Sticky Fingers

Sticky Fingers drops your team into a heist. They're a crew lifting a diamond out of a museum, and the only way out is to pool what each of them secretly knows. Simple enough. Nobody manages it in the first ten minutes.

Why nobody can crack it alone - and that's the point

I built it on distributed information. Everyone gets a piece nobody else can see, so solving it alone isn't difficult, it's mathematically impossible. The cards force the room into the one thing teams quietly avoid under pressure... talking to each other. Then I stand back and watch how they choose to.

The first ten minutes tell you everything

Cards go out and the room becomes lovely chaos. Some people go quiet and process. Some broadcast every card they're holding within four seconds. And at least one person stands up and starts walking laps of the room looking for whoever has the thing they need.

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 will tell you more than a quarter of 1:1s.

Here's the tell, and I see it every single time. The teams that finish fast agree on how they'll talk inside the first ten minutes. The teams that stall spend 45 minutes heads-down on their own little corner, surfacing occasionally to ask "anyone got a red card?" before diving back under.

Every card they needed was on the table from minute one. Nobody built a way to move it around. That is the entire game. Barely a game at all, on paper. It is what people do next that makes it one.

What you'll see surface before the debrief even starts

Give people an hour of pressure and the habits they carry into real work walk right out into the open:

• The announcer versus the hoarder. One person spills everything the second the cards land. Another sits back to see what the rest do first. Both show up inside two minutes. Both cost the team, in completely different ways.
• Who the room actually listens to. Someone always steps up to gather the pieces. "Tell me what you've all got." Volunteering isn't the signal. Whether anybody does what they said is.
• The lone genius who slows everyone down. Nearly every group has one person convinced they can crack their bit alone before looping anyone in. The game makes that instinct visibly, expensively wrong. You'll both watch it happen.
• Decision by drift. Most teams never actually decide how they'll communicate. They fall into a method in minute three and live with it for the next 45, like a bad flatmate. Naming that changes how they run their next real project.
• Who checks out when it gets hard. The room stalls, and somebody quietly sits back and waits for a hero to turn up. We connect that, gently, to what they do when a real deadline slips.
• 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.

Who this is for

Cross-functional and project teams. Especially the ones quietly living in silos and calling it focus. If you want a group to get sharper at solving things together, this is a strong fit.

When to bring it in

• New teams still finding their rhythm. Far better to find the communication patterns in a game than in a live project with real money on it.
• When "people just aren't talking" keeps turning up in post-mortems. This shows the whole room what that actually looks like, live, in front of them. No finger-pointing required.
• Big rooms. Offsites, town halls, all-hands. It holds energy at 150, which almost nothing does. A brilliant opener before a longer session.
• Functions meeting for the first time. Different teams, different floors, different habits. You'll know inside an hour whether they share enough language to work together.

When I'll tell you it's not the right fit

• When the real problem is trust, not talking. Sticky Fingers will show you people aren't sharing. It won't tell you why. If the root is psychological safety, you get the symptom and not the cause, and I'd rather say that now than take the booking.
• Very senior teams who want depth. An hour is an hour. Seasoned leaders enjoy it, but it works best beside a longer game, not as the centrepiece of a leadership development day.
• When you need individual data. This gives you team-level patterns. If you're assessing individual leaders, something else will serve you better.

What changes when the room hits 150

Same chaos, much bigger canvas. And the thing that separates the teams who crack it from the ones who don't is still exactly one thing. Does somebody set a way to talk, early? "Everyone call out the suit you're holding" takes 90 seconds. Do it in round one and you finish with time to spare. Skip it and 50 minutes later you have every right card in the room and nothing at all on the table.

At 150 something else happens. Little sub-leaders pop up all over the floor, each running their own cluster, none of them talking to the others. Who steps into that, and whether they ever look up, is the richest behavioural data the whole day produces. I track it live and enjoy myself far too much.

What surfaces at scale

• Who calls out what they're holding straight away, and who waits to be asked before contributing anything
• Who quietly takes on coordination without being told to, and whether the room lets them
• Who keeps working solo even after the game has made solo work structurally impossible
• Whether the group ever decides how to organise, or drifts into a pattern in minute three and never revisits it
• Who reframes when the first plan fails, and how fast the room gets behind them
• Who folds under the clock, and who stays useful

Good moments to run it big

• New teams with no norms yet. One hour hands them shared experience and shared vocabulary
• Big offsites and all-hands. It holds energy at 150 and opens a longer day properly
• Teams asked to work across functions or locations for the very first time
• When you simply want to watch how 150 people behave. There are easier ways to fill a room. There is no easier way to read one

And when it isn't

• When the block is trust or safety rather than communication. You'll see the symptom. One hour won't reach the cause
• Senior teams wanting deep reflection. At an hour it's energetic but brief. Pair it with a longer game or use it as the warm-up
• When you need individual, psychometric-style data. This is a team game and the unit of analysis is the group

Where the real learning lands: the debrief

Every session ends on an EPPA debrief. Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application. Nobody walks out with fuzzy takeaways. They leave with one named behaviour and one specific place to use it on Monday. And I run the debrief myself, because I'm the one who watched the whole thing happen. That continuity is the product.

Come and see

Tell me a little about your team and I'll tell you straight whether this is the right game for them. If it isn't, I'll say so and point you at the one that is.

Message me on WhatsApp Call +91 99458 61640

Let's find out if it fits your team

Book a quick call. Twenty minutes, your team, your goals, and a straight answer on whether this is the right game.

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With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.