A 90-Minute Team Values Workshop Using Puzzle4Life™ Pieces
A facilitator-ready workshop that moves a team from abstract values posters to seven pieces they actually recognise.
For Team leads, facilitators, and people managers · Updated 2026-08-04
Most team values exercises produce five words nobody can recall a month later. This workshop produces seven physical pieces, each attached to a real event the team lived through.
Before the session
Ask every participant to arrive with one story: a moment in the last year when the team was at its best. One moment, two minutes to tell.
Minutes 0–30: the stories
Each person tells their moment. Nobody comments, nobody names a value yet. A scribe captures only the verbs — what people actually did.
Minutes 30–60: extract the traits
Cluster the verbs on a wall. Clusters become candidate traits. This is the part teams normally skip, and it is the reason posters fail: the value has to come out of behaviour, not out of a list.
- Aim for eight to twelve candidate traits
- Reject any trait with no story behind it
- Merge synonyms aggressively
Minutes 60–80: choose seven
Vote down to seven. Each surviving trait must keep the name of the story it came from — the story is what makes it enforceable later.
Minutes 80–90: assign owners
One person volunteers to own each piece for the quarter. Owning a trait means noticing it publicly when it happens, not policing it.
After the session
Produce the seven pieces and mount them where the team works. Revisit at the next quarterly — retire any piece with no new stories attached to it.