The Crossword

What it is

Teams solve a large, purpose-built crossword together. The clues weave in the company’s own themes and the formats lived through during the day. It works as a stand-alone activity and equally well slotted into a corporate event or played through a dinner. There’s an online version too, for groups joining from different offices.

Solving an enormous crossword together

The Crossword is an unusual way to build a corporate identity, get to know each other and spend time together. It’s a simple tool with a lot of force in it, because it builds team spirit through collaboration and through competition at once. Solving a crossword sounds like a desk activity, right up to the moment you add a race where the group that fills the grid first wins. For an international team that needs to align and share a set of values, it does a surprising amount of work.

Most of us have taken a puzzle book on holiday at some point and ended up doing exactly this under an umbrella. Every year, probably.

So the idea was to build a proper setter’s challenge around the company itself. It puts what people know to the test across every part of their work: not only products, services and processes, but colleagues, partners, events, the things that actually happened.

In the first phase people have to earn the right to answer the clues, and after that it turns into a straight race between teams to complete as many words as possible.

So it’s a highly customisable activity, and an occasion to laugh together.

The Crossword: a challenge on a large scale

To make it genuinely original, we use a giant crossword.

A grid a metre high and several metres wide is, without question, a way to pull people in. Answering clues on something that size becomes a challenge on a different scale entirely.

The Crossword can work as:

• a stand-alone team building format, or
• an add-on to another format.

The grid can of course be built around whatever is particular about your company. Challenge your colleagues on the facts and the history of the business, reward the most loyal clients or the people who crack the hardest clues first.

Doing it in a setting that mixes challenge and culture is a lot of fun, and we find out whether the pen really is mightier than the sword. The day after, everyone remembers three facts about the company that no presentation had managed to lodge.

A crossword unlike the usual ones

The online crossword: together at a distance

Near or far, this format is a good way to test communication, reasoning, logic and creativity. Stepping out of the working day and going all the way into solving puzzles remotely, with nothing pulling at your attention, is not as easy as it sounds.

The team has to collaborate and work the puzzles out together to earn the clues. People have to range over everything that comes to mind to find the words that might belong in the grid. Everyone gets to put their ideas and their thinking in front of the others, by chat or video call, and what emerges is the kind of joint work that gets the grid finished.