Did you know? Only 28% of employees are excellent critical thinkers. At the same time, research shows that critical thinking ranks first for employers in terms of its importance for employee success. It is as high as communication (98.5%), higher than teamwork (97.7%), and even much higher than leadership competencies (58.5%).
If it’s also significant for your team (and it must be if you’re here), then this article is a no-skip read for you. We’ve compiled the best critical-thinking team-building ideas for every need and taste indoors (in-office, off-site, or virtually) and outdoors. Afterward, don’t miss out on the expert strategies for boosting critical-thinking skills in your crew.
Follow the lead and build a high-performing team of reasonable brainiacs.
Indoor Critical-Thinking Team Building
Problem-Solving Exercise
Needless to say, problem-solving and critical-thinking skills march hand in hand in our brains. No critical thought = no breakthrough = no problem solved. That is, you need to think critically to tackle problems more effectively. Besides, the study proves when you deal with issues collaboratively in a group, every individual has considerable improvement in critical thinking.
So, consider problem-solving team-building activities like these:
- Brain-twisters
- Puzzles
- Marshmallow-Spaghetti Tower or Cup-Pyramid Building
- Escape Rooms
- Code Breaks
- Riddles, etc.
Your team members can master critical thinking skills when solving the conundrum, escaping from the room, breaking the code, and doing other engaging things offline or online (if you’re working remotely).
For example:
Light & Wonder organized a thematic escape quest to solve puzzles together virtually for skill-boosting and joyful holiday team building.
Source: LinkedIn
Hack-a-thon (or App-a-thon/Cloud-a-thon)
Have you ever tried running a hacking marathon, aka hack-a-thon, or, more frequently, hackathon?
This is quite a popular solution to stimulate critical thinking and problem-solving among employees specializing in tech-related fields, such as IT services, education technology (EdTech), banking and finance technology (FinTech), and so on.
For example:
Teradata hosts an annual Vantage Cloud-A-Thon, in which teams compete to tackle 14 different challenges on machine learning, generative AI, cloud strategy, etc.
Source: LinkedIn
Note: This can be a great critical-thinking team-building idea to engage Gen Z employees who prefer more innovative challenges with technologies like AI.
Critical-Thinking Workshop or Course
It’s kind of a workout for the brain: if you train it regularly, it grows cognitive “muscles” like analysis, logical reasoning, and others.
Joe Schaeppi, CEO & Co-Founder at Solsten, says, “So, make sure to incorporate critical-thinking workshops or classes in your continuous learning and development plan for employees. Pack those with brain-teasing icebreakers, brainstorming blitzes, “What Would You Do?” role-playing scenarios, and more! Besides, you can pick your preferred mode: face-to-face or virtually via Zoom or Microsoft Teams.”
For example:
The Physio Inq team leaders engaged in a critical-thinking training course as a part of their in-house upskilling program with an online coach via a video-conferencing tool.
Source: LinkedIn
Stress Test
Let’s face it—stressful real-life situations don’t have a pause button to stop and think it through. That’s why you must prepare your team for anything, even the worst.
And that’s when stress-testing can help your workers sharpen resilience and decision-making skills while being one step away from a disaster. Later, when a crisis strikes, they will handle it reasonably with steady hands and cold heads.
It can be:
- Tight project deadline
- Technical problem
- Customer service failure
- Stakeholder conflict
- Financial emergency
- Hacking or social-engineering attack
- The “everything goes wrong” case with multiple unexpected issues
For example:
Develop scenarios for employees to manage deadlines under pressure individually or run shock tests in cybersecurity for the whole team.
Or—
Why not create a competitive environment?
For example:
Every year, FORVIA (Faurecia) arranges the 8D competition to stress-test the team’s problem-solving abilities.
Source: LinkedIn
Outdoor Critical Thinking Team Building
Build-Up Challenge
If you want to organize team building beyond the office, this is just what you need.
Here are several build-up challenges that belong to the best critical-thinking team-building activities for your team to enjoy outdoors:
- Cardboard boat or car
- Tower (e.g., a balloon or cardboard box tower)
- Pipe bridge
- Giant “spider web” between two objects (poles or trees)
- Aerodynamic paper airplane
For example:
See how the MGI Joyce Dickson team indulged in Friday fun with a dash of friendly rivalry during their F1 car-building competition.
Source: LinkedIn
Your teams can alternatively compete in building cardboard boats and see whose boat keeps sailing longer.
Geocaching
Are you ready to become treasure hunters, aka “geocachers”?
Embark on an exciting treasure hunt and develop your spatial critical-thinking skills together in a super-engaging way.
Here’s how you can plan your geocaching team-building event:
- Pick a suitable outdoor location: You can opt for existing spots via the Geocaching® app or Geocaching.com website or hide unique treasures (geocaches) in the neighborhood or local park.
- Split your employees into groups and choose team leaders.
- Equip everyone with tools: Clue sheets + GPS-enabled devices (use your smartphones).
- Give additional problem-solving tasks: Prepare riddles to create a more challenging experience for each geocache location.
- Add gamification elements: Levels, prizes, awards, etc.
For example:
Besides cycling and mini-golf tournaments, Reaction Biology, a BioTech company, enjoyed the geocaching game in the Black Forest (Germany) during their annual corporate retreat.
Source: LinkedIn
Outdoor Detective Role-Playing
Now, how about stepping into Sherlock’s shoes and solving a murder mystery?
This way, you can play one of the best critical-thinking team-building games on logic and deduction with assigned (or drawn) roles as follows:
- The Lead Detective (“Sherlock”) takes charge of the investigation.
- The Forensic Expert (“Lab Geek”) pays attention to the smallest nuances and analyzes physical evidence (footprints or suspicious objects).
- The Cryptographer (“Code-Breaker”) deciphers cryptic messages and cracks codes.
- The Record Keeper (“Scribe”) types or writes down all the conversations and findings.
- The Interrogator (“Questioner”) collects testimonies.
- The Witnesses (“Onlookers”) get some input information beforehand but don’t reveal everything unless the sharp-minded “detectives” ask the right questions.
Pro tip: You can make it thematic for Halloween and select a spooky place (an abandoned building on the outskirts of the city/town or a remote cabin in the woods).
As an alternative, go for a virtual murder mystery, just like the Wealthify team.
Source: LinkedIn
Set the 1920’s theme to virtually untangle a mysterious knot of clues leading to the culprit. (What if it’s the witness?!)
Survival Adventure
Yep, throwing your team into the wilderness (in an organized and controlled way!) might be the best thing for their brains.
Here’s the reason.
On top of a survival skill set, including orienteering and fire-starting, you will also build up the following:
- Situational awareness
- Strategic decision-making
- Team collaboration
- Fast and creative problem-solving
- Psychological endurance
- Stress management
- Adaptability
Pro tip: Turn to a dedicated survival training center to prepare a guided adventure program for your team. And then, try to survive in the mountains or the desert with practically no equipment and minimum water (but with some bits of Google’s or ChatGPT’s assistance—if there’s an Internet connection, of course).
Source: YouTube
How to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills in Your Team
Develop Them in Parallel with Creativity
In fact, creative thinking and analytical abilities are the two skills that are expected to grow in importance for over 70% of companies between 2023 and 2027.
Some employers even claim they should be cultivated alongside, inseparably. Laurence Bonicalzi Bridier, CEO at ArtMajeur by YourArt, is one of them. The art business leader explains, “Divergent (creative) thinking sets the stage for innovation, whereas convergent (critical) thinking reshapes and refines fresh, innovative ideas into something meaningful and practical. In other words, your employees need to think outside the box first to put the box together later.”
If you want to build a creative team of reasonable thinkers, “you may combine creative and critical thinking during DIY workshops as creativity naturally flows when you do something with your own hands and minimal prompts or nudges,” according to Laurence Bonicalzi Bridier.
For example:
Amid the People’s Day celebration, Santander rolled out a pizza-making workshop for employees to promote resourcefulness, decision-making (regarding ingredients and dough decisions), and creativity (for the topping).
Source: Instagram
Teach Your Employees to Ask Proper Questions
What are those?
Let’s review the most relevant types: what-ifs and “five whys.”
What-If Questions
For Tom Golubovich, Head of Marketing & Media Relations at Ninja Transfers, “What-ifs are like practicing yoga but for the brain—mental yoga if you wish. They gently stretch your team members’ imagination and make them reasonably think about different possibilities and outcomes.”
For example:
His marketing team uses this tactic to predict customer concerns about DTF transfers and address them in advance on social media: What if I don’t have a heat press, only a household iron?
Source: TikTok
Pro tip: You may also use what-if questions for critical-thinking team building to mitigate project management risks:
- What if the project’s scope changes midway through?
- What if one of the crew members gets sick or leaves during the project?
- What if there’s a client/stakeholder communication breakdown?
- What if the supplier fails to deliver materials on time?
- What if we experience a data breach and leakage?
- What if we don’t meet our initial OKRs? What’s our backup plan?
The Five Whys Method
The root-cause analysis with “five whys” is another way to practice reasoning.
David Haskins, CEO at WrongfulDeathLawyer.com, argues that it is the cornerstone of cause-and-effect methodology for critical thinkers in specific spheres (like legal) and overall. “The Five Whys is an indispensable critical-thinking technique for law professionals. It helps lawyers drill down to the true causes of legal issues. And we have successfully implemented it in our law practice.
However, it can likewise be used in any other industry.”
Here’s how.
Determine a problem
↓
Why did it happen? (Or why is it happening now?)
↓
Why is that?
↓
Why is that?
↓
Why is that?
↓
Root Cause
Source: LinkedIn
Perform a Retrospective Analysis Regularly
Thanks to retrospectives (one of the key elements in the Agile methodology), your team won’t make the same mistakes ever again.
Molly Ancel, Managing Partner at Peerpoint Property Solutions, says, “Retrospective analysis is a must-learn skill for teams who want to identify what’s driving and what’s stalling performance and progress and transform setbacks into winning comebacks. That’s why I’d recommend running retrospective meetings after each project, without exception, as the most effective critical-thinking team-building exercise. They are applicable to all business processes, from marketing campaigns to sales.”
Instead of saying, “That was a tough project… Anyway, let’s move on to the next one,” run a retrospective meeting and answer these fundamental questions:
- What worked perfectly? Let’s repeat this strategy next time.
- What didn’t work? Let’s fix that and try another approach (or tool).
Mind: If you prefer Agile project management, you should be running those after each sprint.
Pro tip: Delve into retrospective analytics with Nimble Retro to make your “look-backs” even more structured and productive.
Build an Effective Team of Critical Thinkers in Nimble
Let your employees’ thoughts fly swiftly (sometimes flying out of the box to innovate), but always guide them toward the pursued goal. Think smarter while getting a panoramic view of your projects and tasks in Nimble’s work management software, which has incredibly handy features for Agile companies.
After all, the most successful teams don’t just cope with project heaps—they do it reasonably and flexibly. Go Nimble and stay adaptive to any changes coming your team’s way.
