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Team building can help a team handle conflict, but only one kind of conflict, and it can make the other kind worse. Below: how to tell which one you have, twelve activities for the kind team building helps with, and the debrief questions that turn a game into practice.
If you already know it is the everyday kind — crossed wires, clashing working styles, a team that avoids disagreement until it boils over — skip to the activities.
First: is this a team building problem?
Most workplace conflict is ordinary friction. People misread each other’s messages, want different things from the same project, or have never had to disagree with each other out loud. Team building is good for that. It builds the listening, the vocabulary and the goodwill a team needs to disagree without it turning personal.
Some conflict is not that, and a team event is the wrong response to it:
- Harassment, discrimination or bullying. These are HR matters with a legal dimension. Putting the people involved in a fun activity together tells the person who raised it to get over it.
- A formal complaint, or a dispute that is already with HR. Let the process run. An event in the middle of it looks like a verdict.
- One person’s performance or conduct. If the conflict is really about one person not doing their job, that is a conversation between them and their manager, not a team exercise that makes everyone else sit through it.
- A real power imbalance between the two sides. A manager and their report, or a senior team and a junior one, cannot settle a disagreement on equal terms in a game.
- A decision that has to be made. Sometimes two sides disagree because nobody has decided. The fix is a decision from the person who owns it.
For those, the right help is HR, a trained mediator, or a manager. Everything below is for the other kind: the team that needs to get better at disagreeing, not a dispute that needs settling.
A shared vocabulary: the five conflict styles
It helps a team to have words for how each of them tends to handle conflict, and the most widely used set comes from the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, published by Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann in 1974. It sorts conflict behavior along two lines — how much you push for your own concerns, and how much you try to meet the other person’s — and gives five styles:
| Style | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Competing | Push for your own position; win the argument |
| Collaborating | Work at it until both sides get what they need |
| Compromising | Split the difference; each gives something up |
| Avoiding | Step away from the disagreement altogether |
| Accommodating | Give the other person what they want |
None of the five is wrong. Avoiding is the right call for a trivial disagreement; competing is right in an emergency. Teams get into trouble when everyone defaults to the same one, or when two people with opposite defaults keep colliding. Several of the activities below come back to these five words in the debrief.
12 conflict resolution activities
Grouped by the skill each one practices. Run them with a team that is not in open conflict — they build the habit, and the week of a blow-up is the wrong time to start.
Listening and assumptions
1. Back-to-back drawing
15 minutes · pairs · a pen, paper and a few simple pictures
Two people sit back to back. One has a picture of a few simple shapes and describes it; the other draws it without seeing it, and may not ask questions. Then swap, and this time questions are allowed. Compare the two drawings.
Debrief: What did you assume the other person knew? How much better was the drawing once you could ask a question? Where does that happen at work?
2. Listener, speaker, observer
20 minutes · groups of three · a list of mild, low-stakes disagreements
One person argues a position on a low-stakes topic — open-plan offices, the right time for a standing meeting. The listener must summarize the argument back to the speaker’s satisfaction before replying. The observer watches for interruptions, and for the moment the listener started building a reply instead of listening. Rotate so everyone plays each role.
Debrief: How often did the summary need a correction? What changed when you had to get it right before you could answer?
3. The two-sided story
20 minutes · groups of four to six · a short written scenario
Give each half of the group a different account of the same event — a missed deadline, say, one written from the project lead’s side and one from the designer’s. Each half discusses what went wrong, then the two halves compare notes.
Debrief: Which facts did your version leave out? How quickly did your side decide who was at fault?
Perspective-taking
4. Role reversal
20 minutes · pairs · a real, low-stakes disagreement from the team
Pick a disagreement the team has had that is settled or harmless — the office playlist, the tool you almost switched to. Two people argue it, then swap and each argues the other’s side as convincingly as they can.
Debrief: Which argument was harder to make? What did you understand about the other side that you had not before?
5. Same numbers, different conclusions
25 minutes · groups of four to six · one short dataset or scenario
Give every group the same short set of facts — a budget, a page of customer comments — and ask each for a recommendation. Groups usually reach different conclusions from identical information. Present them side by side.
Debrief: Where did you start reading the facts differently? Which of your assumptions did the other groups not share?
Deciding together
6. The NASA moon survival exercise
40 minutes · groups of four to six · the exercise sheet
The classic consensus exercise, devised by the social psychologist Jay Hall in the 1960s. The team has crash-landed on the Moon, 200 miles from their mothership, and must rank fifteen salvaged items by how useful they will be. Each person ranks them alone first; then the group must agree a single ranking by consensus — no voting, no averaging. Compare both with NASA’s own ranking.
Debrief: Did the group’s ranking beat most of the individual ones? Who changed their mind, and what changed it? Did anyone go quiet rather than disagree?
7. Rank the priorities
20 minutes · groups of four to six · a list of eight to ten real priorities
The workplace version of the moon exercise: hand each group the team’s actual competing priorities for the quarter and ask for an agreed top three. This one gets close to real disagreement, so use it once the team has done a lighter exercise first.
Debrief: Which of the five styles showed up — who competed, who compromised, who avoided? How did the group reach its decision?
Collaborating under pressure
8. The marshmallow challenge
25 minutes · groups of four · per group: 20 sticks of dry spaghetti, a yard of tape, a yard of string and one marshmallow
Created by Peter Skillman and made famous by Tom Wujec. Each group has 18 minutes to build the tallest freestanding tower with the whole marshmallow on top. Wujec’s records show an average tower of about 20 inches — around 10 for business school graduates, and about 26 for children just out of kindergarten, because the children test early while the adults plan, build once, and run out of time.
Debrief: When did your group first test the design? Who had an idea that did not get heard? What would you do differently with the same 18 minutes?
9. The minefield
20 minutes · pairs · a blindfold and objects scattered across a clear floor
One partner is blindfolded; the other guides them across a room of scattered obstacles by voice alone. Run it once, then swap. It works only in person, and it needs a room people can move through safely.
Debrief: What made the directions easy or hard to trust? What did the guide do differently the second time?
Naming how you handle conflict
10. Style mapping
30 minutes · the whole team · the five styles above, on cards or a slide
Each person places themselves among the five styles for how they usually handle disagreement at work — and then, separately, where they would like to be. Share only if people want to. The point is the vocabulary: once a team can say “I think I’m avoiding this one,” disagreements get easier to name early.
Debrief: Which style is most common on this team? Which one is missing, and when might we need it?
Shared goal, low stakes
The last two are the ones we run ourselves, and they work for a different reason. They are not conflict exercises and nobody debriefs them as one. They give a team a shared job that has nothing to do with work, where the stakes are low enough that disagreeing does not matter — which is the point.
11. A cooking class
60 to 90 minutes · from a handful of people to several hundred · virtual or in person
Everyone makes the same dish at the same time, taught live by a chef. Small disagreements come up naturally — whose onions are sliced too thin, whether the chili goes in now — and get settled in seconds, with a result everyone eats at the end. A team cooking class is a good way to rebuild goodwill after a hard project, once the actual conflict has been dealt with. It is not a substitute for dealing with it.
12. A murder mystery
About 90 minutes · virtual · a live game master runs it
Everyone is handed a secret role, and the team works together to question suspects, share clues and name the killer before the reveal. It fits this list because it exercises the skills from activities 1 to 3 — listening closely, not jumping to conclusions, pooling what different people know — and because every person has a part to play, so the quieter half of the room has a reason to speak. Our murder mystery is set on a cruise ship, with drinks optional.
How to debrief, so it is not just a game
The activity is the warm-up; the debrief is where the practice happens. Three rules keep it useful:
- Keep it about the exercise, not about people. Ask what happened in the game, not who is like that at work. People draw the connection themselves, and being told it by a facilitator feels like an ambush.
- Ask three questions and stop. What happened? Why did it happen? Where does that happen at work? Long debriefs turn into lectures.
- Leave with one thing the team will do differently. One agreement — “we summarize before we reply in design reviews” — is worth more than a list of ten.
Spread one or two activities from this list across a quarter rather than running all of them in an afternoon. The skills stick when they are practiced often, not all at once.
Are there companies that run team building for conflict management?
There are two kinds, and it is worth knowing which one you need.
Facilitation and mediation firms run structured conflict workshops and mediate live disputes. If the conflict is already serious, or anything in the first section applies, this is the kind of help you want, and your HR team usually knows who to call.
Team event companies run the shared-goal activities — cooking classes, games, tastings — that build the goodwill and habits which stop ordinary friction from escalating. Rockoly is the second kind. We do not mediate disputes and we do not pretend a cooking class resolves one, but a team that has cooked a meal together and laughed at the results has an easier time disagreeing the following week.
For a lighter start, our icebreaker activities and questions work well as a warm-up before any of the exercises above, and the five stages of team development explains why a new team’s “storming” phase is normal and when to expect it.