Win Win Win

What it is: collaboration vs. competition

What should a team’s strategy be? In this game participants discover that competitive spirit works only up to a point — it’s collaboration that actually builds success. As the game develops, it becomes obvious that working toward a common goal yields far better results. The activity revolves around a profit-maximization objective and delivers a lesson in collaboration both within teams and across them. Run it at medium energy (walking) or high energy (running).

How it works

The activity runs over five rounds. Name the five teams after real departments or functions in your organization and it lands even harder — it works for intra-departmental and inter-departmental collaboration alike. The five teams are arranged around a large loop, and the exercise requires participants to collect balls from the central loop as well as from the other teams. Those balls represent organizational profit, and the challenge is to maximize it.

Left to their instincts, teams compete — taking from one another — and the total profit stays low. In a powerful variation, you defuse that competition by combining the profits earned across all teams each round. Now the teams get several chances over the five rounds to improve the organization’s overall result, and the benefit of identifying a common goal and collaborating — rather than competing for the highest individual score — becomes impossible to miss.

What the group learns

• The need to rise above individual goals.
• That divergent goals are counter-productive for the organization as a whole.
• That collaboration between teams carries the organization forward — while competing for limited resources is detrimental to everyone’s success.

Just as important, participants get to reflect and judge for themselves the current state of their own organization — where these same dynamics are already playing out back at the office.

The debrief that makes it land

The real insight gets articulated after the exercise, in the conversation the facilitator leads — and it’s critical to have that dialogue, because the thoughts a group vocalizes afterward are what ultimately drive home what the exercise set out to teach. Two questions consistently open it up: Where is this competitiveness happening in our organization right now? and Are there projects right now that would benefit from more collaboration?

Who it’s for

Win Win Win is the platform for any group where you want to build pride in joint effort and collaboration for the common good — and it will amply demonstrate, in monetary and human terms, the benefits that accrue to an organization when its teams are more collaborative and less competitive with one another.