Lifeboat Game and a difficult decision

Lifeboat Game is a captivating and difficult activity to discover how emotions affect the success of our negotiations.

It is necessary to form small groups of 5 to 6 people. Give each team a list of 15 people who are on a yacht in the middle of the ocean.

Tell them that the yacht
developed a leak and is sinking rapidly. There is only one lifeboat and it will have capacity
only nine people; There is no room for one more and there are no more lifeboats or life jackets.

Each group is challenged to reach an agreement on which of the 15 people will go in the
lifeboat and be saved. However, they must also list those that they keep in order of
importance, because if they run out of food and water, the “less important people”
You have to throw it overboard.

The key to this game is to make the 15 people on the list as controversial as possible. For example, include a priest, a minister, a rabbi, a pregnant woman, a powerful person, leaders of both major political parties, an ex-convict, a doctor, people of different ethnicities, etc.

Give them a period of time to resolve the problem. Make it long enough to enter.
Heated discussion but brief enough to speed up the activity.

At the end, each team shares their list.

Moment of Reflection

• What problems or difficulties did you have during decision making in your team?
• Why did these problems occur in the first place?
• How did you solve these problems? Do you think it was the best way? Why?
• How else could they have resolved their differences?

The topics of this publication: interactions, negotiation, argumentation, make agreements