy levels constantly -Gamestormer
Prepare before you get into the room, understand the purpose and who will be there; how do you support everyone working towards that purpose? Remember you are primarily there to support the achievement of the purpose and not delivering content. Therefore, focus on how to make the most of everyone’s contributions and how to keep them engaged with it – vary the activities to support different ways of working (eg. solitary vs collaborative). Also, if you need to produce a report/findings make sure the participants are producing things you can draw on directly afterwards eg. prioritisation matrix or roadmap. – Claire Agnew
Set up the session with a clear centre line. Know your stuff (practice, practice, practice) and gain agreement up front to keep bringing people back to centre when they stray – if you have a clear centre line to draw people back to they will appreciate the level of productivity you achieve. -Gamestormer
1. Be familiar with the virtual platform that you are using, be it Zoom, Google Meet, WEbecs etc. 2. Be mindful of your virtual presence. Tone (speak clearly, varying your tone and at a moderate speed), body language (dressing , do not move around too much as it is distracting), engaged by looking at the camera hole. 3. Enlist a “co-host” to help you to navigate and take care of other engagement activities with audience. For e.g. polling, look at Chat messages. This will help the main facilitator to better focus on delivering their messages. 4. Add interactive activities such as poll, breakout room for discussions, type their views in chat box. 5. Practice, practice and practice, to build confidence. -CL Goh
Relax, anything you add to the meeting/workshop/event is better than it would have been without a facilitator. Everything is oops of learning, and we all get better through that experience. But in the end, everything we do makes things a little better and a little more likely to have good results. -Gamestormer
Facilitation is about designing, creating, and holding a container for the participants to fill up with great ideas and outcomes. Design a session that has just enough structure for them to stay on purpose but loose enough that they can have fun getting there. -Steve Silbert
The first time I was put in charge of facilitating a project, I remember feeling the need to grasp the opportunity, having to show all that I know. It was only later that I realized that it is important to really grasp the situation, talk to the others involved, and make use of what THEY know before passing any of my own judgment. -Johannes Neukamm
1) Co-create and agree on-line etiquette with the group. This includes talking order. One of many ideas that sticks with me is”participants talk once until everyone has had an opportunity to contribute” 2) all participants use headphones to cut out amplified background noise 3) create a hand-drawn frame and place it around your laptop camera…. this is to encourage you to focus on the frame when talking to give the impression of looking at fellow participants to “connect“ -Gamestormer
Start with an authentic check-in to create the social foundation to be productive and innovative together. all goes well when the team is united more deeply (than how’s the weather and what’s your name). even if things go wrong they all pull together to find a solution. And check-out at the end, even if it is a thumbs up or down, or a one word checkout. so people feel complete, util you meet again! tips for checkin in here http://www.thecircleway.net/circle-way-guidelines -Sandra Otto
keep the final objectives in mind – not your beautifully crafted session plans. Sometimes everything runs as you expect, but more often people head off in new directions. Be ready to follow them down those rabbit holes by focusing on the objectives, not the methods you think you need to get to your objectives. You might find yourself in Wonderland! -Katie Streten
Have a plan. Be sure what you want to achieve and especially take your time for ice-breaking in the beginning. Have an activity planned for the welcome and ice-breaking according to the audience age. A good start will help you through later struggles. And to decrease nervousness: breath. Before you go into the room, breath calmly. -Gamestormer
Set the tone early. The opening exercise needs to make it clear that it is a safe space to be visionary and to be wrong. I sometimes ask the room “What’s one thing you believe that no one else agrees with?” Or “If you could wave a magic wand and overcome one character flaw, what would it be?” -Greg Larkin
Ask a lot of questions -Gamestormer
Imagine that you need to make the most of the time that people are spending with you. Prepare for each session within the time block, knowing you can change the plan on the spot. Think of props, food, timing, drinks, breaks and work very carefully on planning the time blocks. Once you have it all mapped out you can change as you go along depending on the expected outcomes and what is happening in the moment. -Alison
Know your stuff, love your stuff and be yourself. (If you know what you’re talking about and care about the subject matter, care about others learning it, then all that’s left is to be yourself – that’s what will get the material across better. Oh, and, tell stories. Stories make your message accessible 🙂 -Vikee Rayner
The facilitator isn’t a trainer, not a teller, nor a seller of information. Get to know your participants (not audience) and empathize as far as possible. In facilitation content isn’t king as it is in training. Empathy is king. So, in preparing for a facilitative session I would strongly recommend as careful a study of the participants as possible — their ages, backgrounds, preferences, learning styles, whatever you can lay your hands on. -Leslie D’Gama
You are working for the group, you are there to facilitate people, to help them and it’s not about you. Try to make a connection between you and the group since they can help you too. Let they to help you and they will appreciate you for it. -Silvia Alba
Remember the the 80/20 rule. 80 percent prep, 20 percent running the actual event. Make yourself a script, prepare your handouts/materials well advance, have your slides done, and then practice! Do a trial run through with colleagues. If you’re facilitating with someone else, you must practice together. If you do all this, by the time you go to do it live, you’ll feel much more comfortable. All the prep, means you’ll be able to handle a curveball (and there always is one) and you’ll feel and sound natural because it’s not the first time you’re running it. -Melinda Miller
Focus on the groups needs, not your own -Gamestormer
I always prepare a detailed time-boxed slide, with everything written out – knowing that everything has been planned and accounted for gives me the freedom to really focus on my participants and making sure the workshop output is all that it can be. I also recommend blocking time in your calendar in the days following the workshop, to ensure everything is captured and circulated back. Last tip – facilitating a longer activity can be surprisingly exhausting. Plan ahead for some downtime so that you can recharge. -Genevieve Metropolis
From professor Langlois of the Université du Québec, in his LEADEX workshops: Your job (as leader, or facilitator) is to create a positive, memorable experience for those involved. I learned this in 2004 and it has been a validation of my approach; since it has become my mantra. Facilitation is not about me the facilitator, but about the participants. -assume you are with friends -ask open ended questions -mirror what you understood and ask if it’s accurate and if there’s more -be genuine and open, otherwise you come across as pushing an agenda -be complicit, like this is an elite clique (smile with a twinkle in your eye) -use humor Facilitation is not about me the facilitator, but about the participants. -assume you are with friends -ask open ended questions -mirror what you understood and ask if it’s accurate and if there’s more -be genuine and open, otherwise you come across as pushing an agenda -be complicit, like this is an elite clique (smile with a twinkle in your eye) -use humor Another foundational quote, from Stephen Haines of San Diego’s Haines Centre for Strategic Management: «People will support what they help build». Facilitation is a powerful way to get people involved in building a future state. -Gamestormer
Level the playing field. Whenever I facilitate, I make sure that I get this message across at the start, that I am one among them playing the role of facilitator not instructor. By doing this, you set the expectations at the right level both for you and for the audience. -Gamestormer
Besides a great design that you have co -created with key sponsor and maybe participants too, set intentions of how you want to be experienced. I often say to myself that I will be an ocean of love. This often works for me and I usually add one or two intentions based on what I assess the group will respond to and benefit from to bring their best most hopeful, creative selves. And, importantly, no matter how busy I am with prep I greet people as they enter, and “R before T” put relationship before task. A few welcoming words and a question to bring about exchange are more valuable than can be expressed. -Michele Berry
Pause for 5 seconds after you ask a question to allow people to “hear what you said, process what you said, come up with a response, articulate their response”. I literally count to five in my head to give people time to process. Second, is a mindset. You are not responsible for the outcome… your job is to focus on the process. Similar to an umpire of a baseball game. Keep the participants focused on the rules/process. The game is there’s to own the outcomes. -Gamestormer
People are going to share so many interesting ideas on content, templates, games… logistics are a lot less sexy… and getting logistics right will make or break a workshop. If you get it right, they won’t notice how well planned it is, but if you get it wrong your reputation will suffer no matter how good the content is. So here are thoughts on the practicalities. + Try to figure out the space (real or virtual) first. Where will you pin things, where will you do breakouts, how will you bring people back. + Make sure you build in time contingencies, things usually take longer than you think they will. Even getting people into and out of break-out groups takes time. You may feel pressure to squeeze more in, but the quality will suffer if you don’t give people enough time to work through ideas, have disagreements, work through disagreements etc + Pre-plan how you will do break-outs either using a pre-planned list or a game eg line people up in order of their birthdays & divide the line into 2, 4 etc.. Don’t tell people to organise themselves or it gets cliquey or awkward. + Keep lots of pace changes, some fast exercises, some slow. some digital presentation & some analogue, some sit down exercises, some standing. It keeps people alert + Snacks. At the start of a workshop lots of great snacks set the scene & get people excited for the day (especially important if you have people who would prefer to be somewhere else). Keep the snacks going throughout to keep energy up. If virtual, get people to pre-organise their snacks and you could even use this as a fun warm-up. + Don’t skimp on warm-ups and try to gradually use them to encourage people to open up and be a little bit vulnerable. Silly stuff is good. Warm-ups may seem a waste or precious time, but they build the rapport necessary to create a safe space for non-judgemental creativity. + Music can help to keep up the energy during break-outs and signal when time is up + Lay out a master plan of how the workshop will run (details are not necessary) at the start. If people have a sense of what will be expected they will stay focussed. + Make sure you have all the kit you need (boards, sticky notes, tech back-up plans etc. Also important is thinking about what printouts you need eg templates, reference material etc. And have spares. + Have a welcome plan, especially if attendees don’t know each other. They won’t all arrive at the same time, so think about what is happening in the space between the first person arriving and starting the workshop + Be flexible… things never quite go to plan, so you may need to change things up as you go, that’s pretty normal, don’t be hard on yourself. -Gamestormer
Prepare + Review the list for facilitating (assume your professor has given these, if not find a list) + Develop a list of probing and follow-up questions + Research info on audience + Prepare an opening that is a story or questions to pique curiosity Onsite + Start on time even if the audience is not ready + Focus on the audience and supporting their ability to connect with each other and share ideas; walk around and introduce yourself before the session starts + Watch your energy level – and smile + Walk the room; if there are slides go to back when they are being used – your role is a guide on the side not a sage on the stage + When there is a question, re-frame it and throw it back to the audience – and if possible, to those who are not speaking + Watch the time and make sure you leave time for the ending + Have a strong summary statement that reflects what happened during the session + Provide a call to action at the end + Thank the audience for engaging PS If there is work time for the group during the session remember you are still facilitating and paying attention to their tasks and the time; move from group to group; capture good ideas to share; listen to their discussion and help if they are off track; continue to monitor time; and, DO NOT fiddle with your phone or stand in the corner and talk to other facilitators. Once the group has reconvened, share what your saw and heard. -Gamestormer
It’s about them; not about you. Listen intently and learn the different types of questions to ask to keep a group moving. Where they go is up to them; not up to you. Emergence is a very exciting property of good facilitation. -Gamestormer
I’d say they could observe the experience as they lead it and take cues from the group – to see where they can improve next time and where the group is suggesting what works and what doesn’t. -Mike Rohde
Know yourself thoroughly , ask yourself why you are in facilitation. Knowing this, enjoy yourself, equipping yourself with the necessary knowledge , trends, state of the art practices and co explore with fellow practitioners. Do off line facilitation work shops with your friends , community and known circles, to get the feel. Be thorough with tools, technology and logistics . Reflect on the sessions ,feedback and make improvements .
Don’t worry how people react or if they don’t want to follow your instructions. It is mainly a sign of their emotional state of themselves, not something because of you. -Gamestormer
Team with a co-facilitator. Facilitation can be an endurance sport. There may be a question you are trying to answer, but no matter how many ways you phrase it, you can’t get a particular individual to understand. Another facilitator, with different experiences can calmly come in and offer a different perspective that might click for that individual. It is also very helpful to have someone who can help with logistics, if something needs to be addressed when your attention needs to be elsewhere. -Gamestormer
Have a game plan and even have a back up in case things go belly up. And then when you execute it, own it. Even if you have to pull some “fake” confidence out to feel like you pulled it off. How do you get fake confidence? Practice your introduction in a mirror before hand. Be an actor/actress. There is truth to fake it until you make it that I have even put into play as a librarian. Remember you will build with each facilitation experience you give so your “fake” confidence will grow into true confidence with experience behind it. -Michelle Boisvenue-Fox
Embrace imperfection -Gamestormer
Come with a plan. Rehearse that plan. You can even create a spreadsheet created with your facilitation plan detailed down to the minute. Then throw that plan out the window. Be present. Respond to the room and let the facilitation evolve as both the people in the room and you gain more clarity on the ideal outcome of the session. Aim to conclude with a consensus of next action -Adam Kreek
Be transparent when trying something new to you. The group doesn’t have to know everything is new to you… just say, “I’d really like to try xyz with this group…” Be quiet sometimes. As a new facilitator, I told stories and got chatty to cover my nerves. With feedback from video and colleagues, I have learned to breathe instead. When something goes wrong, move on. Things happen – technology, typos, skipped steps in an activity – just acknowledge and move forward. People will remember what you spend time on and what is uncomfortable, so apologizing at length could overshadow the good stuff. -Gamestormer
It’s important they understand to not try to be the smartest person in the room, but instead, ask the smartest questions :wink:. Have a bunch of questions mentally (or physically) ready. And if ever they ‘seize up’ and don’t know what to do, use those questions. Like: What’s the most important thing we want to get out of this meeting? What would it take to finish this meeting early? (that’s a cheeky one, I like that one). Is this the right thing to be discussing now? If I was the boss/main stakeholder/team/anyone else you need to talk to after this, what’s the main outcome of this that you tell me? How would you summarize this discussion as a tweet? -Ben Crothers
Over prepare. Conduct full-dress rehearsals with all the accoutrements so you create in yourself a ‘muscle memory’ that automatically flows through facilitation. A foundation of preparation minimizes surprises, allows you to gracefully respond when they arise and return to the facilitation plan. -Gamestormer
I think they need to be prepared: agenda, activities and materials in advance, they need to dominate instructions and repeat instructions in a clear and simple manner. They need to take time to define key messages they want to leave to the audience and personal stories or examples to reinforce them. -Martha Roa
Practice breathing. No meeting and no facilitator is perfect. One thing that holds true in every engagement I facilitate is that something unexpected always shows up. So learning to take a deep breath and pause so you can re-orient to the present has been the most helpful tip that was passed down to me, so I pass it onto others. -Gamestormer
Plan Practice Remember that noone knows the finer detail of the plan except you (so it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t quite go to plan). Be yourself -Mary-Ann Shuker
Don’t expect it to go as planned. When it doesn’t, be kind to yourself and others. -Gamestormer
1. Make the content your own and deliver from your truth. Don’t be a regurgitator. 2. Experience for yourself the processes you want to deliver 3. It’s better if everyone starts with acknowledging they don’t know the answer – including you – so true emergence can be experienced 4. Learn how to host yourself before you host others 5.It’s not about you: people are there to have an experience hosted by you, not about you, so… 6. Relax and enjoy the experience together. If you don’t have fun with the problem you’ll never solve it. I remember my nerves radically shifted when I realised being up front of a room of people facing complexity was not about me, but about them. And all I was there to do was help them tap into their wisdom, creativity and remember what they already knew. -Gamestormer
“Raise your hand if you can hear me” > I love this as a way to quiet down a boisterous room. I’d also say to remind them that you must be overly prepared, and then things will shift regardless, but it’s that preparedness that allows you to be able to shift and adjust. If you hadn’t prepared at all, you’d be lost. -Amanda Thompson
Remember your job is to keep away from the content and maintain a neutral stance. Focus your energy on moving the group forward – it’s not about you! -Gamestormer
Smile – even if you have to force it a little because you are nervous and you want to do well. A smile will put others at ease and releases dopamine, endorphins and serotonin into your bloodstream – all good things that help you to be present in the moment. Its free, you carry it with you everywhere and it has immediate impact. Also, embrace being a beginner at this and be gentle with yourself. We are all learning, all the time. -Gamestormer
I find it important to start the day with rules/expectations and an ice breaker to get everyone in the group comfortable talking. The most important rule (in my opinion) is to make sure everyone stays open to ideas of others. So exciting – workshops are fun! -Allison Squires
Connect personally with your audience before launching into the session – a brief moment in which you share something small/simple and at whatever level of depth fosters comfort and safety for you and the group. This can be a small insight about yourself, your journey to this session, a personal interest in or reflection on the session’s subject matter or this particular group etc. You’re prompted to pause before starting and pushing off into the session from a place of human engagement rather than the adherence to runsheet/script. -Gamestormer
Your goal as a facilitators is to help a group reach a meaningful outcome, but also remember how people FEEL when they leave your workshop is as, or more, important than what you are teaching them. -Chris Federer
Your workshop needs to be prototyped and practiced. Make sure that you get a chance to run through it as much as possible to iron out any quirks. Having a good flow will allow you to focus on the participants. Also work out your timings and stick to them -Gamestormer
Be extremely comfortable with design and make sure you be as clear as possible with it. Especially the learning objectives. prepare like crazy … including jokes and stories and pauses etc. …. BEFORE the session….however emerge with flow DURING the session….hold the design lightly not tightly … Be a scientist while preparing but an artist while delivering Do a good audience analysis if possible… if you know them and their context well, there will be less surprises Set it up well … try and manage expectations of everyone before delivering get the audience to speak as early in the session as possible… choose a game or an activity … Enjoy it … cut yourself some slack…gracefully accept any screw ups but make sure you LEARN from them” -Gagan Adlakha
Be perfectly prepared, as if your life depends on it. And once you start with the workshop: let go and trust in the process. -Gamestormer
Be clear on the aims of the meeting/retreat/etc. beforehand (engaging stakeholders in that process) and discuss these at the start of the gathering to ensure there’s buy-in (and, if not, discuss any possible changes). For the kinds of processes I facilitate, the goals typically include some more process-y stuff (e.g., teambuilding) and some more product-y stuff (e.g., strategy development). -Gamestormer
Work with your own strengths – as a government worker years ago I was asked to facilitate a lot of business planning, with only a small amount of training, because I was friendly, gentle and diplomatic. I was nervous but once you realise you’re only facilitating, not decision making, you can make the most of your skills. -Gamestormer

Bring Your Own Dashboard

strategic planning activities games

For more information

Listen to Michael Schrage, research fellow with MIT Sloan School’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, describe the need for strategic KPIs, common pitfalls organizations encounter when grappling with new technologies and why co-creating dashboards in a workshop setting are fundamental to AI capability development.

Read through your favorite Management publication today and you’re likely to find an article on Artificial Intelligence. One we particularly liked, Strategy For and With AI , clarifies the difference between using AI in your product or service (Strategy *For* AI) and harnessing AI to plan your strategy (Strategy *With* AI). The latter involves a tight coupling of KPIs, Data Governance and Decision rights that few companies can claim – the article recognizes Google, Uber, and GoDaddy. While these case studies may reveal an intimidating gap between their achievement and your organization’s progress, a discussion with article co-author Michael Schrage reveals simple steps any organization can take to move forward on this path.

strategic planning activities games

Most teams, regardless of size, can access data measuring their progress towards goals. Use this group activity to validate the strategic alignment of your KPIs, understand the relationships between them, and brainstorm tests you can perform to validate both.

There are two options for opening this game:

If your participants have defined KPIs or OKRs which they currently measure:

  • Ask them to bring a sample report or dashboard to the activity
  • Which organizational strategies the report aligns to ( O KR)
  • Report KPIs (O KR )
  • Other important reporting metrics
  • Once all the reports have been presented, ask the teams to write down their KPIs and metrics, one per sticky note and put them up on the wall.

If your participants have less defined measurement and feedback infrastructure OR you’re looking to explore new measures and KPI’s

  • Inform the players the purpose of the activity is to explore our strategy by creating a dashboard
  • Write at the top of the whiteboard an organization-wide strategic goal
  • Ask the players to take five minutes for an individual brainstorm: list all the customer behaviors impacting the strategic objective of your organization. For example,  a digital marketing team may be concerned with: customers signing-up for the newsletter, shoppers visiting your website, follow the brand on Twitter.
  • At the end of the brainstorm, ask each player to put their sticky notes on the wall, quickly presenting them to the team one-by-one. 
  • Once all the brainstormed ideas are on the wall, ask the group to organize them into themes. Let the themes emerge organically, i.e. don’t guide or direct their behavior. 
  • Take 5 minutes to review each theme; ask for the players to briefly explain their thinking and insights. 
  • For each theme ask the group to identify one or two KPIs that best measure the desired consumer behavior. 

KPI relationship matrix

  • Let the players know you’re going to explore your KPIs by looking at their relationships to one another. 
  • Set the board by creating a matrix of the KPIs identified in the Opening. 
  • To play, the group determines the relationship between each set of KPIs: Direct if an increase in one would cause an increase in the other OR Indirect if an increase in one would cause a decrease in the other.
  •  A group may choose to write down relationships individually at first and then call out their results on each item and criterion to create the tally. 
  • Identification should be done quickly, as in a “gut” check.
  • What do you notice about these relationships? 
  • What KPIs should you consider adding? Removing?
  • Are there instances where KPIs should be optimized instead of maximized?
  • Are the representative strategies aligned? Do the KPIs indicate any conflicts? 
  • What other organizations are implicated by these KPIs?
  • What are we uncertain about? How might we test those uncertainties in the next week?

Based on your discussion perform a Start-Stop-Continue. Ask the group to consider the customer behaviors, KPI relationship mapping and subsequent discussion and individually brainstorm in these three categories:

strategic planning activities games

  • Start: What are things that we need to START doing?
  • Stop: What are we currently doing that we can or should STOP?
  • Continue: What are we doing now that works and should CONTINUE?

Have the individuals share their results.

In our data-rich world, your strategy is what your KPIs say it is. Teams often try to maximize KPIs in the absence of understanding their impact. This exercise clarifies ripple effects strategies have on each other and surfaces considerations for when Optimization should trump Maximization. 

This game was inspired by David Kiron and Michael Schrage’s MIT Sloan Management Review article, Strategy For and With AI

COMPLEMENTARY GAMES

  • Manage What You Measure – create an aligned set of KPIs
  • Post Up & Affinity Map – two collaboration basics
  • Start, Stop, Continue – a great closing option for any meeting

Friend or Foe?

strategic planning activities games

Any product change, project plan, change management initiative requires assessment of and approach to working with stakeholders, a term we use to describe anyone who can impact a decision. Stakeholders often slow or block change; in other cases, they bust obstacles and accelerate progress. To increase your likelihood of success, check out this activity from visual thinker  Yuri Mailshenko and identify your stakeholders to understand how they feel about your work.

Object of Play The object of this game is to create an organizational map of your stakeholders. In some cases this may look like your org chart. In other cases situation and context will dictate a unique shape — likely familiar but undocumented. In addition to mapping stakeholders’ organizational relationships, you’ll also analyze their contextual disposition regarding your initiative.

Number of Players 5 – 15

Invite players from across your project’s organizational spectrum to ensure thorough stakeholder mapping. Colleagues with experience from similar projects or relationships with suspected stakeholders may provide valuable information. Invite them, too!

Duration of Play 30-60 minutes

Material Required Organizational Design Analysis works best on a whiteboard. Substitute a flip chart (or two) if necessary. To run a good session, you will need:

  • Dry-erase markers, we recommend using at least three colors (black, green, red)
  • Dry-erase marker eraser (or paper towels)
  • Sticky notes

Step 1: Map organizational structure

  • Invite your players to a five minute stakeholder brainstorm, ask: Who are our project stakeholders? Ask them to consider teams and individuals both inside and outside your org or company. Have players write one stakeholder per sticky note.
  • Once the brainstorm ends, have each player present their stakeholders by placing their sticky notes on a wall and provide to the group a brief description of their thinking.
  • With all the sticky notes on the wall, ask the group to organize them into a rough org chart. This needs only to be an imprecise draft.
  • With the sticky note draft org chart as your guide, create a cleaner version of the org using a whiteboard and dry-erase markers. Ask for a scribe to map the organisation top to bottom. When the scope is quite big (for example, you are mapping a large enterprise), map the parts of the org structure that are less relevant to the analysis with less detail, and vice versa.
  • To help with navigation, label all stakeholders.
  • Denote future parts of the organizations (ones that are missing at the moment but are important to be considered for potential impact).
  • Draw a border around the areas that are affected by the change/initiative or are in the focus of the analysis.
  • Your whiteboard map could now look something like these:

Drawing considerations:

  • Avoid using prepared artifacts like your company’s official org chart. Create on-the-go with full engagement of the group.
  • Draw people. Draw a person as a circle and the upside down letter ‘U’. A group of people could be just three persons put close to each other; avoid drawing departments and teams as boxes.
  • Many organizations are matrices of different kinds. Introducing an extra dimension might create visual clutter. Try to avoid that by either using a different style of a line (dotted or dashed lines) or a different color for a weaker organizational component.

Step 2: Add insight

  • Begin a group discussion with the goal of mapping stakeholder disposition and level of support regarding your initiative.
  • Disposition towards the initiative: are they for, neutral or against? To what degree? Why?
  • Level of impact: how much influence will this stakeholder have? High, medium or low?
  • Relationship strength between stakeholders: who do they influence? who influences them? To what degree?
  • Participation energy level: high, medium or low?
  • If you are having difficulty dispositioning a particular stakeholder, move to the next one. Additional conversation may help you get unstuck and you can circle back to the troublemaker.
  • A green smiley face for a supportive stakeholder
  • A battery with one out of three bars charged for a low-energy stakeholder
  • A cloud overhead signals a confused stakeholder

Strategy Org charts are quite unambiguous and offer little room for opinion. This exercise’s value comes from mapping less obvious things like stakeholder influence, disposition and decision making power in relation to the initiative. Defined structures are rarely challenged but a necessary foundation. What is interesting is something that lies beyond the official org chart – people’s attitude to the topic of discussion, their real power and influence. Players will share their opinions openly — and surprisingly!–in a safe, structured and collaborative setting.

Complementary Games You understand who your stakeholders are and the org design dynamics facing your project, now what?

  • Who do – identify what you need from each of your stakeholders
  • Empathy Map – get inside their heads to understand their pains and gains
  • Understanding Chain – create the story your stakeholders need to hear to contribute to your success!

Activity developed by Yuri Malishenko – visual thinker, agile coach, product owner

Activity titled by Stefan Wolpers – agile coach and ScrumMaster.

Navigate your market opportunities

strategic planning activities games

Any innovation or technological invention can be applied to serve different types of customers. Understanding your set of market opportunities increases your chances of success: It not only allows you to focus on the most promising market, but also helps you to avoid a fatal lock-in. The Market Opportunity Navigator, developed by Dr. Sharon Tal & Prof. Marc Gruber  in their book  Where To Play,  is a tool that helps you to map out your market opportunities and adopt a broad view of your options, so you can set your strategic focus smartly.

Object of play Unleash the power of new market opportunities by stepping back from your current product and customer assumptions. The Market Opportunity Navigator offers a structured process for identifying, evaluating and prioritizing potential markets for innovation; examine and rethink your strategic focus or plan your future roadmap. This game provides a shared language to discuss, debate and brainstorm with your team and stakeholders.

Number of players 1-6 players (depending on objective).

You can work individually to sketch out your initial perceptions, but a diverse team is recommended if you want to broaden your view and map out your landscape of opportunities more accurately.

Duration of play Anywhere between two hours (for a ‘quick and dirty’ process), to two days (for a thorough discussion). In general, the game includes three steps:

Step 1 – Identify Market Opportunity Set Step 2 – Evaluate Opportunity Attractiveness Step 3 – Depict Your Agile Focus Dartboard

strategic planning activities games

  • A large print of the Market Opportunity Navigator, preferably on A0 size . A1 – A3 will do the job. Downloadable here
  • If you can’t make large prints of the worksheets, it’s OK! You can easily reproduce all the worksheets on flip charts.
  • Flip chart paper with adhesive backing
  • Sticky notes of different colors
  • Markers and pens
  • The facilitator of the game can learn more about the process at: www.wheretoplay.co

How to Play Room Setup: Place the A0-sized Market Opportunity Navigator somewhere in the room. If you don’t have an A0, draw the templates on individual flip charts and hang.

Step 1: Identify a Market Opportunity Set

strategic planning activities games

  • Begin the game with a clear definition of what a Market Opportunity means. Write on the board: A market opportunity is any application of your abilities for a specific set of customers.
  • Inform the players we will now explore each.
  • Ask the players to take five minutes for an individual brainstorm to describe and characterize the core technological elements or unique abilities of the firm in their own right, detached from any current or envisioned application. Write one element or ability per sticky note.
  • Once the brainstorm is done, have the players to put their notes on the wall. Ask for volunteers to sort the notes into meaningful categories (see Affinity Map ). Once finished, ask the sorters to describe their process.
  • Summarize the unique abilities of the firm and list their functions and properties on the upper part of worksheet 1.
  • Repeat this process to brainstorm customer problems that can be addressed with these unique abilities. Ask the players to take five minutes for an individual brainstorm and describe customer problems, one per sticky. To broaden their horizon, ask them to think about who else beyond the current customer set might have these problems. What other problems might they have? Encourage players to think wide and broad. There are no ‘wrong ideas’ at this stage.
  • Once the brainstorm is done, ask the players to put their notes on the wall. Ask for volunteers to sort the notes into meaningful categories (see Affinity Map ). Discuss what these categories might mean for your company and products.

strategic planning activities games

  • At the end of the brainstorm, pick few market opportunities that seem interesting for further consideration. ask the players to briefly describe their idea as they place it on the Market Opportunity section of the Navigator. Use colored sticky notes to represent each of these market opportunities, and place them on the market Opportunity Set section of the Navigator.
  • Your Market Opportunity Set is now ready.

Step 2: Evaluate Opportunity Attractiveness

strategic planning activities games

At this step, players will assess the potential and the challenge of each opportunity in their set, to compare and prioritize options. Market opportunities are not born equal- some are more attractive than others.

  • To begin the evaluation process, explain first what an attractive option is. Write on the board: An attractive option is onethat offers high potential for value creation, and limited challenge in capturing this value.
  • Divide the group into small teams, and assign 1-2 market opportunities to each team.
  • For each opportunity, ask the teams to assess the overall potential and overall challenge of each option, using the criteria described in Worksheet 2. If you do not have an A1 sized worksheet, recreate the template on a flip chart or use smaller prints.

strategic planning activities games

Step 3: Depict Your Agile Focus Dartboard

strategic planning activities games

Having multiple options at hand is important for maintaining your agility. In the last step of the game, you can design your Agile Focus strategy.

  • Begin with a clear explanation, write on the board: An Agile Focus strategy clearly defines your primary focus, the opportunities that you will keep open for backup or future growth, and those that you put aside for now. It will help you balance the ongoing tension between focus and flexibility.
  • Players should pick attractive opportunities from step 2, and assess their relatedness to the currently pursued market(s),using Worksheet 3. If you do not have an A1 sized print, recreate the template on a flip chart or use smaller prints.
  • Discuss and pick at least one backup option and one growth option that you want to keep open. Depict your decision (using colored sticky notes) in the right part of the Market Opportunity Navigator. Your Agile Focus Dartboard is now ready.

strategic planning activities games

Strategy This thought process is extremely powerful for companies seeking to understand and leverage their landscape of opportunities. The ‘big picture’ that it provides is especially valuable for:

  • Startups seeking their initial strategic path
  • Companies in need for pivot
  • Companies searching for new growth engines
  • Companies wishing to leverage existing IP

You can play this game to advance solid strategic decisions, but also to nourish and nurture the cognitive flexibility of your team, or simply to develop a culture that is more flexible and receptive to adaptations.

If you use this tool as a structured decision-making process, more time is required for market validation. In this case, you can map out your opportunities, state your assumptions while doing so, and get out of the building to support or refute them. You can then update the Market Opportunity Navigator and reflect on your learning.

Complementary Games Finally, use the Navigator in combination with other great tools to set a promising strategic path:

  • the Empathy Map will help you to more deeply understand your stakeholders; play this game before exploring new opportunities
  • A quick ride on the Carousel will put players in a brainstorming mindset before exploring
  • Use the Business Model Canvas to further and more managerially flesh out the viability, feasibility and desirability of your newly discovered Market Opportunities

Variations You can use each step of the Market Opportunity Navigator as a separate game, depending on your objectives. For example:

  • Use step 1 as a game to uncover different applications and target markets
  • Use step 2 as a game to assess the attractiveness of a specific business opportunity that you have in mind, and check out if it’s worth betting on.
  • Use step 3 as a game to develop possible roadmaps for your venture

Source Prof. Marc Gruber and Dr. Sharon Tal created The Market Opportunity Navigator in their book, Where to Play: 3 Steps to Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities

Mapping Organizational Culture

strategic planning activities games

Are you struggling to break down organizational silos, increase creativity, engagement and collaboration? Do you feel like the people in your company are resisting change? Is your company’s culture holding you back?

Nobody denies the critical importance of culture to a company’s success. And yet, although everyone agrees that culture is of vital importance, culture still seems fuzzy, vague and difficult to grasp. Culture change initiatives are often well-meaning, but end up as a series of feel-good exercises. They create a feeling that progress is being made, but ultimately fail to deliver results.

Objective of Play Assess, map and transform organizational culture via deep reflection. As a leader or manager in a large organization, you probably have a sense of the culture and people challenges facing you, but at the same time, you must also manage not only down but up and across the organization.

Culture Mapping gives you the intelligent information you require to make a business case for the interventions, executive support, and budget you will need to minimize risk and maximize the chances of success for your change initiative.

Number of Players Use the culture map individually or with a group.

For group use, gather 5 – 6 people from the same function (IT, HR, finance, et al) who work together and know each other well. The goal of the session is candid and constructive criticism; the boss cannot come.

Duration of Play Anywhere between 15 minutes for individual play (napkin sketch of a Culture Map) to 90 minutes for a group.

Material Required Culture Mapping works best when players work on a poster on the wall. To run a good session you will need:

  • Alternatively, recreate the canvas on a large whiteboard.
  • Tons of sticky notes (i.e. post-it® notes) of different colors
  • Flip chart markers
  • Camera to capture results
  • The facilitator of the game might want to read an outline of the Culture Map.

How to Play There are several games and variations you can play with the Culture Map. Here we describe the most basic game, which is the mapping of an organization’s existing culture. The game can easily be adapted to the objectives of the players (eg, map your desired culture or that of another organization).

  • The outcomes in your culture are the fruits. These are the things you want your culture to achieve, or what you want to “harvest” from your garden.
  • The behaviors are the heart of your culture. They’re the positive or negative actions people perform everyday that will result in a good or bad harvest.
  • The enablers and blockers are the elements that allow your garden to flourish or fail. For example, weeds, pests, bad weather, or lack of knowledge might be hindering your garden. Where as fertilizer, expertise in gardening specific crops, or good land might be helping your garden to grow.
  • Start with Behavior , it tends to be the easiest to discuss. These are the things we see everyday, the things we talk about when we ask someone if they “want to grab a coffee?” Use the guide questions to prompt ideas. Write a single behavior on a sticky note, put it on the map. Before moving to the next step, group similar behaviors and remove duplicates. Recommendation: be as specific as possible, use stories to elicit detail and specificity; avoid the tendency to be generic in describing these behaviors. Ask the players: how would you describe this behavior as a scene in a movie?
  • Move to Outcomes. Go behavior-by-behavior and use the guide questions to prompt ideas, the most important being: What happens to the business because of the behaviors? Write a single outcome on a sticky note, put it on the map near its related behavior. Use a marker to draw a line between a behavior and its direct outcome.
  • Move to Enablers and Blockers . Go behavior-by-behavior and use the guide questions to prompt ideas. Enablers and blockers describe why we behave the way we do: a listing of organizational incentives. Write a single enabler or blocker on a sticky note and place it near it’s related behavior. Use a marker to draw a line between an enabler or blocker and its resulting behavior.
  • Once you have taken a pass at each section, examine the map and discuss with the group. Do the relationships make sense? Are the behaviors as detailed as they could be? Has your discussion sparked any other thoughts? If so, add them to the map. Recommendation: Keep relationships as direct as possible. For example, a behavior should have only one outcome and one enabler or blocker. It is likely this will not happen without discussion, editing and refinement. For clarity and communication, keep the relationships as simple as possible, for example:

strategic planning activities games

Strategy Depending on who you ask, 60–70 percent of change initiatives fail to meet their stated objectives, and the primary source of that failure, according to a Deloitte study, is resistance to change. So if you’re embarking on a change initiative, the last things you want to skimp on are risk-awareness and risk management.

Culture Mapping surfaces information that, as far as we know, cannot be collected any other way. It gives the C-suite access to frontline culture in a way that they could never get through their own efforts, because the water-cooler conversation always shuts down, or significantly shifts, when the CEO or senior leader walks by.

Variation Map the Culture of industry competitors or an aspirational company

The Culture Map was developed by Dave Gray and Strategyzer AG .

Manage What You Measure

Measures of success vary across an organization. Executives concern themselves with company-wide Objectives involving Revenue, Cost, Profit, Margin and Customer Satisfaction. Further down the org chart, management and individual contributors rate performance against more detailed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tracking customer behavior: a product manager may measure app downloads, or number of shopping cart items per visit. These customer behaviors clearly affect the larger corporate Objectives, but how? and which have the most impact?

strategic planning activities games

Objective of Play Understand how customer behavior impacts higher level objectives; direct organizational efforts on the most influential of those behaviors.

Invite participants across the KPI spectrum: individual contributors, management and executive leadership. A successful game will demonstrate how all levels of KPI’s relate and affect one another.

Duration of Play 30 minutes – 3 hours.

Material Required Manage What You Measure works best when played on a whiteboard. To run a good session you will need:

  • Sticky notes (i.e. post-it® notes) of different colors
  • Dot stickers
  • Dry-erase markers

1. With the group gathered, introduce Manage What You Measure by stating that the purpose of the game is to focus resources and strategies on the most critical customer behaviors. To get there, the group will map the relationship between high-level corporate objectives and customer behavior.

2. Write at the top of the whiteboard a corporate-wide Strategic Goal.

3. Below that, write on sticky notes the measures of success (KPIs) for that Strategic Goal. Use different color sticky notes when possible.

4. Ask the players to take five minutes for an individual brainstorm: list all the customer behaviors impacting the KPIs identified in Step 3; one per sticky note. If possible, match sticky note colors of customer behaviors and KPIs — this will help organize what may become a crowded whiteboard.

5. After the brainstorm, ask the players to come to the whiteboard and post their sticky notes under the appropriate grouping.

6. Take 5-10 minutes to review the sticky notes. Lead a clarification discussion. Ask participants to explain any potentially confusing sticky notes. Note any customer behaviors mapped multiple times.

7. Repeat steps 4 – 6 once. Use the first set of brainstormed-customer behaviors as the baseline: what are the behaviors that drive those behaviors?

8. Once everyone is comfortable with the customer behaviors, conduct a Dot Vote . Give each player five dots to place on what they consider the most important customer behaviors in light of the Strategic Goal in step 2.

9. Tally the votes.

10. Once again, take time for discussion. Note unpopular choices; ensure their dismissals have merit. Have any results surprised the group? Why? Recommendation: If the Dot Vote results and ensuing discussion dictate further prioritization, consider playing Impact & Effort or the NUF Test .

11. Once the group agrees on the prioritized areas of focus, assign each a baseline value (what is the measure of this behavior now?) and goal (where would we like it to be). Recommendation: Consider playing Who-What-When

Strategy Employees understand organizational goals at different levels. By defining relationships between high-level objectives, mid-tier KPIs  and the customer behaviors that drive them you have created a map easily navigated.

This clarity creates a shared understanding across all levels of the organization. Now, each time a team reports progress on their specific KPIs, executives will have a clear sense of why the team is working on that and how it affects the Objectives they care most about.

Complementary Games The Empathy Map will help you to more deeply understand your customers and their behaviors; play this game before Manage What you Measure

Manage What You Measure derives from Jeff Gothelf’s Medium post: Execs care about revenue. How do we get them to care about outcomes?

Hero’s Journey Agenda

strategic planning activities games

Object of play The Hero’s Journey Agenda is a unique and different way to lay out the agenda for a meeting or workshop that creates a sense of adventure and builds anticipation for the meeting.

Number of players One, usually the facilitator, created live in front of a group.

Duration : 10-15 minutes.

How to play I am going to give you a script here, based on the video above. But this exercise works best if you make it your own, using a story you love and that you feel your audience will be familiar with, like a favorite fairy tale or movie.

1. Draw a large circle on a whiteboard or flip chart. Tell people,

“This circle represents all the things we’re going to do today. We’re starting out up here (point to the top of the circle), and we’re going to take a hero’s journey.”

If you have geeks in the room, can actually talk about it in terms of Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings, or another story you expect the group to be familiar with.

You can also say,

“Any story, any epic adventure follows this basic format. This is something that a guy named Joseph Campbell came up with. He wrote a book called The Hero Of A Thousand Faces, which you can look up. Basically, the hero’s journey works like this. You begin in ordinary life. This is where everyone is coming into a meeting. We’re actually in our ordinary lives right now, and we’re going to do some special work and we’re going to be moving outside of ordinary life.”

2. Draw a stick figure at the top of the circle. Now say,

“The hero’s journey basically has two big components to it. There is the known world, which are the things that we kind of already know, the regular work and so forth. There’s the unknown, which are the things that we hope we will discover and explore during the course of this meeting.”

Draw a wavy line to represent the boundary between the known and unknown.

“This is called the threshold. It’s the threshold between the known and the unknown.

3. Now say,

“Here we are on the hero’s journey. The first thing in the hero’s journey is the call to adventure. That is where we talk about things like: What are we going to do? What’s the work that we’re going to do? Why is it important? What brings us to this point?”

Write “The Call” at around 1 o’clock on the circle, and talk about the purpose of the meeting. You may want to ask people why they came and what their expectations are.

4. Now draw a couple of stick figures at around 2 o’clock, and say,

“You’re going to find in the beginning of any story, you’re going to find the helpers and the mentors. You’ve got, whether it’s Dumbledore or Gandalf or Obi Wan, whoever that character is, the droids, the characters that are going to help you. These are the characters that are going to help you find your way.”

Helpers can be things like teaching people how to use sticky notes in a certain way. There are a lot of Gamestorming tools in this category. We call them openers. So you can tell people “We’re going to meet our helpers and mentors.” Those helpers might be tools, or people, experts that we might bring in. It could be a keynote speaker.

5. Next you will talk about crossing the threshold between the known and the unknown.

“Now, where we cross the threshold, that’s usually a good time for a coffee break. It’s the end of the morning, coffee or tea, depending on what country you’re in. Maybe both. We’re going to have a break.”

You can draw a coffee cup or a teacup here.

6. Now say,

“Next, we’re going to start getting into the trials and tribulations. We call this problems and pitfalls. It’s the part of the journey where you’re exploring the problem space.”

There may be all kinds of activities or things that you’re going to do here. You might be brainstorming, you might be working stuff out, might be drawing a map of the system. There are a bunch of things that you can do to explore this problem space. In a story, you’re going to find all kinds of challenges: you have to climb the mountain, you have to fight the trolls, all the things that have to happen to move the story forward.

Write the words “Problems and pitfalls,” and draw some explosions here, or barbed wire, or something representing problems and pitfalls, at 4 and 5 o’clock on your circle.

7. Now write the word “Pit” and draw a pit at the bottom of the circle. The pit, in a day long meeting, might be lunchtime.

“Every story has its pit. The belly of the whale, the cave. I just call this the pit. We’ve hit the bottom. This can be a tough space to be, because we’ve just opened up all these problem spaces and issues and things that we have to deal with. It may feel like we’re never going to get home. The pit is also the place here Bilbo Baggins finds the ring. It’s the place where the deep reflection, the real powerful learning can also happen. Over lunch might be a good time to explore what is down here in the pit. What are we feeling like? What are the emotions?”

8. Now write “Powers” and draw some stars, or a superhero stick figure with a cape, something that represents powers, around 7 or 8 o’clock, and say,

“We come out of the pit after lunch and we’re creating new powers. We’re solving problems. We’ve learned how to use the force. We’re now solving problems, we’re creating solutions, we’re working on things together. These kind of tools we might be using here would be customer experience map, service blueprint, we might be designing, we might be prototyping a product. This is where we’re actually getting cool results out of the meeting, but we still have to take that back to work.”

9. Now write “The return” at around 10 o’clock, and say,

“That’s part of the hero’s journey, too, the return to ordinary life. We have to go back and cross the threshold again. This time is all about those powers that you’re bringing back. We want to come back to the workplace with gifts. Think, new ideas, new thoughts. We want to spend some time thinking about, “How do we take this back to work?”

This is the part of the meeting where you make some time for the group to think together about how they are going to bring the new ideas from the meeting back into the organization. What am I going to do in my next meeting? How am I going to explain this to my team? You might actually work on the PowerPoint together or work on some documents that are about sharing what you actually did during the meeting.

10. At this point you can close the exercise by asking people if they have any thoughts and additions before you proceed with the meeting.

strategic planning activities games

Strategy This is a very powerful way to set up an agenda for a relatively large scale session of work. Spend some time upfront on this. Draw it out and talk through it with key stakeholders, either before the meeting or at the beginning of the meeting. It is also a good litmus test to help you think through the goals of your meeting. If you can’t answer questions like, “What’s the call to adventure? What are the problems we want to explore? What are the things that we want to find? What are the things that we want to bring back to work?” and if you can’t sort of think these through at the beginning of a meeting, then it’s legitimate to ask yourself, should we really have this meeting?

The Hero’s Journey Agenda seems to work really well, not only for designing the agenda but for making sure you have all the major bases covered and creating positive energy and enthusiasm for the whole endeavor.

The Hero’s Journey Agenda was created by Dave Gray. It was inspired by The Hero’s Journey, popularized by Joseph Campbell, and the Pie Chart Agenda , which comes from James Macanufo, co-author of Gamestorming.  

Cost Benefit

This game, developed by Johan Tré , is most probably the most simple collaborative cost benefit analysis ever. It is applicable onto subjects where a group has expert knowledge about costs and/or benefits.

A group of developers is such an example. Especially a customer or customer proxy will have interest when it comes to prioritizing work items.

Generation ideas If the list of work items is not existent you can start this exercise by a silent post-up. All individuals in the group start scribbling down about the work to be done. (one thing/sticky) After 10 min or so ask the group to hang them on the wall.

Clustering Ask the team to group items together by subject in silence. Items causing discussion you ask to park aside. Explain that the only purpose is having a priority. So under what cluster it’s been put isn’t that important. What is important however, is all know where it’s under. So on the exact scope (what-fits-best-where) there is no explicit consensus needed. A majority is fine.

In short: * does everybody know the scope of the clusters? * can the team proportionally estimate the size of the scope? (what is bigger/smaller then what)

Priories on cost

CostBenefit-Sorting-Scaling

This all takes about 10 min: Sorting 5, scaling 5. Depending on the position on the scale, write the relative number bottom left on the stickies. E.g. stickies in the middle: 50%, top 0%, bottom 100%. This will be your Y-axis coordinate to put your sticky on a 2D cost -benefit graph.

Priories on benefit

Do the same for the benefits with a product owner, customer if preferred. Sort, relatively scale them, and write the number bottom right.

Cost Benefit Result

Putting it all together

Draw the X and Y axis with the top and bottom values from the exercise above:  the costs & benefits. Hang the stickies according to the cost/benefit coordinates noted on them.

The low hanging-fruit and infeasible-expensive items are clearly found now.

Note that the same approach can be done with a Kano diagram or any other kind of 2D graph. It’s a fun way of clearing things out and prioritizing is done through collaborative support. Special attention on discussion starters is recommended. They are the time consumers, and can be stopped by guarding and communicating your goal: prioritizing .

Enjoy this game, feedback is mostly appreciated!

Source This game was developed and originally authored by Johan Tré .

Object of Play

This game has been designed to help prioritize different ideas or items in a quick and energetic way without getting stuck in endless discussions and avoiding any kind of influencing. It is similar to 20-20 game as it will compare items in pairs.

Number of players:  4 – 50

Duration:  15-45 minutes depending on the group size and items at hand.

How to play

  • Organize or facilitate another game to generate items that require prioritization.
  • Ask all attendees to put the items at hand in the middle of the group of people, one by one and shortly explaining the item at hand.
  • When all items are in the middle of the group let each one of the attendees select their “Top”, “Most Important” item out of the pile and do this one person at the time. If their top item is gone then they could take their second, third… option out of the list, purpose it that everybody has 1 card at hand. (With a small group let them take 2).
  • Now instruct the people to mingle amongst each other and find a partner in order to form pairs. Shortly discuss how to spread 7 points amongst the 2 items at hand with the 2 of them and add those points on the back of the card.
  • Let the people take each others card and find another partner for a second round of weighting cards with each other.
  • Do this 5 times (5 times 7 = 35)!
  • Summarize all different weights to a single figure and sort highest number on top and so on…

Note: Even when the group does this a second time with the same items and interest at hand the sorting will be the same but figures might differ a bit.

Getting a group consensus about priorities between different related items is not easy and 35 will give them an easy way to effectively and repeatedly prioritize items according the groups consensus. The technique is build in such a way that people can not cheat the system and influence the outcomes as you compare, weight items related to each other. By constantly changing cards from hands and switching from partners one is can never influence the outcome. A great way to achieve a fast consensus about the priority of the items at hand.

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Team Building World

10 Strategic Planning Team Building Activities for Your Employees

10 Strategic Planning Team Building Activities for Your Employees

Are you looking for some strategic planning team building activities ?

In today’s business world, it’s no longer just the leaders who create strategies that their subordinates follow. Businesses now recognize the importance of employees developing effective strategies.

In this article, let’s see 10 team building activities for strategic planning that you can conduct with your employees.

What is Strategic Planning?

In simple terms, strategic planning is the process of setting objectives and developing a plan to achieve them. Having a good strategic plan helps your employees understand their responsibilities. So, they know how their contributions aid in the company’s achievements. Ultimately, this facilitates the alignment of their efforts with the organization’s vision and objectives.

10 Strategic Planning Team Building Activities for Your Employees

Here are some amazing activities to develop the strategic planning skills of your employees.

#1. Brain Mapping

Brain Mapping is a team building activity that encourages collaboration between team members while creating effective solutions.

Time: 30 minutes – 1 hour

Materials: Computer, Whiteboard/Paper, and Markers

Participants: 2-10 people

Instructions

  • Each participant should come up with ideas on how to solve a problem or reach a goal in the company. For example, how can a company increase customer satisfaction?
  • The team should then map out all these ideas and create strategies to make them happen.
  • Participants can draw the solutions on paper/ whiteboard, or use computers for more detailed plans.
  • Once the mapping is completed, they can discuss their plans with others, and come up with the best solution.

During the debrief, you should identify any areas of improvement for the team and recognize their successes. Encourage creativity to help foster collaboration between team members.

#2. Fish Bowl

The objective of this exercise is to encourage open dialogue between team members while creating innovative strategies.

Materials: Fish Bowl/ Container, Paper, and Markers

Participants: 4-8 people

  • Each participant should put their ideas into the fish bowl or container.
  • The facilitator should ask each participant to take turns and explain their ideas.
  • Next, the facilitator can draw the solutions on paper/whiteboard, or use computers for more detailed plans.
  • After each idea is discussed, the team should come up with a collective solution that benefits everyone.

During the debrief, identify any areas of improvement and recognize effective collaboration between team members. Encourage feedback to create a safe environment for open dialogue.

#3. Collaborative Goal Setting

This activity encourages employees to set goals for the organization and develop plans to achieve them.

Time: 45 minutes

Materials: Post-it notes, Markers, and Whiteboard

Participants: 4-6 people

  • Divide the participants into smaller teams.
  • Give each team a goal or initiative to focus on. For example: “Develop strategies for increasing customer engagement”.
  • Each team should brainstorm potential strategies for achieving that goal. Then, they can analyze the merits and demerits of each strategy, and decide on the best ones.
  • Finally, let them present their strategies to the other groups.

In the debrief, discuss how the team worked together to develop goals and strategies, as well as any new ideas or perspectives that arose during the activity. Celebrate successes and brainstorm solutions for potential challenges encountered.

#4. Elimination Match

In this exercise, the participants should use their strategic planning skills to complete some tasks before the opposing team.

Materials: Set of cards with individual tasks related to strategic planning

Participants: 2 teams of 4-5 people each.

  • Divide the participants into two teams of equal size.
  • Each team will receive a set of cards that represents a specific task related to strategic planning. They can be creating a budget, developing a marketing plan, identifying potential risks, etc. As the facilitator, you should provide further instructions to the teams such as the specific requirements for each task or any time limits.
  • Now, the teams must try to finish the tasks as quickly as possible. After completing a task, they must place the respective card on the table. The first team that completes all the tasks will win the game.

Discuss how teams used strategic planning skills to identify opportunities, create plans, and manage risks to complete the tasks quickly. Furthermore, participants should evaluate what strategies could have been employed differently in order to improve their performance.

#5. Futures Wheel

The goal of this activity is to help team members explore potential strategies for different scenarios.

Time: 20-30 minutes

Materials: Large poster board or whiteboard, markers

Participants: 6-10 people

  • Ask the group to identify a goal they would like to achieve in the future.
  • Each group member lists out 3-5 different steps necessary to reach that goal.
  • Now, each group can draw a circle in the center of the poster board or whiteboard and label it with their goal. Also, they can draw a series of circles around the first one and label them with each step necessary to reach that goal.
  • Then, they can discuss potential strategies that could be implemented at each step to make progress toward the end goal.

As a facilitator, it’s important to ensure everyone understands the goal and the steps necessary to reach it. During the debrief, you should check in with each group member to make sure they understand how their individual strategies contribute to the larger plan.

#6. Lost at Sea Survival Game

This activity encourages employees to strategize and work together to survive in an imaginary “lost at sea” scenario.

Time: 45-60 minutes

Materials: Imaginary items such as a fishing net, a flare gun, a water container, etc.

  • Divide the participants into teams with an equal number of members in each.
  • Ask the teams to envision themselves lost at sea and present them with a set of imaginary items. Some examples of items include a fishing net, a flare gun, a water container, etc.
  • Give each team a few minutes to plan how they would use their resources in order to survive until help arrives.
  • After the allotted time, have each team present their strategies to the other teams.

During the debrief, it’s important to discuss how the teams collaborated and which strategies worked best. Encourage team members to share their thoughts on what they learned from this activity.

#7. Mock Trade Game

In this exercise, employees should participate in a trade to understand the effects of supply and demand on pricing.

Time: 30-45 minutes

Materials: Fake “money” (Monopoly money), and Items to trade like pencils, paper clips,etc.

  • Divide the participants into groups of two, and provide each group with some fake money. Ask them to decide on an item that they will trade and set a price for it.
  • Have the groups take turns trading items at their agreed-upon prices, allowing them to make profits or losses based on their decisions.
  • After trading has finished, have them compare profits and losses.

During the debrief, it’s important to discuss how each group was able to maximize their profits or minimize their losses. It is also beneficial to ask the participants what strategies they found most effective in order to gain insights into future trading decisions.

#8. Strategic Terms

The objective of this activity is to help participants understand and apply common terms in strategic planning.

Time: 15 minutes

Materials: Index cards with terms related to strategic planning, timer

Participants: At least 4 members per group

  • Divide the participants into groups. Then, split each group into two sub-groups.
  • Give each sub-group a set of index cards with terms related to strategic planning such as “Goals”, “Risks”, and “Rewards”.
  • Each sub-group will then take turns drawing one card at a time and explaining how it relates to strategic planning. For example, when a sub-group draws the “Risks” card, they must explain how taking risks can help an organization succeed but also carries a certain amount of uncertainty.
  • At the end of the game, the sub-group with the most creative explanations for each term is declared the winner!

During the debrief, participants should reflect on how their groups worked together to come up with creative explanations for each card and gain new insights into strategic planning. Additionally, discuss successes and ways to apply what was learned in real-world scenarios.

#9. SWOT Analysis

The objective of this activity is to help employees identify internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats.

Materials: Whiteboard or paper, markers

  • Ask the group to identify an area in which they need to implement change or improvement.
  • Have each group member list out their own strengths and weaknesses related to the topic. Also, they should identify any external opportunities or threats that could impact their success.
  • Ask the group to brainstorm potential strategies based on their strengths and weaknesses, as well as any external opportunities or threats.
  • Then, they can discuss the risks and benefits associated with each strategy, and make an informed decision.

During the debrief, it’s important to ensure that everyone understands how their individual insights contributed to the strategic planning process. You should also encourage group members to share any additional ideas or questions they may have.

#10. The Strategy Grid

This activity is to help teams focus on actionable items while creating an effective plan for achieving results.

Time: 30 minutes-1 hour

Materials: Paper and Markers

  • The facilitator should draw the grid on paper or whiteboard, with columns and rows representing the goals, objectives, strategies, tactics, and timelines needed to achieve success.
  • Team members should then brainstorm and come up with different ideas for each section of the grid.
  • Encourage discussions and ask questions to ensure everyone understands the objective of the activity.
  • After all the sections are filled out on the grid, the teammates should discuss the best strategies and tactics to achieve each goal.
  • Once finished, debrief as a team, highlighting successes and areas for improvement from the activity.

As a facilitator, remind the team that communication and collaboration are key to achieving success. Also, encourage the team members to be open and honest in their feedback on what worked well during the activity as it will help them in future planning sessions.

Want Some Unique Team Building Activities?

If you want some unique activities (both in person and virtual) for your employees, you can get my new e-book:

The Busy Leader’s Guide of Unique Team Building Activities: 30 Fully Customizable Exercises That You Can Conduct with Any Group of Employees, Anywhere

Final Words

Strategic planning team building activities help employees to do proper risk assessments and make better decisions. They also help foster collaboration and communication, which are essential for any successful business. So, try out some of these activities today and watch your team blossom!

Like this article on “10 Strategic Planning Team Building Activities for Your Employees”? Feel free to share your thoughts.

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12 Strategic Planning Exercises to Help You Get Amazing Results Next Year

by Greg Head | Dec 28, 2016

strategic planning activities games

If you are like most early-stage entrepreneurs, you set aggressive goals. You probably got a lot done this year, but you still came up short on achieving everything on your plan. Now it’s time to assess how you did this year and determine what needs to happen next year.

When you fell short, did you under-execute or did you set your goals too high? It was probably a little of both.

Great execution requires serious planning, especially as your team grows. Making clear strategic decisions and aligning everyone to the same goals are powerful “force multipliers” for your business. Strategy is simply the answer to the bigger questions, and what your execution depends on.

If you’re not taking time every quarter to ask deep questions and create goals for your company, you’re in a state of MSU (“Making Sh#% Up”). MSU creates misalignment, confusion, frustration, and the bad habit of missed commitments. This problem multiplies as your business grows.

Here are 12 powerful strategy exercises to help you think differently, set strategic priorities, align your plans, and get better results.

Strategic Planning Basics

These are the simple, time-tested strategic planning questions that are widely used in goal-setting, prioritization, and execution:

  • Strategic Planning – What’s the current situation? What are we trying to accomplish? What do we need to do to get there from here in the next quarter, year, or 3 years? (see Strategic Planning for Dummies)
  • SWOT Analysis – What are our internal Strengths and Weaknesses?  What are our external Opportunities and Threats? ( SWOT  explained)
  • Continuous Improvement – What is working? What’s not working and needs to be improved? What lessons have we learned? ( Continuous Improvement  explained)
  • People & Organization – Do we have the right people in the right roles? (Jim Collins calls this “A-players in key seats.”) Are all the major functions and priorities of the business “owned” by responsible leaders? How does our organization, staff, and culture need to change to accomplish our goals?

Check out Verne Harnish’s One-Page Strategic Plan and checklist for some simple tools to guide your discussion and final result.

Getting the Big Things Right

These questions will keep you out of the weeds and focus you on the real reasons you are in business:

  • Serving Stakeholders  How well did we serve our stakeholders–employees, customers, partners, owners/investors, and our community? Which of these did we serve best and worst? How can we improve? (see  Shareholders First? ,  Harvard Business Review)
  • Purpose and Values – Did we stay true to our stated Purpose (our larger cause)? Did we live up to (or fall short of) our stated Values? Are we hiring and firing to our Purpose and Values?
  • The Dan Sullivan Question – If we were having this discussion 3 years from today, and we were looking back over those 3 years, what has to have happened for us to feel happy with our progress? ( The Dan Sullivan Question, Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach)
  • Hedgehog Concept – Three questions: 1) What are we deeply passionate about? 2) What can we be the best at?  3) What drives our economic or resource engine? Where do these three intersect (our hedgehog focus)? ( Hedgehog Concept , in “Good to Great,” by Jim Collins)

New Thinking Creates Different Results

These questions will help you expand your thinking and see things differently. You can make room for more productive actions when you let go of bad habits, unproductive beliefs, and outdated processes:

  • New Possibilities – What would we do if we could not fail? What would we do if we had no fear and no excuses? What would be possible if we had no limits on our resources, staff, or time?
  • Stop Doing List – What thoughts, beliefs, and habits are no longer useful and should be left in the past? What types of customers and employees should we stop pursuing/hiring? Which initiatives should be stopped so we can use the resources more productively?
  • Fire Your Old Self – If you fired yourself and hired the best candidate in the world to replace you, what would they do differently to get better results? How can you start doing that immediately? Who do you need to be to create the results you want?
  • The One Thing – What’s the ONE Thing we can do right now, and by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary? (see Gary Keller’s “ The One Thing”)

Even disciplined entrepreneurs who take planning seriously don’t accomplish all of their big goals. They face unexpected internal challenges, external forces they can’t control, and massive “learning opportunities.” No problem, just keep moving and start again.

The growth game is won by the leaders and teams who keep their eyes on the big goals and continually adjust to make progress. Keep moving forward.

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Recipes for energizing your team celebrations.

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Who doesn’t love to celebrate?! And it’s an important step for our teams and groups as well. I want share with you three meaningful “games” for three different scenarios. These activities are related to celebrating an aspect of the team or organization. I will include the learning theory behind the game, the process for delivering…

Barbara-8-2017

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Sony President Outlines Strategic Shift Towards Multiplatform First-Party Game Releases, Including PC, to Drive Profit Margins

S ony President and PlayStation Chairman Hiroki Totoki recently discussed the strategic opportunities inherent in expanding the availability of first-party games onto PC platforms. He described the company’s proactive efforts in this direction as part of an ambitious plan to drive profit margins.

Totoki’s remarks came during an investor Q&A coinciding with the release of Sony’s latest financial earnings report. Responding to inquiries about strategies to enhance profitability within the gaming division, he addressed the challenges associated with reducing costs in PlayStation hardware due to component pricing.

However, he emphasized a shift towards a “multiplatform” approach to releasing first-party games as a potentially lucrative avenue for growth.

“In the past, our primary objective was to popularize our console through exclusive first-party titles,” Totoki explained. “While that remains true, there’s also a synergistic effect. Strong first-party content can bolster not only our console but also other platforms like computers. Embracing a multiplatform strategy can contribute to improving operating profit. This is an area we are actively pursuing.”

Expressing his belief in the existence of opportunities for margin improvement, Totoki expressed a desire to aggressively pursue enhanced margin performance.

Under the leadership of former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, Sony traditionally released its games as console exclusives initially, with PC releases following “at least a year” later, with some exceptions for live-service games.

It remains unclear whether Totoki, who assumed the interim CEO position following Ryan’s departure, intends to narrow this gap to leverage the initial excitement surrounding PlayStation releases. Alternatively, his statements may align with Sony’s previous assertion that PC and mobile platforms would represent 50% of its first-party portfolio by 2025.

While Sony has experienced notable success with PC releases of PlayStation games, including titles such as God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves, its most recent major PC success was Helldivers 2, which launched simultaneously on PC and Steam last week.

The post Sony President Outlines Strategic Shift Towards Multiplatform First-Party Game Releases, Including PC, to Drive Profit Margins first appeared on ReelZap .

Sony President Outlines Strategic Shift Towards Multiplatform First-Party Game Releases, Including PC, to Drive Profit Margins (Credits: Push Square)

Betonline - Strategic Winning 17+

Plan your goals properly, nhat khang company limited, designed for iphone, iphone screenshots, description.

A Betonline for creating basketball game schematics. Customize courts, save schemes, create animations, and use drawing tools to move pieces around the field. Betonline allows you to visually represent game strategies with player movements, ball passes, and trajectory drawings. DRAWING TOOLS: Our app provides you with various drawing tools to create game schemes. No need for paper and pencils anymore – design your perfect strategy digitally. COURT CUSTOMIZATION: You can tailor the court to match your strategy precisely. Adjust the size, lines, and other court elements to suit your needs. CUSTOMIZE PLAYERS AND BALL: Customize player appearances and the ball's look to make the game as realistic as possible. Choose colors, sizes, and other details to match your vision. SCHEME ANIMATION: With the animation feature, breathe life into your schemes. In the transition between frames, you modify element placements and draw, creating a dynamic and interactive game narrative. SCREEN RECORDING WITH ANIMATION: Bring your schemes to life by recording the screen with animations. Share your best ideas and strategies with friends or sports coaches. Take advantage of the opportunity to create the best basketball game schemes and strategies. Betonline is your ultimate companion in sports achievements. Try it now and become a true basketball game master! Don't wait; download the app and start making sports history today!

Version 1.3

1.3 Enhanced user experience

App Privacy

The developer, NHAT KHANG COMPANY LIMITED , indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .

Data Used to Track You

The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

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Disability Action Plan

The Disability Action Plan sets out the immediate actions the government will take in 2024 to improve disabled people’s everyday lives and lays the foundations for longer-term change.

Ref: ISBN 978-1-5286-4675-8, E03061238 02/24, CP 1014

Order a copy

Annex A: list of actions

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Disability Action Plan (PDF)

PDF , 607 KB , 48 pages

This file may not be suitable for users of assistive technology.

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Disability Action Plan (British Sign Language)

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PDF , 599 KB , 70 pages

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Disability Action Plan (Welsh)

PDF , 389 KB , 48 pages

Disability Action Plan (audio version)

The Plan sets out actions the government will take forward with disabled people, their organisations, and other government departments and public service providers in the following areas:

  • Support disabled people who want to be elected to public office.
  • Include disabled people’s needs in emergency and resilience planning.
  • Include disabled people’s needs in climate-related policies.
  • Improve information and outcomes for families in which someone is disabled.
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  • Help the government measure how effective its policies and services are for disabled people.
  • Research issues facing disabled people in the future.
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  • Improve understanding of the cost of living for disabled people.
  • Promote better understanding of United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) across government.
  • Monitor and report progress of the Disability Action Plan.

We have developed this new Disability Action Plan to complement:

  • the National Disability Strategy which sets out the long-term vision to transform disabled people’s lives for the better
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Super Bowl 2024: Why the glaring contrast in Chiefs, 49ers new OT rules preparation may have decided the game

The chiefs prepared and knew proper strategy for the new playoff ot rules; the 49ers did not.

shanahan3.jpg

The NFL playoff overtime rules changed several years ago, but  Super Bowl LVIII was the first playoff game where the new format was in effect. The basics of the new overtime rules are simple: both teams get possession of the ball no matter if a team scores a touchdown on the opening possession or not. 

The Kansas City Chiefs certainly knew what was going on. The San Francisco 49ers did not. And that was the ball game: Chiefs 25, 49ers 22.

Here's a look at the striking difference in the way the two teams were prepared for a potential overtime.

49ers didn't know the new playoff rules

In the aftermath of the Chiefs' overtime Super Bowl victory, San Francisco players admitted they did not know the new overtime rules -- even though they were in place for two years. 

"I guess that's not the case," 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk said,  via The Ringer . "I don't really know the strategy." 

Juszczyk thought a team that got the ball first in overtime won if they scored a touchdown, which was the rule instituted in 2010. Under those playoff overtime rules, the game would not immediately end if the team that gets the ball first scores a field goal on its first possession -- but the game would end if a touchdown is scored by the offense or if the defense scores a safety on the first possession of the overtime period.

The 49ers'  Arik Armstead also admitted he wasn't aware of the new overtime rule, not knowing the other team got possession of the ball even if the team that won the coin toss -- and chose to receive -- scored a touchdown. Those were the sudden death overtime rules pre-2010. 

If 49ers players were unaware of the new overtime rules, did Kyle Shanahan know? If Shanahan did know, how did he prepare for a Super Bowl that certainly had the potential to go to overtime? It was a possibility that skyrocketed after kicker Jake Moody had an extra point attempt blocked with 11:22 left in the fourth quarter, resulting in only a 3-point lead.

The 49ers decided to take the ball first in overtime, a decision made even worse since at least some of Shanahan's players did not know what the protocol was if the 49ers scored. Since both teams get possession of the ball in overtime, going first wasn't the optimum strategy.

No matter what the 49ers did, the Chiefs knew exactly what they needed when they got the ball. Yes, in case the 49ers didn't know: The Chiefs were getting the ball in overtime. Of course, by choosing to get the ball first, Shanahan wouldn't be aware of what was needed, or what the Chiefs might do.

"This is something we talked about with, you know, that none of us have a ton of experience of it but we went through all the analytics and talked with those guys and we just thought it would be better, we just wanted the ball third," Shanahan said after the game, via a league transcript. "If both teams matched and scored, we wanted to be the ones who had the chance to go in. 

"We got that field goal, so we knew we had to hold them to at least a field goal. And if we did then we thought it was in our hands after that."

The 49ers clearly showed a lack of awareness. With the Niners' field goal, the Chiefs knew they needed a touchdown to win the Super Bowl. Even if the 49ers had scored a touchdown, the pressure would've been on them to choose between kicking the extra point or attempting a two-point conversion.

In fact, the only way the 49ers benefitted from choosing to get the ball first would've been by scoring a touchdown and then converting the two-point attempt. Anything else? Advantage, Chiefs.

Chiefs talked playoff OT strategy with analytics coordinator

Kansas City was certainly prepared for the new overtime rules, as head coach Andy Reid kept discussing the rules with his team throughout the playoffs. He knew the possibility of an overtime game was always on the table. 

How did Reid know what to do if the Chiefs had won the coin toss? Reid trusted Mike Frazier, who has been with Reid all 11 seasons in Kansas City as the Statistical Analysis Coordinator. Frazier had the same role with the Philadelphia Eagles from 2003 to 2012 -- also with Reid. 

"That's the value of Mike. He does a great job with that," Reid said, via a league transcript. "There's two ways you can go with it. You can either kick it off or you can receive it. I'm not sure there's a right answer necessarily. Ours ended up being the right one. 

"That easily could have gone the other way. That's what we felt was the right thing to do...That was just something that we chose throughout studies. We felt that was important."

The Chiefs wanted the ball second. The 49ers wanted the ball third (if that was a possibility). 

Clearly the 49ers made a mistake once they failed to get into the end zone. With Patrick Mahomes on the opposite sideline, the 49ers should have put the pressure on him to score a touchdown first (and Reid to make a decision whether to go for two afterwards).

Of course, this would have been avoided if San Francisco knew the rules. Neither the players -- nor the head coach -- were aware of the situation. 

And that was the ball game. 

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2 New Strategic Planning Icebreaker Activities

Strategy , Tools , Fun Strategic Planning , Strategic Planning , Strategic Thinking , Innovation , Collaboration

Based on executives visiting the Brainzooming website, there is considerable interest right now in “strategic planning icebreaker activities.”   I guess that isn’t surprising. This is the time of year when most organizations that are going to do strategic planning are thinking about it or have already started.

Here are two brand new ideas for strategic planning icebreaker activities. They both materialized last week. One is from a misunderstood comment at a strategic planning workshop. The other is a spin on a strategic planning technique someone told me about.

#1. Why can’t we have nice things?

Walking up to a small group at a Brainzooming strategic planning workshop, I mistakenly thought one participant said, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” That was enough of an inspiration to jot the idea down on this sticky note.

strategic planning activities games

It occurred to me that this could be one of those fun strategic planning icebreaker activities to start a conversation about challenges and roadblocks an organization is facing. As it’s shown here, people can introduce themselves, then state a reason the organization can’t have nice innovations. Nothing about the question suggests whether the responses must be serious or silly. You may want to arrange for an early participant to share a silly answer to keep the tone light.

#2. Fill in the Blank

The second icebreaker activity idea came from someone telling me about a strategic planning workshop exercise where they used fill-in-the-blank questions. That made me remember the Match Game television program. On the game show, contestants completed a sentence by filling in a blank. The players scored points based on whether celebrities matched their answers to the typically suggestive questions.

Why not use a similar approach for strategic planning icebreaker activities?

Based on the same theme of getting a conversation started about innovation challenges, possible questions are:

  • “If someone comes up with a big idea , you can expect BLANK to ask more questions than anyone.”
  • “The most disruptive innovation we ever tried was like a whack to the BLANK.”
  • “When an innovation doesn’t come out as planned , somebody around here always says BLANK.”

I'm thinking we'd print the questions on sheets of orange paper, allowing people to answer them in writing and then hold them up as they introduce themselves.

Remember: These Are from the Brainzooming R&D Lab

We haven’t tried either of these in a real workshop yet, but we will soon. If you beat us to it, contact us about how they go! –  Mike Brown

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Date published: 09/05/17

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IMAGES

  1. Game Plan Strategy Planning Tactic Target Concept

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  2. Top 10 Strategic Planning Board Games

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  3. 15 Strategy Board Games That'll Unleash Your Inner Genius

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  4. 80 Fun Strategic Planning Activities and Ideas!

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  5. Fun Strategic Planning Activities

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  6. Strategic Planning Game

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VIDEO

  1. Strategic Plan Training 6 15 23

  2. Introduction to Strategic Planning

  3. Strategy Practice Interest Group Business Meeting 2023

  4. 22.Beginning Strategy (Planning Concepts)

  5. Strategic Planning 1

  6. Strategic Planning

COMMENTS

  1. 80 Fun Strategic Planning Activities and Ideas!

    9 Ways to Keep Strategy Meetings Fresh 12 Ideas for Spicing Up Strategy Meetings in the Boardroom via the Bedroom 11 Ideas for Fun Strategic Planning Activities 8 Icebreaker Activities 5 Fun Strategic Planning Activities 3 Short, Funny Strategy Questions 7 Types of Strategy Planning Fun

  2. Team Building Exercises

    Use the exercises below to strengthen your team's strategic thinking and planning skills. The activities should also help to improve communication and collaboration skills. You can use them in various ways, for example with a group of new managers, or to refresh the skills of senior leaders. Exercise 1: Early Bird vs.

  3. Games for vision and strategy meetings

    Games for vision and strategy meetings - Gamestorming Category: Games for vision and strategy meetings Posted on June 11, 2022 by David Mastronardi Even Flow Framework by Troy Schubert Polarities live as interdependent pairs that need each other to exist, for example inhaling & exhaling. One pole is not valued as better than the other.

  4. Icebreaker Activities

    1. What would be the title of your autobiography? Theme: Summarizing complex events or concepts. Purpose: Preparing for activities like crafting a vision statement. 2. If you were a superhero, what would you call yourself? Theme: Naming stuff is hard! Purpose: Practicing packing a lot of info into a single, evocative word or phrase.

  5. 35 effective leadership activities and games

    35 effective leadership activities and games by Robert Cserti on May 19, 2023 21 min read 23 comments Share Good leaders can make or break a team. While more and more people are being asked to step into leadership roles, the path to becoming a good leader is long and not always straightforward. This is where leadership activities come in.

  6. Games Can Make You a Better Strategist

    Games Can Make You a Better Strategist. by. Martin Reeves. and. Georg Wittenburg. September 07, 2015. Play has long infused the language of business: we talk of players, moves, end games, play ...

  7. 8 Fun Strategic Planning Icebreaker Activities

    8 Fun Strategic Planning Icebreaker Activities Tools , Creativity , Fun Strategic Planning , Strategic Planning , Collaboration I'll admit it upfront: I'm not a huge fan of highly-involved, fun strategic planning icebreaker activities that don't provide direct value to the strategic thinking we need to do.

  8. 18 Fun Leadership Games to Build Skills

    Leadership games are fun challenges and activities designed to help players learn essential skills and become better leaders. Examples include 60 seconds story, guess the drawing, and the blindfold game. ... This challenge inspires creativity, strategic planning, and teamwork. To play this game, team members have to work together to build a ...

  9. Best Strategic Planning Activities for Your Organization

    Team building exercises: Activities like trust falls, problem-solving puzzles, or team sports can help build trust and improve communication within the team. These activities can be customized to fit the needs and goals of the organization.

  10. Become A Strategic Thinker with Creative Thinking Games

    Group Games. Carpenter Strategy Toolbox - This site is an open-source wealth of exercises and video tutorials for teaching strategic management with a class or a group. Team Building Kits - Team Building Kits is an immersive mystery game designed to combine fun and bonding with teamwork productivity.

  11. 80 Funny Strategic Planning Activities and Ideas!

    3 Short, Funny Strategy Questions 7 Types of Strategy Planning Fun 11 Fun Strategic Planning Browse that Are No Stuffy for Works 7 Ways Groups Can Collaborate on Fun Strategic Planning New Way to Proficient Convert Fun Strategic Planning Activities up Virtual and Hybrid Conferences

  12. 20 Essential Strategic Thinking Exercises for Maximum Impact

    Objective Setting Setting clear objectives is a critical step in strategic thinking. This exercise involves establishing specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your organization.

  13. Fun Strategic Planning Exercises

    Here are six creative ideas for last minute changes to turn around a boring strategy meeting by fashioning quick, fun strategic planning exercises and activities: Create a competition. Split your whole group into smaller groups and turn your strategy work into a competition. Challenge each group to do more of whatever it is you need - more ...

  14. 11 Fun Strategic Planning Ideas

    This updated Brainzooming eBook features: 11 go-to approaches Brainzooming uses to design and facilitate strategic planning activities that are fun, productive, and boost results. New tips to maximize the fun and engagement in virtual and hybrid meetings. A bonus checklist to translate all the fun strategy planning approaches directly to your ...

  15. 7 Key Activities for a Strategic Planning Facilitator

    Last updated on Sep 27, 2023 As the strategy leader, you have seven activities to which I recommend you pay close attention to build a strong strategy that has full buy-in and commitment. Gain your team's commitment and buy-in to the process

  16. Ten Strategic Planning Activities

    Ten Strategic Planning Activities $99.95 Free! Ten fun activities which challenge established ways of thinking and involve strategic planning, problem solving and innovative thinking. Add to cart Category: Mini Games Packs Description

  17. Games for planning

    How to Play Step 1: Become aware Tell the players that we're going to explore states-of-being or actions that appear to be opposites of one another. Ask the players to take a few minutes and silently brainstorm perceived states-of-being or actions, and their opposites.

  18. 10 Strategic Planning Team Building Activities for Your Employees

    #1. Brain Mapping Brain Mapping is a team building activity that encourages collaboration between team members while creating effective solutions. Time: 30 minutes - 1 hour Materials: Computer, Whiteboard/Paper, and Markers Participants: 2-10 people Instructions

  19. 11 Best & Updated Fun Strategic Planning Ideas

    The 11 Best & Updated Fun Strategy Planning Ideas is free and features: Eleven go-to approaches Brainzooming uses to design and facilitate strategic planning activities that are fun, productive, and boost results. New tips to maximize the fun and engagement potential in virtual and hybrid meetings. A bonus checklist to translate all the fun ...

  20. 12 Strategic Planning Exercises to Help You Get Amazing Results Next

    Making clear strategic decisions and aligning everyone to the same goals are powerful "force multipliers" for your business. Strategy is simply the answer to the bigger questions, and what your execution depends on. If you're not taking time every quarter to ask deep questions and create goals for your company, you're in a state of MSU ...

  21. strategic planning games

    strategic planning games Recipes for Energizing Your Team Celebrations! By Barbara MacKay | May 17, 2016 Who doesn't love to celebrate?! And it's an important step for our teams and groups as well. I want share with you three meaningful "games" for three different scenarios.

  22. Best strategy games in 2024

    Worms W.M.D is inspired by the classic Worms Armageddon game from the 90s but packs in plenty of new features and quality-of-life changes that make this one of the best Worms games ever.

  23. Sony President Outlines Strategic Shift Towards Multiplatform ...

    Sony President and PlayStation Chairman Hiroki Totoki recently discussed the strategic opportunities inherent in expanding the availability of first-party games onto PC platforms. He described the ...

  24. ‎Betonline

    ‎A Betonline for creating basketball game schematics. Customize courts, save schemes, create animations, and use drawing tools to move pieces around the field. Betonline allows you to visually represent game strategies with player movements, ball passes, and trajectory drawings. DRAWING TOOLS: O…

  25. 5 Fun Strategic Planning Activities

    What does Ghostbusters have to do with strategy? By definition, you aren't supposed to be able to anticipate black swan events. But when a client wants a black swan exercise, you figure out a way to give them a black swan exercise. This fun strategic planning activity gets its fun from the connection to Ghostbusters that inspired the exercise.

  26. Disability Action Plan

    The Disability Action Plan sets out the immediate actions the government will take in 2024 to improve disabled people's everyday lives and lays the foundations for longer-term change.

  27. Super Bowl 2024: Why the glaring contrast in Chiefs, 49ers new OT rules

    Super Bowl 2024: Why the glaring contrast in Chiefs, 49ers new OT rules preparation may have decided the game The Chiefs prepared and knew proper strategy for the new playoff OT rules; the 49ers ...

  28. 2 New Strategic Planning Icebreaker Activities

    You may want to arrange for an early participant to share a silly answer to keep the tone light. #2. Fill in the Blank. The second icebreaker activity idea came from someone telling me about a strategic planning workshop exercise where they used fill-in-the-blank questions. That made me remember the Match Game television program.

  29. Travis Kelce Names Chiefs Staff's Secret Weapon Who Laid Out Overtime

    One of the biggest storylines of Super Bowl LVIII, a 25—22 Kansas City Chiefs victory over the San Francisco 49ers, was the overtime period. The Chiefs had a clear plan in place for overtime ...