Corporate Maze
Corporate Maze puts a team through a floor grid where only yes or no answers are allowed, and the real content of the exercise isn't the puzzle - it's who takes over navigating and who goes quiet.
A few steps run in order, with most of the weight loaded onto the last one, where the real behaviour shows.
Reach for this when…
- Two people dominate every meeting and the rest of the team has gone quiet, and nobody will say it out loud.
- A newly merged team hasn't found its working rhythm and status meetings feel flat.
- Leadership wants to see the team's actual dynamics rather than hear a description of them.
How to run it
- Brief the team: step through a grid on the floor one square at a time, the facilitator only answers yes or no.
- Let the team find the pattern by trial and error - the rule is never explained upfront.
- Time the exercise, and note who spoke, who led, who stayed silent, without commenting yet.
- Debrief: how did the team communicate, who led, who listened, how did they handle being told 'no'.
A worked example
Situation. Conor Byrne manages operations at GreenField Agritech, an agritech startup in Cork, Ireland, after two departments had just merged and meetings were being carried by the same two people every time.
Applied. He ran the maze with the full merged team. Within two minutes the same two people had taken over stepping through the grid and calling the moves, and the other six stood back and watched.
Result. The debrief didn't need much steering - the team had just watched itself do, in a low-stakes grid, exactly what it did in every planning meeting. That was the whole intervention; the fix conversation happened on its own.
The catch
The exercise only works if the debrief is run well - without it, it's just a game and the pattern goes unnamed. Some participants dismiss it as childish before it's finished, which can shut down the honesty the debrief depends on.
If the debrief takes less time than the maze itself, you skipped the part that mattered.
Origin: Various (experiential learning tradition)