Goals: Improve your attendees’ collaboration and problem solving.
Is your team having problems working together to solve problems? Towers of Hanoi is an exercise where a team of attendees must work together to transfer a tower of items from one location to another. This simple team building brings out communication and trust issues quickly and is a fast way to determine where your team is in terms of team dynamics.
Time: 20–60 minutes
Participants: 2–8 per team; use breakouts for additional teams
Technology: Share Screen, breakouts
Category: Problem solving, collaboration
Setup: Chat http://mathisfun.com/games/towerofhanoi.html and ask one attendee per team to click on the link. Have the attendee share their screen. If you have more than one team, assign a team leader to each team,
share the link, and put them into their own breakout room after you give instructions.
Instructions to the Audience: Your team goal is to move the tower of this stack of disks from one location to another in the least number of moves.
Assign at least one disk to each of your attendees.
You can assign more than one disk to an attendee after every attendee has a disk.
Only move that disk when the attendee asks to move it.
You can only move one disc at a time and you can only put a smaller disk on top of a larger disk in one of the three provided spaces.
Tips: You can use more or less disks to increase or decrease the complexity. 4 disks = 15 moves, 5 disks = 31 moves, 6 disks = 63 moves. Key themes from this team building game are problem solving, communication, sharing of ideas, leadership, and analytical thinking. You can place other metaphors on this event such as moving inventory or staging an office move
or a complex project such as building a product or a house.
Debrief: Did your attendees plan before they started moving?
What did you do when you got stuck? How would you describe the attendee process?
How do you think you could speed up the process? How could you make the process more harmonious?
What can we learn from this activity to perform better at work?
Click play to see the solution to the Towers of Hanoi.
Want to learn more?
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