Broken Square Team-Building Activity: Instructions and Alternatives
The Broken Square Activity seems simple at first glance, but appearances can be deceptive!
Much more than just a puzzle that you put together as a team, the activity has proven itself a popular and effective way to develop skills like problem solving, non-verbal communication, collaboration, and more.
If you’re a facilitator looking for Broken Square Activity instructions, or for suggestions for alternative or additional activities for your team building workshop, this blog is for you.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
An overview of the Broken Square Activity
Learning objectives
Broken Square Activity instructions
Adapting the activity for different audiences
Broken Square Activity facilitation tips
An Overview of the Broken Square Activity
Used correctly, the Broken Square Activity is a powerful team-building exercise.
In it, participants are given a set of puzzle pieces and instructed to create a complete square. But there’s a twist: their pieces can’t make a complete square.
To create a square participants need to use pieces from other participants’ sets, but they can’t take the pieces unless offered, and no verbal communication is allowed.
Success in the activity therefore requires effective non-verbal communication, patience, and prioritising group success over individual success.
Because it’s so simple to set up and run, the Broken Square Activity has proven popular as a way to explore group dynamics in educational, corporate, and training contexts.
It also lends itself well to virtual settings, letting facilitators run the activity with digital tools for remote teams.
Learning Objectives
The Broken Square Activity is a good fit for facilitators looking to explore the following learning outcomes:
Teamwork: participants quickly realise that completing their square isn’t possible without helping others, placing emphasis on shared goals over personal success.
Problem solving: with limited resources and no verbal communication allowed, participants must be creative and adaptable to succeed.
Non-verbal communication: participants must rely on body language, gestures, and other means of conveying ideas clearly without words.
Emotional intelligence: observing and responding to other’s non-verbal cues fosters empathy and emotional regulation.
Maintaining focus: communication restrictions can lead to frustration, but success requires participants to manage this and communicate effectively.
Leadership: participants have the opportunity to model helpful behaviours and facilitate group success, which are valuable leadership skills.
Situational awareness: working silently invites awareness of other participants, as the usual verbal cues for support or information are absent.
Adaptability: restrictions on communication require participants to adjust their approach as the task progresses, experimenting with different methods and tactics to find something that works.
Broken Square Activity Instructions
Here’s how to run the Broken Square Activity in six easy steps:
Prepare the sets of puzzle pieces
Brief the participants and give them their pieces
Begin the activity
Check the squares
Review
Optional: repeat the activity
Full instructions below:
Step 1. Prepare the sets of puzzle pieces
For each participant, take a square piece of paper or card and cut it into pieces. Try to ensure that each piece is cut into a unique pattern: this ensures that no participant will be able to create a square with the pieces they initially receive.
If you want to give a visual indication of which set is which you can either use different coloured paper for each participant or write a number on the back of each piece made from the same piece of paper. This makes it easier to organise the pieces at the end of the activity, but gives participants a clearer clue as to which pieces they need to complete their square.
To prepare pieces for the participants, mix them in such a way that no participant has a complete set at the beginning. You could switch out the same number of pieces per set, or shuffle them all together and distribute them at random: the more shuffled they are, the harder the activity will be.
Step 2. Brief the participants and give them their pieces
Gather the participants and give them the following information:
The basic goal of the activity: to form a complete square with the puzzle pieces
The key rules: no talking, non-verbal communication only; and no taking puzzle pieces from other people, only giving away your pieces and receiving pieces offered to you.
Step 3. Begin the activity
Give each participant their pieces then begin the activity, observing as they get to work and not intervening unless somebody needs the rules to be clarified. Make sure to observe participant behaviour, paying particular attention to behaviours aligned with target learning objectives.
Step 4. Check the squares
Once participants indicate that their squares are complete, review each one to ensure accuracy. Prompt them to make any adjustments if necessary, reminding them to adhere to the rules.
Step 5. Review
This is the step where the real learning can take place, and is more important to the overall learning outcomes than the building process itself.
Gather everyone together and ask questions that prompt them to reflect on performance, behaviours, and barriers to success, all at the individual and group level.
Encourage everyone to contribute to the discussion and aim to strike a balance between open discussion and reflection on specific behaviours and learning outcomes.
Step 6. Optional: repeat the activity
From an experiential learning perspective, repeating the activity after a review gives participants an opportunity to apply insights gained from their group discussion.
The repeated attempt lets participants try new behaviours and strategies, and to see their impact on individual performance, group dynamics, and other areas.
If you’re looking to achieve deeper learning from the Broken Square Activity, we highly recommend this approach.
Adapting the Activity for Different Audiences
One of the strengths of the Broken Square Activity is that it can be easily tailored to the needs and abilities of different group types. Here are some ways to adapt the activity:
For virtual teams: use an online platform where participants can share pieces digitally with the same non-verbal constraints as the original.
For hybrid teams: combining virtual and in-person participants is a good way to explore how communication limitations impact performance in different environments.
Time pressure: introducing a time limit for completing the squares increases pressure which can alter behaviours and strategies, providing good discussion points for the review.
Communication windows: introducing short windows where verbal communication is allowed can get participants thinking about how to communicate as concisely and effectively as possible.
Rotating facilitator role: choose one participant to be a facilitator, and task them with guiding the group’s process. They are still subject to the same communication restrictions, but with no expectation to build a square they are free to help other participants. This introduces leadership into the mix and allows for discussions about how leaders can help or hinder performance.
More or less difficult: you can adjust the number of pieces required to complete a square up or down to meet the ability of the group.
Broken Square Activity Facilitation Tips
Effective facilitation balances guidance with giving participants the freedom to learn through experience. As a facilitator your role is to only intervene when necessary. Here are some things to keep in mind, and prompts you could use:
Observe without intervening: allowing participants to take ownership of the process lets them put communication and problem solving skills to use. Observing these and making notes for discussion later is far more effective than actively trying to influence behaviour.
Invite other observers: assigning an observer role to 1-2 participants and asking them to take notes on what they see taking place brings extra material from a different perspective to the review phase, opening out discussion.
Non-verbal communication: invite participants to think about types of non-verbal communication, from gestures, to body language, to facial expressions. Invite them to think about ways to express ideas or needs without words.
Patience and group awareness: invite participants to be aware of their responses to potentially frustrating situations, and to consider these as part of the learning process. Invite them to reflect on how emotions impact team dynamics.
Silent reflection: if participants seem confused or daunted by the task after the brief, allowing a couple of minutes of silent reflection can help them to collect their thoughts and consider potential strategies, building confidence for the activity itself.
In Conclusion
The Broken Square Activity is a versatile tool for exploring and developing a suite of behaviours related to teamwork, communication, problem solving, leadership, and more. Facilitated properly it can be enjoyable, engaging, and lead to impactful, lasting learning.
In this post we’ve introduced the activity and outlined the steps required to run it. We’ve also looked at learning outcomes, adaptations, and facilitator tips. It’s our hope that anyone reading this piece now has the information they need to run the activity in a meaningful way.
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