Silo-Busting Exercise
Assemble a team facing a real challenge, then add people from a completely separate department who have no experience with it. The outsiders bring fresh perspective and break entrenched patterns.
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Related Exercises
Red Teaming
Explicitly assign team members the role of critics and challengers in a meeting. Making the adversarial role official removes personal friction and ensures ideas are stress-tested.
Support
Activities focused on demonstrating and receiving support within a team, emphasizing that all members succeed or fail together.
Excluding
Excluding is a scene exercise in which one performer is deliberately left out of a group's activity or conversation, forcing that performer to find a way into the scene. The exercise builds awareness of inclusion and exclusion dynamics onstage and trains performers to assert themselves without bulldozing their scene partners. For the excluding group, it develops sensitivity to when sidelining behavior is blocking a scene's progress. For the excluded performer, it trains the instinct to make strong, specific offers that justify entry into the action. The exercise reveals how quickly exclusion flattens a scene and how powerful a well-timed inclusion choice can be.
Board Races
Board Races is a team energizer in which groups compete to be the first to complete a task at a whiteboard or similar surface, such as listing items in a category or solving a puzzle. The competitive element raises energy and rewards quick thinking under pressure. It works well as a warm-up or icebreaker.
Problem Solving
Improvisational problem-solving exercises where teams tackle challenges using 'Yes, And' principles to build creative solutions.
Arguments
Three players: one in center, two on sides taking opposite positions. The center player must maintain logical and emotional agreement with both simultaneously.
How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Silo-Busting Exercise. Retrieved March 17, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/exercises/silo-busting-exercise
The Improv Archive. "Silo-Busting Exercise." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/exercises/silo-busting-exercise.
The Improv Archive. "Silo-Busting Exercise." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/exercises/silo-busting-exercise. Accessed March 17, 2026.
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