Fantastic Team Building Activity!

We talk a lot about the importance of creating teams in agile. People need to learn to work together towards an overall goal and share accountability rather than each person doing only their piece and not caring about the whole. It takes a long time for a new team to gel and really become a team, but there are team building activities that can help.

In December, I was lucky enough to discover a great team building activity available in Cape Town, London, Paris and Dubai! It’s called HintHunt. My team and I enjoyed it so much we went back in January to play their second room!

What is it?

• Imagine a team of people (3 to 6)
• With a strict timebox of 1 hour (let’s call it a sprint)
• and a shared goal to achieve in that time (getting out of the room)

How do you do it?

• You have to use problem solving skills
• And communicate well between all the team members
• You can even track where you are with a whiteboard

Does everyone succeed?

Actually no, that’s the part that makes it so much fun, it’s a real challenge. I don’t remember the exact stats but only about 40% of people have solved the first room, and about 10% have solved the new zen room.

Anyone else thinking this sounds exactly like Scrum?

As soon as I played I realised this is the ideal game for a Scrum team to play together. It builds teams to do exactly what they need to do to build great software, and it’s a great deal of fun. So if you live in one of the cities I’ve mentioned be sure to check it out.

Let us know if you beat our record of 1 min 59 sec remaining on the clock for the Zen room 🙂