TEAM BUILDING
See a new side of your colleagues with this interactive teambuild

“You’ll never look at your work colleagues the same”
SHAUN MURISON – IG | CFD & Forex Trading



Trusted by South Africa’s top brands for over 17 years
Our Murder Mystery teambuild has some unique benefits over other team building
At our teambuilds the participants get to play completely different characters to the ones they play in the office. They change the story of their interaction.
If John and Sue play the characters of Neels 9mm and Poppie Poggenpoel they have a completely new interaction because Neels and Poppie have a very different story to John and Sue.
However under it all, John and Sue are still present during Neels and Poppie’s story and that presence during a new story is what contributes to redefining the incomplete stereotypes of workplace characters.
In case you were wondering, Neels 9mm and Poppie Poggenpoel are characters in our Hoodlums of Hillbrow and Gangsters of the Cape Flats stories.
“Once they saw everyone else dressing up … they went beserk!”
– hear Kate’s thoughts on her teambuild below –
Saving your team from the danger of a Single Story
Our lives, our teams and our workplaces are composed of many overlapping stories. If we hear only a single story about a co-worker, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
Of course our work persona is certainly a part of who we are, but it’s not all of who we are. It’s just one narrative. It’s our work character – ‘the salesman’ or ‘the creative’ or ‘the boss’ or ‘the developer’.
Those characters are a part of us, but they don’t define us. They are simply a single story of our character’s part in a greater team story.
The danger for teams is that when people us as one thing over and over again, then that is what we become to them. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.
How this teambuilding helps you
By allowing team members to participate as characters in a fantasy Murder Mystery story we provide people with a fun and safe environment to express stories of themselves which may not find a space in the traditional office narrative.
This means that through this teambuild your team gets to hang up their work character and dispel the incomplete stereotypes that unwittingly find their way into our offices when we portray the same ‘character’ over and over again.
Why this team build is different to other teambuilding
Traditional teambuilding focuses on the behavioral level, where this team build focuses on the awareness level.
While there is certainly a place for teambuilding like drumming, survivor, amazing race, minute-to-win-it etc, in those team builds you are working together as a team to achieve a goal. While that sounds about right, it’s not really that different from what you do in the office. You are just working together toward a different goal. You hope that by doing the same thing (solving a challenge) in a different setting (teambuild vs office) that your team members will suddenly have a new insight into one another.
The problem is that such an approach doesn’t do anything to address the incomplete stereotypes that the members of your team have of you! When John the salesman and the Sue the sales manager sit next to each other around the drumming circle, they may be having fun, but the dynamic which defines the interaction is still the single story of salesman/sales manager. They do something different (behavioural level) but they don’t change their characters (awareness level).

“Great way to get everyone out of their shells, no matter their position”
KIRSTY BECK – Lyoness