Businesses are always looking for new ways to challenge and stimulate their employees. One way of accomplishing this is to have employees participate in various team building activities and decision making exercises. By participating in decision making exercises, employees are able to pick up new skills and learn to work together more efficiently as a group.
Lost at Sea
The game "Lost at Sea" is what's considered a consensus seeking task. The concept behind consensus seeking tasks is to get a group of people to pool their knowledge together in an effort to come up with the best possible decisions. While there are many variations to the lost at sea storyline, a common theme revolves around a fire damaging a ship while it's far from civilization, resulting in the survival of only 15 undamaged items. The group is tasked with coming up with a consensus based on ranking the items according to their importance to survival.
"Wilderness Survival" is another variation of a consensus seeking task. In wilderness survival a common theme is to have participants imagine they are all alone and lost in the woods. Each participant will be given a series of questions in which each question has three possible answers. The participants must choose one of the three choices for each question according to what they would do. When finished, the group members must compare their answers and come up with a group consensus on which answers are ideal.
"Prisoners' Dilemma" is a game that's considered an inter-group competition. The primary goal for inter-group competition games is to teach participants that collaborating can be the best way to compete. To play, participants are divided into two groups and told they are being interrogated for a crime. For 10 rounds, each group will need to decide whether or not it will confess to the crime. Points will be assessed accordingly, depending on whether both parties confess, neither party confesses, or only one party confesses. In the end, the team with the most points wins.
The Delphi Method
The "Delphi Method" is a group decision-making technique that can be used to achieve consensus through a series of questionnaires. When using the Delphi method, questionnaires are passed out to all participants so they can fill them out anonymously. After the results are tallied, a summary is given, and another questionnaire is handed out to each participant. This process is repeated until a consensus is reached for the entire group. This type of decision-making exercise is often utilized by juries when they're trying to reach a verdict.
- John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Part 1 Games, Role Plays, and Exercises
- RedmondFamily.com: Lost At Sea
- Change Management Toolbook: The Prisoner's Dilemma
- Copy / Paste: Prisoner’s Dilemma – A Game Theory Simulation
- Skills Converged: Decision Making Exercise - The Delphi Method
- The University of Alabama in Huntsville: 1.5 Delphi Method
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