Leading teams can feel like herding cats, because everyone on the team brings a unique perspective, set of skills, and background. Many of the tools - like popular behavioral assessments - designed to help understand these differences and foster team cohesion fall short of driving real change, because it takes more than shared frameworks and language to inspire people to change how they interact on a day-to-day basis. Why? Because real growth and change don’t result from knowledge alone; they come from experience. From doing. From practice. At its core, experiential learning is about creating a safe space to practice applying the knowledge at the individual and groups levels. Games are the perfect tool to bridge the gap between knowledge and action because they give leaders and teams a chance to learn together and practice new ways of problem solving and collaboration that incorporate everyone’s strengths and perspectives. Unlike the real world, games allow for failure without consequence, which empowers teams to think creatively and experiment with new ways of communicating and behaving, and generate critical a-ha moments that drive change. In this session, we’ll explore how leaders can use play to inspire stronger cohesion and performance from their teams - whether virtual, in-person, or hybrid. We’ll play a few games that are especially effective for common leadership challenges including enhancing motivation and engagement, fostering individual and collective accountability, and inspiring creative problem solving.