Could cultural differences be causing hidden friction in your team?
"Are we… even speaking the same language?"
That question may be floating around your team—unspoken, unresolved, but real.
Your team might be experiencing tension, inefficiency, or confusion…
without quite knowing why.
Cultural misunderstandings rarely announce themselves. Instead, they quietly erode trust, disrupt communication, and make collaboration harder than it should be.
But what if your team could safely explore these hidden dynamics—playfully, openly, and with purpose?
Why Serious Gaming Works
You can’t fix what you can’t see—until you play
When people play together, patterns emerge—how they speak, decide, follow, lead. These patterns hold the keys to culture.
Serious Games create a safe, engaging space where teams can see themselves in action. They reveal unspoken assumptions, clashing expectations, and invisible habits—without anyone needing to “call them out.”
These sessions blend game-based collaboration with proven cultural models like Trompenaars or Erin Meyer’s Culture Map. Together, we unpack what happens during the game, reflect on your team’s unique mix of styles, and build practical agreements for how to work better—across differences.
In every Serious Gaming session, your team will:
Play a collaborative game (online or in-person)
Observe real-time team behaviors and reactions
Reflect using a structured cultural model
Co-create an action plan that fits your real-world context
“You leave not with solutions, but with the awareness and shared language to grow, adapt, and collaborate more intentionally.”
Explore the sessions
1. Intercultural Escape Game – Trompenaars Edition
Discover how your team behaves under pressure—and what it reveals about your cultural mix.
In this browser-based collaborative game, teams face time-sensitive challenges that require joint problem-solving. During the session, we map the behaviors that surfaced onto Trompenaars’ cultural dimensions (like individualism vs. collectivism, specific vs. diffuse, or achievement vs. ascription).
Participants reflect on their own and others' tendencies, gain language to describe differences, and design ways to collaborate more consciously going forward.
Outcome:
Greater mutual understanding, a shared cultural team map, and a practical team action plan.
2. Intercultural Escape Game – Erin Meyer Edition
Use your team’s Culture Map profile to explore how you really work together.
This session uses the same collaborative Serious Game setup, but the session is guided by a group culture profile based on Erin Meyer’s Culture Map model. Teams reflect on how communication, feedback, leadership, and trust play out across Meyer’s 8 cultural dimensions.
The combination of live gameplay and structured model discussion helps teams surface unspoken tensions and design clearer collaboration habits.
Outcome:
Better understanding of cultural preferences, clearer team norms, and targeted improvements in communication and decision-making.
3. Diversity in Action – Roles & Contributions
See what each person naturally brings—and build a team plan around it.
This flexible-format session uses a Serious Game tailored to your team’s context. As participants collaborate, they reveal their natural roles—initiators, bridge-builders, challengers, organizers, and more. Through guided reflection, we explore how those roles relate to the diversity in the group.
Instead of trying to "balance" differences, teams learn how to use them—intentionally and respectfully.
Outcome:
A shared understanding of roles and contributions, and a team-designed plan for making the most of everyone's strengths.
4. Intercultural Conflict Styles Lab
How does your team handle tension across cultures—and what could it do differently?
This session uses a gameplay scenario designed to surface natural reactions to disagreement and conflict. Through the Intercultural Conflict Style model (Mitchell Hammer), we explore how participants express emotion, manage disagreement, and interpret assertiveness across cultures.
The game acts as a mirror—teams reflect on what escalated or diffused tension, then co-design strategies for navigating real-life conflict with more skill and cultural awareness.
Outcome:
Greater insight into personal and team conflict styles, practical tools for de-escalation, and shared team agreements for handling tension.
5. Remote & Hybrid Collaboration Clinic
Collaborate better—even when you’re not in the same room, culture, or time zone.
This session simulates the real challenges of remote teamwork using a browser-based Serious Game that requires distributed problem-solving. Participants face scenarios where time zones, silence, or miscommunication play a central role—mirroring real-world hybrid friction.
With cultural models layered on top (e.g. high-context vs. low-context, task- vs. relationship-orientation), the group reflects on how different work styles affect remote collaboration.
Outcome:
Awareness of remote-team blind spots, clearer team communication norms, and an agreed-upon hybrid collaboration guide.
6. Power & Hierarchy in Teams
Who leads? Who follows? And what kind of hierarchy fits your team’s culture?
A collaborative game with rotating leadership roles helps teams explore how they relate to authority, voice, responsibility, and decision-making. Some participants will thrive when structure is clear. Others will chafe.
Using models from Hofstede and Trompenaars, we make these dynamics visible—then ask the team: What works for us? Where do we want to shift?
Outcome:
Insights into power dynamics, clearer leadership expectations, and agreed-upon structures for decision-making and voice.
7. Decision-Making Across Cultures
Should we seek consensus—or move fast and decide? Let your team explore and align.
This session uses a time-bound game scenario where the team must make high-stakes decisions under pressure. It exposes natural preferences for top-down vs. consensus-based decision-making.
With reflection guided by Erin Meyer’s Deciding dimension, teams unpack where decisions stall or feel unfair, and agree on more effective decision rules that respect everyone’s working style.
Outcome:
A shared decision-making framework, clearer escalation paths, and more trust in how choices are made.
8. Custom-Built Session – Tailored to Your Challenge
Not every question fits into a box. Let’s design something that does.
Sometimes the challenge isn’t just communication or conflict. It’s something deeper. Or something new. A cultural shift. A leadership transition. A team dynamic that’s hard to name but easy to feel.
If it involves people, culture, complexity—or something important you can’t quite put into words—it can be gamified.
Together, we can co-create a session (or a series) that fits your context: your team, your timing, your questions.
Outcome:
A fully customized experience built around your real-world situation, using game-based learning, cultural reflection, and team action planning.
Is this right for your team?
Cultural challenges aren’t always loud.
In fact, the most common signs are subtle: slow decisions, confusing silences, misaligned expectations, or growing tension that no one quite knows how to name.
If any of these feel familiar, this work may be a good fit:
You work in an international or culturally diverse team
You’ve noticed recurring misunderstandings or invisible tensions
Your team struggles to align on communication, decisions, or leadership
You’re forming a new team or reshaping an existing one
You want to use your team’s diversity as a strength—not a stumbling block
You’re in HR or Learning & Development and need more engaging tools than traditional trainings provide
You don’t just leave with a good conversation.
You leave with a clear direction, real agreements, and the option to keep growing.
Depending on your needs, follow-up options may include:
A second session to deepen or broaden the reflection
Group coaching or facilitated dialogue
Individual sessions to support personal insight or leadership growth
Custom-designed Serious Games for specific challenges in your organization
Long-term tracks to shape your team culture intentionally
This work meets you where you are—and grows with your team.
From insight to impact
Let’s turn cultural complexity into team clarity
If something in your team feels off—and you suspect culture is part of it—let’s talk. One short conversation can open a new path forward.
Every session we offer is adapted to your team. And if what you need isn’t on the list, we can create something that is. This work meets you where you are—and builds from there.
— Clear. No pressure. Just a thoughtful conversation.