Team Building Use Cases: When Team Building Actually Helps
Different teams need different things from their time together.
Sometimes a team is brand new. Sometimes people have worked together for years but barely know one another outside their roles. Sometimes a reorganization has rattled relationships. Sometimes a distributed team is finally gathering in person. And sometimes everyone just wants to spend time together without being subjected to another awkward icebreaker or scavenger hunt.
Make Believe Works designs and facilitates creative, non-competitive team-building workshops for moments when relationships matter.
Our workshops help teams build trust, strengthen psychological safety, break down silos, reconnect across roles and locations, and learn something real about the people they work with.
We work with groups from 5 to 500+, in person, virtually, and in hybrid formats across the U.S. and Canada.
Here are some of the situations where Make Believe Works team building can really help:
New or Newly Merged Teams
Help people become more than names, titles, and boxes on an org chart.
The Situation
A new team tends to be polite.
People are still figuring out who speaks up, who listens, what everyone is good at, what is safe to say, and how much of themselves they should bring into the room.
The same thing can happen when existing departments merge. Everyone may technically know one another while still thinking of their new colleagues primarily through their roles.
What the Team Needs
Before people can work well together, they need opportunities to understand one another as human beings.
Not through forced introductions or “tell us a fun fact,” but through shared experiences that reveal how people think, what they notice, what matters to them, and what they bring to the group.
How Make Believe Works Helps
Our workshops give new teams something interesting to do together while creating structured opportunities for curiosity, storytelling, creativity, and connection.
Activities such as Storyline are especially effective for new teams because people create and share within playful constraints. The structure makes connection easier without making vulnerability feel like an assignment.
Nobody has to impress anyone. Nobody has to win. Nobody has to reveal their deepest secret to someone they met Tuesday.
Good for: newly formed teams, merged departments, onboarding gatherings, new leadership groups, and teams starting a major project together.
“Make Believe Works is great, low-stakes practice in the bravery that it takes to collaborate across boundaries and hierarchies. Collaborating creatively, stating opinions freely, and expressing yourself during a Make Believe Works activity feels safe and low stakes. These are the cultural conditions that allow such unique outcomes in our work.”
— Diana R., Managing Director, IDEO
Teams Going Through Reorganization or Change
When the org chart changes, relationships have to catch up.
The Situation
Leadership changes. Teams merge. Roles shift. People are promoted, moved, hired, or laid off. A new strategy arrives and everyone is trying to understand what it means for them.
Even necessary change can make people more cautious.
They wonder where they stand, how decisions will get made, which relationships still matter, and whether it is safe to speak as freely as they did before.
What the Team Needs
Teams navigating change need more than information about the new structure.
They need opportunities to establish relationships inside it, feel that their contributions still matter, and develop confidence in the people they now depend on.
How Make Believe Works Helps
Our workshops temporarily move people outside their titles, hierarchy, and professional expertise.
Everyone enters unfamiliar territory together.
That creates low-stakes opportunities to experiment, contribute, adapt, ask for help, and see colleagues with fresh eyes.
A workshop will not solve a reorganization. It can help the people living through one begin to relate to one another differently.
Good for: reorganizations, mergers, leadership transitions, rapid growth, restructuring, and teams adapting to new responsibilities.
“Make Believe Works gives you a different way to engage with each other as people. It opens up a whole new way of being together. It inspires you to see what others bring to the table.”
— Meg D., Design Lead, IDEO.org
Cross-Functional Teams and Silos
Help people understand the person on the other side of the workflow.
The Situation
Marketing thinks Product never listens.
Product thinks Sales promises things that don't exist.
Design thinks Engineering says no too quickly.
Engineering would like everyone to please stop changing the brief.
Often, the problem isn't hostility. People simply spend most of their time seeing colleagues through the friction created by their roles.
What the Team Needs
Breaking down silos rarely starts with another presentation explaining why collaboration matters.
People need opportunities to interact somewhere their normal roles don't determine the relationship.
When someone stops being “the person blocking my project” and becomes a complicated, funny, interesting human being with their own pressures and perspective, future collaboration gets easier.
How Make Believe Works Helps
Our activities deliberately make conventional expertise less important.
The person with the most seniority doesn't automatically have the right answer. The loudest person doesn't receive extra points. One department can't beat another.
Activities such as Emblemottos, Storyline, and Homegrown Heroes give colleagues reasons to pay attention to one another, exchange stories, and discover things that normal project meetings rarely reveal.
Good for: cross-functional teams, departments with persistent friction, organizations trying to break down silos, and groups that collaborate frequently but don't know one another particularly well.
“Make Believe Works impacted my sense of belonging at work. It helped me connect with my colleagues and realize that I had a place there. In those sessions we were all equal.
Make Believe Works broke down silos. It changed how we saw people. It brought out our true selves.”
— Hanna P., Senior Service Designer, Comte Bureau
Leadership Teams and Executive Offsites
Purposeful enough for the agenda. Human enough to change the room.
The Situation
Senior leaders are often some of the most skeptical people in the room when the words “team building” appear on an offsite agenda.
Reasonably so.
They have limited time. They have real work waiting for them. They've probably participated in more workshops, retreats, and facilitated conversations than they can count.
That doesn't mean executives don't want stronger relationships.
It means the experience has to earn their participation.
What the Team Needs
Leadership requires interpersonal risk constantly.
Disagreeing with a peer. Admitting uncertainty. Changing your mind publicly. Challenging the CEO. Asking for help. Naming the thing everyone else is carefully avoiding.
Those behaviors depend partly on the quality of the relationships between the people in the room.
How Make Believe Works Helps
Leadership teams need opportunities to practice interpersonal risk when the stakes are low.
Our activities deliberately put senior leaders into unfamiliar, talent-agnostic situations where title, expertise, and hierarchy offer very little advantage. Participants have to contribute without knowing exactly how they’ll do, respond to one another’s ideas, reveal something of how they think, and occasionally be imperfect in front of their peers.
Because the activities are structured and non-competitive, those risks feel manageable rather than exposing.
That gives leaders repeated opportunities to experience what candor, uncertainty, curiosity, and vulnerability feel like inside the group, and to see how their colleagues respond.
The goal isn’t to force vulnerability. It’s to create enough safety for people to choose a little more of it.
The experience is playful without being patronizing, purposeful without feeling overly scripted, and designed to earn the participation of people who may arrive skeptical of team building.
Good for: executive retreats, leadership offsites, senior teams, partner groups, boards, and groups where relevance and credibility matter as much as fun.
“The space Make Believe Works created allowed trust and openness to emerge naturally. Leaders connected beyond roles and hierarchies, which led to more honest conversations and stronger relationships.
The impact extended beyond the session itself, giving our Leadership team a shared reference point for trust, vulnerability, and collaboration that continues to influence how we work together."
— Juan Carlos Narro, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, Bocar Group
Distributed Teams Gathering in Person
Make the rare time together worth leaving home for.
The Situation
A distributed or hybrid team is finally gathering in the same place.
The temptation is to fill every minute with strategy decks, planning sessions, project updates, and information everyone could probably have received on Zoom.
Then somebody remembers that one reason everyone traveled was to actually spend time together.
What the Team Needs
When in-person time is scarce, connection shouldn't be treated as filler between the “real” agenda items.
Distributed teams miss many of the small interactions through which coworkers naturally learn about one another.
Who is this person? How do they think? What do they care about? Will I feel comfortable calling them next month when we're both little rectangles again?
How Make Believe Works Helps
Our workshops create concentrated opportunities for those discoveries.
People make things, tell stories, interpret, experiment, laugh, and notice things about one another that are difficult to manufacture in ordinary remote work.
The experience is playful. The relationships it creates can remain useful long after everyone flies home.
Good for: hybrid teams, remote teams meeting in person, annual gatherings, multi-office organizations, and distributed groups coming together for an offsite.
"My team was very disconnected because we worked in different offices. Make Believe Works created the connection we needed to work more fluidly together."
— Senior Director, Strategy, Global Citizen
Introverts, Skeptics, and People Who Hate Team Building
Designed for, and by, people who don’t usually enjoy team building.
The Situation
Someone has put TEAM BUILDING on the calendar.
Half the group is enthusiastic.
The other half is quietly calculating whether a dentist appointment could plausibly take four hours.
They've experienced forced icebreakers, trivia contests, competitive games, awkward skits, scavenger hunts, and activities where enthusiasm seemed to be part of the assignment.
They have learned to be suspicious.
What the Team Needs
Skeptical participants don't need to be persuaded to love team building.
The experience needs to earn their participation.
Introverts don't necessarily want less connection either. They may simply want conditions that don't reward being fast, loud, performative, or constantly ready to speak.
How Make Believe Works Helps
Our activities give people something concrete to make, notice, interpret, or respond to.
There is structure. There is time to think. There are no points for being the funniest person in the room.
Our workshops are non-competitive and talent-agnostic, so people don't need to be artistic, athletic, extroverted, quick, or clever to contribute.
We don't demand enthusiasm.
We design activities worth being enthusiastic about.
Good for: skeptical groups, introvert-heavy teams, analytical cultures, senior audiences, and anyone who has already decided they hate team building.
"People were quite skeptical, but afterwards a bunch of folks shared how surprising, refreshing, and genuinely fun the exercise was.
At dinner after the event, the leaders all answered the questions with each other — it was quite moving."
— Ellen Gladish, Administrative Business Partner for Risk & Compliance, Stripe
Celebrations, Milestones, and Company Gatherings
Playful and productive are allowed to be in the same room.
The Situation
Sometimes nothing is broken.
A team launched something difficult. Hit a milestone. Finished a demanding year. Everyone is gathering for an annual meeting, all-hands, or celebration.
You want people to have fun.
But if everyone is already together, it would be nice if the experience created something more lasting than a bar tab.
What the Team Needs
Celebrations work best when they give people something to remember about one another, not just something they attended together.
Strong cultures are built partly through shared stories, rituals, recognition, generosity, humor, and moments when people feel seen.
How Make Believe Works Helps
Our workshops can be light, funny, surprising, and energetic without turning the room into a competition.
Activities such as Emblemottos, Visible Values, Homegrown Heroes, and Towering Inspiration can celebrate the people, ideas, values, and sources of inspiration that make a group what it is.
Everyone contributes. Nobody wins.
The finished experience belongs to the people who created it together.
Good for: company celebrations, milestones, annual meetings, all-hands gatherings, holiday events, and teams that want fun without turning colleagues into competitors.
"The impact of most team-building activities hasn't lasted beyond the day. But Make Believe Works was different.
For the first time, we came away with a richer sense of our colleagues as people — and as a direct result, we've seen meaningful shifts in how we engage with one another."
— Carina Parnham, Consul, Consulate General of Canada
Not Sure What Your Team Needs?
Most teams arrive with some combination of goals: stronger relationships, more trust, fewer silos, better communication, more creative energy, a meaningful offsite, or simply a desire to spend time together that doesn't feel awkward or pointless.
Tell us who's going to be in the room, what the team is navigating, and what you hope will feel different afterward.
We'll recommend an experience that fits.
Contact Us
We’d love to help your team connect and thrive. Tell us about your event or goals and let’s make a plan.
Reach us at: hello@makebelieveworks.com
What Participants Are Saying:
Make Believe Works reinvents connection and development with its unique, fun, engaging and highly impactful workshops. Most recently, their ‘Super-Secret’ activation facilitated what our team called ‘the most meaningful & fun’ virtual get-to-know you’s they’ve ever participated in. We can’t wait to work with them again!
— Naomi G., Director, Business Planning & Strategy, American Express
"I usually dread team building activities, but this was different. The facilitation was magical and made all the difference. I sincerely enjoyed the process and learning so many new things about my colleagues. Thanks for pushing me out of my comfort zone. Absolutely want more of these."
— Amy O., Design Manager, Spotify