This game is fun and good to get creative juices flowing before a brainstorming session.
Split the people into groups of 5-6 people.
Give them each an orange and one person per group gets a lemon.
Now give them these rules:
- All fruit through all hands.
- Lemon ends where it started.
Fastest team gets a point. Don’t say anything else.
Say “Go” and clock them.
Most teams start by passing the fruit around from hand to hand and end up with a result of 10-20 seconds (depending on the group size).
Now, make them do it again but faster: give them a target of 1 second.
They will look at you with incredulous eyes. They will fuss and stress. The noise level and group energy will go up.
Tell them they can try a few options but when you say “Go” they have to be ready.
When they are ready, say “Go” and see what happens.
Usually all teams more or less ‘get it right’. They understand that passing the fruit around is not fast enough and that they have to ‘put their hands together’ to make this happen in a second. How they do this is irrelevant. There is no one right solution.
Learning goal:
- working as a team, especially under stress
- stop before you start: what is the problem here?
- finding creative solutions quickly
Time: about 5-10 minutes.