Motivation:
Do you remember when you fell in love? You understood your partner blindly, you felt trust and you were able to do amazing things together effortlessly?
You can achieve the same with your team, but longer lasting and minus the heartbreak and the expensive divorce lawyers. That’s what we call professional love. You don’t believe us? Proof us wrong!
Goal of the Game:
The goal of playing “Professional Love! Prove us wrong!” is to help build psychological safety in a team. Through the game the level of trust in the team will improve team collaboration, may help form team agreements, allow for people to build to ask for help, shift from a team with conflict to a team that has constructive conflict, and help people to grow. Let’s create joy in teams!
Connection?
Empathy?
Compassion?
You progress through four stages, which focus on different aspects :
- Who am I?
- Answers for others.
- How are we going to work together?
- Creative mode.
Number of Players:
- Works perfect for team size 3-9 players
- Works with twists for <= 10 team mates
Timing:
- Ca. 20 minutes per player
Materials:
- Tabletopia (web-based) + a video conferencing tool + audio devices + optional: video camera
- Cards + board
Credits:
Anke Stettner, Yvonne Wurzel, Matthias Drescher, Glenn Waters, Janek Panneitz, Rebekka Mander, Markus Wittwer, Michael Kaufman, Martin Heider
Gameplay:
Link to the current list of questions: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1adXhY-jXOWv_S2zlMIzkVAGPC5VrfPc3I_cHkcTaN8I/edit?usp=sharing
1. Setup
To set up the game take two card decks out of the box
- “Questions – Stage 1”
- “Answermodes – Stage 1”
Shuffle both decks and place them face-down in the middle so that everybody can reach the cards.
2. Play 1st stage
You play turn by turn in clockwise order. One round is finished when every player has taken their turn. The active player draws two cards – one question card and one answermode card.
Read out loud the question and then look at the answermode card. In the first stage, there are only three possibilities:
- You alone answer the question
- Everybody answers the question, but within 30 seconds per person
- You answer the question in the form of “2 truths and 1 lie”. That means you give three answers to the question – two of them have to be true, one has to be a lie. It’s up to you if you reveal the lie at the end.
After the question is answered, place the question card on a discard pile and shuffle the answermode card back into the answermode deck. Now the next player in clockwise order becomes the active player and draws two cards.
End of first stage:
After every complete round you choose as a group to stay in stage 1 or to move on to stage 2.
If you run out of questions, but want to stay in stage 1, just reshuffle all question cards from the discard pile.
3. Play 2nd stage
The second stage plays exactly like the first but with two new card decks (put the cards from stage 1 aside for now)
- “Questions – Stage 2”
- “Answermodes – Stage 2”
Now you have completely different answermodes. They are based on the idea that someone is answering the question for you or you are answering the question for others.
Proceed as known until you (as a group) want to move on to stage 3.
4.Play 3rd stage
On the 3rd stage the gameplay still remains the same, but you have to build your own answermode deck. You can choose freely from every card you have so far plus the ones you get with the deck “answermode – stage 3”.
Now take the question-card deck for stage 3 from the box and continue the game as you know it with your personalized answermode deck.
5. Play 4th stage
The 4th and final stage is the open round. Not only can you again refine and prepare a new answermode deck, but also the question deck.
Feel free to look through unused question cards of the stages before or use the blank cards to write your own. Now, ask the other players what you want to know from each other!
Instruction Variants:
- Instead of each player drawing different answermode cards in a turn, the players all play with the same answermode in for a whole round and only change the answermode after everyone took their turn