The Office Tower Challenge
Office Tower is an amazing and challenging activity that encourages collaboration and teaches team members to face uncertainty and deal with failure. Additionally, this activity helps develop skills such as patience, frustration, strategy, creativity and teamwork.
This game consists of two parts. First, instruct your team members to go around the office and bring back any random object, except for paper and the personal belongings of other team members.
Now, your team members will be building a tower using all the objects they gathered. The rule here is simple: every next object must be placed on top of another one.
Every team member can only place their object and can’t touch or adjust others. Team members can, however, ask other team members to adjust their objects in a tower.
If the tower collapses, even partially, your team must perform a total do-over. On every attempt, objects can be placed in any order.
Your team members must be working together to decide the right order of the objects, help each other to better place the objects, and so on.
For this activity to be successful, we recommend doing it with groups of more than 15 members.
Moment of Reflection
- At what point did you feel that you were getting frustrated? Why were you frustrated? Did you employ any strategies that helped you cope with the frustration?
- Was there a moment when you lost patience and no longer wanted to continue playing and complete the challenge?
- What helped your group discover a solution that works? Were there constant trial and error work cycles? Did you add new learnings to each failed attempt so you wouldn’t make the same mistake again?
- Once they managed to build the tower, what did you think? What did you feel? How did you experience that triumph?
- Could it be possible that other intractable problems in your life and work have a solution too, ie but you can’t see it yet?
The topics of this publication: reflection, self, lateral thinking, teamwork, collaboration, cooperation, adaptability skills, strategy, planning, adaptation, emotions, resilience
