The diamond is in the museum. Your team needs to steal it. You have a plan — except the plan only works if everyone’s piece of the puzzle fits together perfectly.
The catch: no single person knows the full picture.
What the game is
Sticky Fingers is a card-based escape room where participants take on the roles of a heist crew attempting to steal a diamond from a museum. The game is built around distributed information: each player holds knowledge that others don’t. The puzzles can’t be solved by any single person working alone — they require every perspective in the room to be heard, combined, and acted on.
Collaboration here isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s structurally required.
What it reveals
Sticky Fingers exposes how teams actually share information and solve problems when pressure is on.
You see who speaks up and who holds back. Whose ideas get heard and whose get talked over. Who connects dots across different people’s knowledge and who tries to solve everything with only what they personally know. How the team handles being stuck — do they regroup and think differently, or do they keep pushing the same approach harder?
The debrief draws out specific techniques for improving creative problem-solving and collaborative thinking — grounded in what just happened in the room, not abstract principles.
Who it’s for
Sticky Fingers works well for cross-functional teams, project teams, and any group that needs to make better decisions by combining diverse knowledge and perspectives. It’s particularly effective where silos are a real problem — where teams technically have access to each other’s expertise but don’t consistently draw on it.
It’s also a strong choice when the development goal is creativity and innovation. The game creates conditions where multi-perspective thinking produces visibly better outcomes, making the case far more powerfully than any workshop slide.
Logistics
- Group size: 12 to 36 participants
- Duration: 2 to 3 hours including debrief
- Format: In-person
- Facilitated by: Arvindh Sundar