I've been trying to work out for a while why teams full of genuinely clever people still get stuck on problems that, looking back, had the answer sitting in the room the whole time.
Not short of ideas, exactly. Short of a way to put them together.
Because most of the creative problem solving training I've come across is perfectly sound. Brainstorming rules, idea techniques, a lovely wall of sticky notes.
And the ideas do come. In my experience the people are rarely the problem.
What I keep noticing is that the pieces of the answer are spread across different heads, and nobody ever decided how they'd get onto one table. Who says what they've got. When. Where.
So the team falls into a way of talking in the first week, and lives with it for the rest of the project. Like a slightly rubbish flatmate.
I'm not immune, by the way. Left to myself I'll happily work heads-down for an hour and then surface to ask whether anyone has the thing I needed fifty minutes ago.
This training lets your team find that out in a game, where it only costs an hour.
How it works: play, then the EPPA loop
The programme runs on one loop, and I call it EPPA. Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application.
The Experience is the game. One hour of Sticky Fingers, with cards, a clock and a fair bit of talking over each other.
Then we unpack it. Patterns first - what kept repeating. Who announced, who held back, when the team finally agreed how to share what it was seeing.
Then Principles, in the room's own words, about how teams solve problems together. It sticks because they got there.
And then Application. A named behaviour, a real situation and a date. People tend to stall here, so it's the step I've built the most around.
It's also the only place AI comes in.
There's no AI in the heist. It's cards, a clock and a room full of people trying to find one another.
The game at the heart of it: Sticky Fingers
Sticky Fingers drops your team into a heist. They're a crew lifting a diamond out of a museum, with a clock running down.
The cards are picture-first. Every card that gets revealed goes into one shared pool in the middle of the table. No private hands. No pockets. Everything is everyone's.
Which sounds like it should make it easy. It doesn't, quite.
Because no single card solves anything. The codes come from combining what different people are looking at, and there are no turns, so everybody is acting at once, out loud, in real time.
Nobody hands out roles either. If the crew needs a card-sorter or a code-writer, it has to grow one itself.
So the puzzle on the table is a creative problem. And the puzzle underneath it is whether the team can get what each person is seeing into the same conversation.
Simple enough, on paper. It's what people do next that makes it a game.
The first ten minutes tell you a lot
Cards land and the room becomes lovely chaos. Some people go quiet and process. Some describe everything they can see within four seconds.
Then a leader turns up. Nobody appointed them. They just said "right, everyone tell me what you've got." Whether the room follows that person or talks straight over them is worth watching closely.
"Everyone describe what you can see, out loud, one at a time" takes about 90 seconds. Do it early and the crew finishes with time to spare.
Skip it, and fifty minutes later every picture the team needed has been on the table the whole time. Nobody built a way to move it around.
What the hour brings out, before the debrief even starts
- The announcer and the one who holds back. One person says everything the second the cards land. Another sits back to see what the rest do first. Both cost the team, in completely different ways.
- Who the room actually listens to. Someone always steps up with "tell me what you've all got". Volunteering isn't the signal. Whether anybody does what they said is.
- Why the person who is sure they can crack their bit alone slows everyone down, and how quickly they notice.
- Decision by drift. Most teams never actually decide how they'll communicate. They fall into a method in minute three and stick with it for the rest of the hour.
- Who checks out when it gets hard, and quietly waits for a hero to turn up.
- The reframer. Every so often, one person notices the whole approach is rubbish and proposes a different one. Easy to miss in the moment. One of the most valuable people in your building to name out loud.
Where AI comes in: the Application step
AI only arrives once the room has named its own patterns. And it works on the team's real project, never on the game.
- Each manager brings one live project where people aren't talking the way they need to.
- AI reads the project's real chats and mails, and drafts the team's talking rules. Who shares what, when, and where. Bring only what you're allowed to share. We'll work with whatever that is.
- The manager edits that draft at the table, in front of colleagues who just watched the same heist.
- They set the date they'll take it to the team. A named behaviour, a real situation, a date. All three, or it didn't happen.
What stays human
Deciding how the team talks.
AI is quite good at spotting where the messages go missing. The rules your team actually agrees to live with are a conversation, and that conversation is still theirs.
What your managers walk out with
- A first draft of the talking rules for one real project, edited by them at the table, with a date to take it back.
- The 90-second habit that separates fast crews from stuck ones, in their own words, because the room worked it out.
- A clearer read on who in their team announces, who holds back and who reframes. Useful on Monday. Even more useful in a crisis.
- Imagine the next project kick-off where somebody says "before we start, how are we going to talk?" and nobody rolls their eyes.
- Shared language from one hour of play. "What can you see?" turns out to be a very handy thing to say in a meeting.
What I can show you
I'll be straight about this. I don't have a separate score for this programme on its own, so I won't pretend to.
What I can tell you is how the rest of my work has landed.
- I've been training founders and leaders since 2019, with founders in the US, Canada, Australia, Singapore and India.
- My game library has been used with a Fortune 100 company, a leading HR-tech platform, a Fortune 500 technology company, a global retail corporation and a global engineering and technology firm.
- One programme at a Fortune 100 company scored 8.82/10 as a satisfaction score, across 113 respondents and six session-days. That's one programme, not all of them.
- Across every scored session-day I have, it's 8.40/10 across 244 respondents. A bit lower, and a lot more honest.
- On a separate one-day programme for a leading HR-tech platform, all 13 participants agreed they understood the learning objectives, and 12 of the 13 said they would apply what they learned.
Who it fits
- Cross-functional and project teams, especially the ones quietly living in silos and calling it focus.
- New teams still finding their rhythm. Far better to find the patterns in a game than in a live project with real money on it.
- Teams where "people just aren't talking" keeps turning up in post-mortems. Which is a lot of teams, honestly, mine included.
- Big rooms. Offsites, town halls, all-hands. It's built to run for anywhere from 12 to 150 people.
Who would probably get more from something else
- Teams where the real problem is trust, not talking. This will show you people aren't sharing. It won't tell you why. If the root is trust, you'd get the symptom and not the cause, and I'd rather say that now. There's a programme closer to that on the programmes page.
- Very senior teams who want depth. They do enjoy it, but an hour is an hour. It works best as the opener to a longer day.
- Anyone who needs individual assessment data. This shows team-level patterns. If you're assessing individual leaders, something else will serve you better.
A few fair worries
"An hour-long card game feels a bit light for a serious problem."
It is light, and I think that's partly why it works. People drop their guard for a heist in a way they don't for a model on a slide. The game is only the start, though. The real work happens afterwards, in the debrief and on their own project.
"We've done creative problem solving training before."
That's fair, and most of it was probably sound. What I've found is that teams usually have the ideas. What they rarely do is sit down and decide how those ideas will get shared. That one decision is what the game makes visible, and what the Application step makes them actually write down.
"Are we comfortable putting our team's messages into AI?"
Honestly, that depends on your company's rules more than mine. Bring only what you're allowed to share, inside the tools you're allowed to use. We'll work with what you bring.
"Can AI really help a team solve problems better?"
Not on its own, no. What it can do is read a pile of messages much faster than any of us and point at where things go missing. The team still has to agree on the rules, and that part is very much a human conversation.
Worst case? We have a conversation and you come out of it with a clearer brief.
Let's find out if it fits your team
Twenty minutes on a call. Your team, the project that's stuck, and a straight answer on whether this is the right programme. And if your team already talks brilliantly... well, I'd quite like to know how.
Tell me what you're trying to fix
I went back and forth on whether to put a form at the end of this page.
Because a form asks you to be tidy about something you are probably still working out. And the enquiries I enjoy most tend to arrive as three messy lines, written by someone who has not finished deciding what they want yet.
So there are two ways in, and I genuinely do not mind which one you use.
Write to me directly at arvindh@puttheplayerfirst.com and say roughly what you want to change. Three lines is plenty. I read my own email.
Or fill this in, if that is easier. It lands in the same inbox.
I answer these myself, usually within a day. Two if I am in a room somewhere with my phone in a bag.
And you are not committing to anything by writing in. Worst case we have a conversation, and you come out of it with a clearer brief than you had this morning.
It won't make anybody more creative overnight. It just makes it a lot more likely that the ideas already in the room end up on the same table, which is most of the job, I think.
With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.