The Map of Who Knows What
Build the team's expertise map on a wall in forty minutes. It outlives the session.
OnboardingCross-team networkingCollaboration
Team building & HR activity playbooks
Team building people
actually want to attend
Complete run sheets for team building activities and HR programmes — timing, materials, what the facilitator says, and the debrief questions that make it stick. Free to read, free to run, nothing to book.
How it works
Easy for you, useful for your team
- 1
Start from the problem
Six things a team activity can usefully do, and a set of questions that rule out most of the catalogue in two minutes.
- 2
Take the whole run sheet
Every activity has timings, materials, the facilitator's actual job in each phase, and the mistakes that sink it.
- 3
Run it yourself
Nothing here needs a vendor, a venue or a budget line. Most of it needs a room or a call and someone prepared.
- 4
Debrief properly
Each activity comes with specific debrief questions, because the fifteen minutes afterwards is what people remember.
Featured playbooks
Start with one of these
Problem Swap
Bring a problem you are stuck on. Leave with someone else's three ideas.
Problem solvingCollaborationTrust & safety
Rose, Bud, Thorn
Three words, one round, five minutes. The highest-value-per-minute thing on this site.
CommunicationTrust & safetyWellbeing
The Pre-Mortem
It is a year from now and the project failed. Write the story of how.
Problem solvingTrust & safetyCommunication
The Blind Build
One person can see the model. One person can touch the bricks. Nobody enjoys the middle.
CommunicationCollaborationProblem solving
Shout-Out Roulette
Everyone gets a name. Everyone says something specific and true about that person.
RecognitionTrust & safetyInclusion
What it is for
Serious play, specific results
Communication
Teams practise handover, listening and saying the difficult thing while the stakes are low.
Trust & safety
The cost of admitting a mistake drops. Problems surface weeks earlier.
Cross-team networking
People find out who to ask, which is the thing most teams lose the most time to.
Onboarding
New starters get a map of the place instead of a folder of documents.
Problem solving
Structured practice at ambiguous problems under a time limit, away from a live deadline.
Recognition
Good work becomes visible to people other than the person's manager.
Collections
Pick by constraint
Virtual team building
Activities built for a video call, not squeezed into one
23 activitiesIn-person team building
For a room, a hallway or a field
25 activitiesQuick icebreakers
Fifteen minutes or less, start of a meeting
9 activitiesNew hire onboarding
For the first two weeks, when nobody knows who to ask
8 activitiesRemote team rituals
Small things, repeated weekly
12 activitiesLarge group events
Thirty people and up, one facilitator
15 activitiesNo budget needed
Nothing to buy, nothing to book
26 activitiesOffsites & retreats
Longer blocks for a day away
19 activitiesGiving back
Team building with an output someone else keeps
2 activitiesLeadership development
Practice at directing, delegating and deciding
5 activitiesSeasonal & holiday
For the end of the year, and the quiet weeks around it
7 activitiesHR programmes
Build something that repeats
Two weeks, roughly six hours of scheduled activity
The first two weeks
An onboarding plan built around who to ask, not what to read.
Ongoing — about forty minutes a week plus one longer session a quarterA year of remote rituals
Small repeating things that keep a distributed team connected between the big events.
One day, nine until fourA one-day offsite that decides something
A running order for a single day, with the activities placed where they do work.
Guides
Read before you book a room
How to choose a team building activity
Start from the problem, not the catalogue. Five questions that eliminate about ninety per cent of the options.
Virtual team building that does not flop
Most remote sessions fail for four specific, fixable reasons. None of them is the activity.
The debrief is the activity
Fifteen minutes of structured questions is what turns an afternoon out into something a team refers back to.
Measuring whether team building worked
Smile sheets measure the catering. Here is what to measure instead, and what you honestly cannot.
Why team building fails
Seven failure modes, each of which is a design problem rather than an attitude problem.
No sales call, no quote, no vendor.
Everything here is free to read and free to run. Take a run sheet and go.