Sticks Activity
The Helium Stick is a short physical exercise where a team tries to lower a light rod to the ground using only their index fingers, and the stick almost always rises instead, exposing exactly how the group actually coordinates under pressure.
Four steps run in sequence: brief the team, attempt to lower the stick, debrief the dynamics, then link it back to their real challenges.
Reach for this when…
- A team's meetings are polite but decisions still get stuck.
- You want to surface coordination problems experientially, not through more discussion.
- A group needs a shared, low-stakes moment to talk honestly about how they work together.
How to run it
- Brief the team: lower the stick to the ground using only index fingers, all fingers staying in contact throughout.
- Run the attempt and let the stick rise, as it almost always does.
- Debrief: what happened to communication, who took the lead, what did frustration do to the group.
- Link what happened directly to the team's real coordination challenges.
A worked example
Situation. Mikko Virtanen ran Virtanen Leipomo, a small bakery chain based in Tampere, Finland, and his shop managers' weekly meeting had become a round of careful, over-polite agreement that never produced a decision.
Applied. Given the stick to lower, the group watched it rise steadily for two full minutes, each manager unconsciously pushing up rather than risk letting it drop on their side.
Result. The debrief named the exact pattern from their meetings: everyone protecting their own position rather than committing to a shared move. They agreed one manager would own each decision going forward instead of seeking full consensus.
The catch
The exercise is only as good as the debrief - run it without a facilitator connecting it back to real behaviour, and it's just a party trick. It also works best with groups who don't already know the trick; repeat audiences will fake the fall.
If nobody in the room can say out loud how the stick's behaviour matches their meetings, the debrief hasn't landed yet.
Origin: Various (experiential learning tradition)