9 Problem-Solving Activities to Try With Your Team at Work

When teams struggle to solve problems together, deadlines slip and innovation stalls. Try these nine problem-solving activities with your team to spark collaboration and drive creativity.

What’s Coming Up

• Why Problem-Solving Matters in Teamwork
• How Do Teams Solve Problems Effectively?
• 9 Powerful Team-Building Problem-Solving Activities
• How Personality Influences Problem-Solving
• Choosing the Right Problem-Solving Activities for Your Team
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Further Reading

Why Problem-Solving Matters in Teamwork

When Cloverpop analyzed hundreds of business decisions, they found something interesting – teams outperform individual decision-makers 66% of the time.

The payoff for having a team with strong problem-solving skills is substantial. MIT Sloan School of Management researchers found that soft skills training delivered a 250% return on investment within eight months.

Teams that are good at problem-solving respond faster to market changes, generate more innovative solutions, and demonstrate greater resilience during challenges. In today’s complex business landscape, teams that can tackle problems together hold a clear competitive advantage.

But many organizations struggle with team-based problem-solving. Today, we’re here to help with that. These problem-solving activities can be layered upon other team-building exercises to establish a strong foundation for agile group collaboration.

How Do Teams Solve Problems Effectively?

Before jumping into specific problem-solving activities, it helps to understand a key framework that drives successful teams. Effective problem-solving follows core steps that any group can learn and apply:

• Define the problem clearly: Ask who experiences it, what’s happening, why it matters, and where/when it occurs. This prevents wasting effort on the wrong issue.
• Generate ideas (divergent thinking): Encourage many ideas without judgment. Diverse perspectives and even “wild” ideas can spark the best solutions.
• Select the best options (convergent thinking): Evaluate ideas based on feasibility, impact, and resources, narrowing down to the strongest ones.
• Make decisions together: Use structured methods, such as fist-to-five voting, to reach consensus while surfacing disagreements for discussion.
• Plan and execute: Assign roles, set milestones, and prepare for roadblocks with contingency plans.
• Review and learn: After implementation, reflect on what worked and what didn’t, strengthening the team for future challenges.

By understanding this framework, teams build a repeatable process for tackling challenges of any size. Next, we’ll look at practical problem-solving activities for team-building that put these steps into action and make them part of everyday teamwork.

9 Powerful Team-Building Problem-Solving Activities

The following problem-solving activities strengthen each phase of the problem-solving cycle, helping your team transform potential into proven capability. While some activities work best for small teams and others scale effectively for large groups across departments, most can be adapted to meet your team’s unique needs.

1. Move It! Challenge

Materials needed: Open space, tape for floor marking

Time required: 10-15 minutes

Instructions:

1. Mark two parallel lines on the floor with tape, spacing them approximately eight feet apart.
2. Divide your team into two equal groups and have them stand facing each other on opposite lines.
3. Present the challenge: both groups must completely switch places while following three constraints – only one person can move at a time, no one can move backward, and each spot can only be occupied by one person at once.
4. Give teams a few minutes to strategize and plan their approach before anyone starts moving.
5. After completing the challenge, facilitate a debrief discussion about their planning process, communication strategies, and the importance of thinking multiple moves ahead.

Expected outcome: Teams practice planning ahead and working together within limits – just like managing projects with tight resources.

2. Lightning Logic Puzzles

Materials needed: Lateral thinking puzzle cards or list

Time required: 15 minutes

Instructions:

1. Divide participants into small groups.
2. Present a lateral thinking puzzle to all of the groups, such as “A man lives on the 20th floor but takes the elevator only to the 10th floor, why?”
3. Explain that teams can investigate the puzzle only by asking yes or no questions to narrow down the solution. Each team will have the opportunity to ask one question per turn.
4. As the facilitator, respond to all questions with only “yes,” “no,” or “irrelevant” to maintain the challenge.
5. The first team to correctly solve the puzzle earns a point or prize.
6. Repeat the activity, rotating between different types of puzzles throughout the session to engage various thinking styles and prevent any one team from dominating.

Expected outcome: Participants practice asking structured questions and challenging assumptions – skills they can use in root cause analysis.

3. SCAMPER Innovation Workshop

Materials needed: Common office items, SCAMPER prompt cards

Time required: 30-45 minutes

Instructions:

1. Divide participants into small groups and give each team a common office item like a stapler, coffee mug, or notebook to reimagine.
2. Introduce the SCAMPER question prompts, explaining that teams will answer each one about their item:
   • Substitute: What could replace this?
   • Combine: What could this merge with?
   • Adapt: What else is like this?
   • Modify/Magnify: How could we emphasize or exaggerate?
   • Put to another use: What else could this do?
   • Eliminate: What could we remove?
   • Reverse: What if we did the opposite?
3. Teams work through each question systematically, using them to redesign their ordinary item for an entirely new purpose or market.
4. Each group presents their most innovative transformations to everyone, explaining which prompts led to their breakthrough ideas.
5. Conclude with a vote to identify both the most creative solution and the most practical one that could actually be implemented.

Expected outcome: Teams master SCAMPER, a systematic creativity method that uses seven specific thinking prompts to force new perspectives on existing products or processes. This technique is directly applicable to product development and process improvement challenges in any industry.

4. Bad Ideas Brainstorm

Materials needed: Sticky notes, markers, wall space

Time required: 25-30 minutes

Instructions:

1. Divide participants into small groups.
2. Present a real workplace challenge that your team is currently facing or has recently encountered.
3. Set a timer for 10 minutes and instruct teams to generate the most intentionally terrible, impractical, or absurd solutions they can imagine.
4. Have teams post all their bad ideas on the wall using sticky notes, creating a gallery of deliberately awful solutions.
5. Each team selects three of their worst ideas and works to transform elements of them into surprisingly viable, practical solutions.
6. Teams share their concepts with the group, explaining how they converted terrible ideas into workable ones and what creative insights emerged during the process.
7. As a group, identify which seemingly “bad” elements actually contained seeds of innovation or challenged useful assumptions about the problem.

Expected outcome: This reverse approach breaks creative blocks and demonstrates how unconventional thinking leads to breakthrough solutions. When combined with activities for communication skills, teams become even more effective at articulating and refining these creative ideas.

5. Six-Hats Problem-Solving

Materials needed: Six colored hat cards or actual hats, scenario cards

Time required: 45 minutes

Instructions:

1. Assign each team member one of the six colored thinking hats, explaining their specific perspective:
   • White: Facts and information
   • Red: Emotions and intuition
   • Black: Caution and critical thinking
   • Yellow: Optimism and benefits
   • Green: Creativity and alternatives
   • Blue: Process and control
2. Present a relevant business problem or scenario for the team to analyze and solve together.
3. Each person must contribute to the discussion strictly from their assigned hat’s perspective, staying in character even if they personally disagree with that viewpoint.
4. After solving the first problem, rotate the hats among team members and tackle a new challenge so everyone experiences different thinking styles.
5. Conclude with a group discussion about how forcing these different perspectives influenced the solutions and which viewpoints were most valuable at different stages.

Expected outcome: Teams learn to separate emotional from logical thinking while appreciating how diverse viewpoints create comprehensive solutions.

6. Random Word Connections

Materials needed: Random word generator or dictionary, current challenge list

Time required: 20-30 minutes

Instructions:

1. Divide participants into small groups.
2. Start by identifying a current team challenge or problem that needs fresh thinking.
3. Use a random word generator or flip through a dictionary to select three completely unrelated words.
4. Challenge teams to create innovative solutions that somehow connect or incorporate these random words into addressing the original problem.
5. Demonstrate with an example: If the challenge is “reduce meeting time” and the random words are “elephant,” “pizza,” and “telescope,” you might generate solutions like an “Elephant Memory System” for capturing key points, “Pizza Slice Timing” to divide the agenda into equal segments, or a “Telescope Focus” approach that zooms in only on the most important issues.
6. Teams develop their own creative connections, finding unexpected ways to link the random words to practical solutions.
7. Each team presents their connections to the group, then discuss which solution is both the most innovative and the most realistically implementable.

Expected outcome: This technique helps break routine thinking and shows how surprises can lead to creative breakthroughs.

7. “5 Whys” Root Cause Analysis

Materials needed: Problem scenario cards, analysis worksheets

Time required: 30-40 minutes

Instructions:

1. Divide participants into small groups.
2. Present a problem scenario that has multiple visible symptoms, such as “team meetings always run over time” or “project deadlines are frequently missed.”
3. Guide teams through five progressive levels of “why” questions, with each answer becoming the basis for the next “why” question:
   • Why do meetings run over? Because discussions go off-topic
   • Why do discussions go off-topic? Because there’s no clear agenda
   • Why is there no clear agenda? Because we decide topics as we go
   • Why do we decide as we go? Because we don’t plan meetings in advance
   • Why don’t we plan in advance? Because there’s no designated meeting owner
4. Have each team document their complete causation chain on worksheets, showing how they traced from symptom to root cause.
5. Compare the different paths teams took to reach their root causes, noting how the same problem can have multiple valid causation chains depending on the questions asked.
6. Conclude by applying this technique to a real challenge your team currently faces, using the practice round insights to dig deeper.

Expected outcome: Teams develop critical questioning techniques and learn to distinguish symptoms from root causes – essential for strategic problem-solving.

8. Solution Chain Problem-Solving

Materials needed: Problem scenario written on paper

Time required: 45 minutes

Instructions:

1. Present a complex problem scenario to the group, such as “a community garden is failing with plants dying, volunteers quitting, and neighbors complaining about the eyesore.”
2. The first person has 30 seconds to propose one initial solution to begin addressing the problem, such as “we can offer free snacks for volunteers.”
3. The next person must build directly on that solution while adding a completely new element or dimension to the approach: “we can offer free snacks and a bus pass to help with transportation.”
4. Continue around the circle with each person extending and enriching the collaborative solution by adding their unique contribution.
5. After everyone has contributed once, review the complete solution chain and identify which additions proved most valuable or transformative.
6. Start over with a new problem scenario but reverse the order of participants to see how different starting perspectives shape outcomes.
7. Compare the two solution chains to analyze how different starting points and contributor sequences led to entirely different approaches.
8. Conclude by applying this collaborative building method to a real challenge your team currently faces, using the insights gained from the practice rounds.

Expected outcome: Teams practice building on each other’s ideas and see how collaboration can lead to stronger solutions than working alone. This collaborative approach works particularly well when teams have already established trust through team-building activities designed to create psychological safety.

9. The Trading Post

Materials needed: Random office supplies (paperclips, sticky notes, pens, rubber bands, etc.)

Time required: 60 minutes

Instructions:

1. Divide participants into small groups.
2. Announce a specific building challenge such as “create the longest bridge between two tables” or “build the tallest stable structure.”
3. Give teams 10 minutes to assess their resources and develop an initial building strategy using only the supplies they’ve been given.
4. Open a “trading post” for 10 minutes where teams can approach each other to negotiate and exchange supplies.
5. Once the trading period closes, teams have 15 minutes to construct their solutions using their final collection of resources.
6. Facilitate a debriefing conversation. How did trading opportunities change each team’s strategic approach? Which negotiation tactics proved most effective for beneficial trades and problem-solving? How did resource sharing improve or complicate the final outcomes?

Expected outcome: Teams develop negotiation skills, resource optimization, and learn how collaboration between groups can improve everyone’s results.

How Personality Influences Problem-Solving

As you lead these activities, you’ll likely notice patterns in how different team members engage.

Some people dive straight into action, eager to test ideas immediately. Others hang back, observing and analyzing before contributing their ideas. You might see one person focusing intensely on getting the “right” answer while their teammate seems more concerned with making sure everyone’s voice is heard.

These aren’t random differences – they’re predictable patterns that reveal a lot about someone’s personality type.

Understanding these patterns helps you organize these activities so that everyone can contribute meaningfully. When you know why someone is holding back (they might be processing internally, not disengaged) or why another person seems to dominate (they might be thinking out loud, not trying to overshadow others), you can adapt your facilitation to draw out everyone’s best contributions.

Let’s explore how different personalities naturally approach problem-solving and how you can leverage these differences for better outcomes.

Analysts

Analysts share the Intuitive and Thinking personality traits. They’re usually strong at strategic problem-solving, relying on logical analysis. They easily spot patterns and make sense of the world through clear, systematic frameworks. In group activities, they tend to focus on root cause analysis, though they may miss emotional factors that other team members notice more quickly.

Diplomats

Diplomats share the Intuitive and Feeling personality traits. They often add stakeholder awareness and help build consensus in problem-solving. They focus on maintaining respect during tough discussions and make sure that solutions consider human needs. These team members excel in creative exercises but may hold back from necessary confrontation if conflicts arise.

Sentinels

Sentinels share the Observant and Judging personality traits. Their structured approach helps turn ideas into action. They’re strong in planning, execution, risk management, and making sure tasks get finished. In team-building activities, they keep the group focused on practical realities, though they may resist new problem-solving methods that don’t have a proven track record.

Explorers

Explorers share the Observant and Prospecting personality traits. They’re flexible and action-oriented. In crises or improvisation exercises, they adapt quickly and shift strategies when plans change. Their agility is a big strength in uncertain situations, though they may lack the long-term strategic vision that other personality types bring.

Choosing the Right Problem-Solving Activities for Your Team

Not every team needs the same activity – your group’s personality mix and current challenges determine which exercises deliver the biggest impact. Match activities to your team’s natural problem-solving style using the framework we outlined, then commit to regular practice.

You might start with weekly warm-ups before adding in monthly or quarterly challenges, for example. Document what works and then watch as structured problem-solving becomes second nature to your team. Groups that master this don’t just solve problems faster – they transform how work gets done, delivering breakthrough innovations and tackling any challenge with confidence.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should teams practice problem-solving activities?

Incorporate brief exercises weekly, with longer sessions monthly or quarterly. Regular 15-minute exercises in team meetings build habits better than occasional workshops. Integrate problem-solving approaches into regular work rather than treating them as separate training events.

Which activities work best for remote teams?

The Lightning Logic Puzzles, SCAMPER Innovation Workshop, and ’Five Whys’ Root Cause Analysis activities that we shared can all work well for remote teams. Use digital collaboration tools like Miro or Mural for visual exercises, and maintain engagement through shorter sessions, clear facilitation, and interactive elements.

How do we measure if problem-solving skills are improving?

To know if problem-solving skills are improving, look for behavioral changes in your teams. Are they using more structured approaches? Is decision-making faster? You’ll also want to track business outcomes like project completion rates, innovation metrics, and problem resolution times. Combine quantitative metrics with qualitative team feedback.

What if team members resist structured problem-solving methods?

If certain team members resist structured problem-solving methods, start by problem-solving issues that most matter to them. When they see their own pain points being addressed, they’re more likely to buy into the solution. Position methods as flexible tools, not rigid rules. Celebrate early wins publicly and let success spread organically.

Further Reading

• 25 Essential Team-Building Activities for Work
• 15 Team-Building Activities for Small Groups
• 12 Proven Team-Building Activities for Large Groups
• 15 Team-Building Activities for Communication Skills
• 8 Trust Team-Building Activities That Transform Team Dynamics