Grid Unlock—How to Work Together to Solve Problems

Goals: Get attendees to find their own way to work together and solve problems.

Grid Unlock is a classic “Magic Squares” challenge updated for a virtual meeting. In a shared spreadsheet, attendees enter nine numbers until you can get every row, column, and diagonal to sum to 15. This is a great initiative for analytical thinking, problem solving, communication,
and cooperation that has the bonus of teaching a team how to collaborate on a single document.

Time: 15–30 minutes

Participants: 3–9 per team; use breakout rooms if there are more

Technology: Share Screen and Microsoft Excel on a Shared OneDrive, Google Sheets or other applications that allow simultaneous editing

Category: Improving performance, problem solving

Setup: Create a copy of Grid Unlock Excel or Grid Unlock Sheets. Click “share” and get a link to the spreadsheet saved on your server. Chat the link to all attendees. If you use breakout rooms, have a different link for every breakout room.

Instructions to the Audience: Your team needs to get the correct code to unlock these contents. The correct code has every row, every column, and both diagonals that add up to 15. Every attendee is assigned at least one number from 1 to 9. If you have fewer than nine people, you can assign two or more numbers to an attendee.

Once assigned, you are responsible for entering your number into the grid.
You have limited time to complete this challenge. (Suggested: 10 minutes)

Tips: Watch for how the attendees work together or don’t work together during this process.

Roles such as leader and data entry usually emerge.

Debrief: What happened? How did your meeting tackle this challenge?
So what? So what did you learn about solving problems as a group?
Now what? Now what will you do differently in your next meeting based on this activity?

Variations: You can repeat this initiative up to two more times and time each iteration. You can give two to five minutes of planning time before you start the stopwatch. Write down the times for each completion and calculate the % increase or decrease in time. You can also involve more people and make this exercise more complex by creating a 4×4
grid that totals 34 or a 5×5 grid that totals to 65, but know that adding more people will slow down the problem solving and increase the difficulty.

Want to learn more?
Click to register for the Engaging Virtual Meetings Conference, every year in October.

http://engagingvirtualmeetings.com/conference

For more team building challenges, fill out the form: