A team activity where the quiet people usually win — how it works, how long to set aside, and which cases suit a first session.
Most team-building activities reward the people who are already comfortable speaking up. A mystery case does the opposite. The evidence is written down, so the person who reads carefully has as much standing as the person who talks fastest — and the breakthrough usually comes from someone noticing a detail rather than someone taking charge.
It also produces a real decision under uncertainty. The group has to commit to an answer knowing it might be wrong, which surfaces how a team actually handles disagreement far more honestly than an exercise about handling disagreement.
For a session of eight or more, run parallel groups of four to six on the same case and compare conclusions afterwards. Two teams reaching different verdicts from identical evidence tends to be the most useful twenty minutes of the day.
Ninety minutes for the case, thirty for the comparison afterwards. The debrief is where the value is — cutting it to get people back to their desks wastes the exercise.
Larger teams should run parallel copies rather than one big group. Beyond six, people disengage because they can't reach the evidence.
The activity works because authority is temporary and evidence-based. Naming someone in charge re-imposes the hierarchy you were trying to see past.
The interesting question afterwards isn't which team was right. It's which evidence each team weighted, and why two reasonable groups diverged.
Not the whole archive — the ones that genuinely suit this.
The right first session, and free, so you can run it once before committing a budget. It resolves on a documented contradiction rather than a leap of intuition — nobody leaves feeling the answer was unfair, which is what sinks a team activity.
Open the case →For a longer session with a group that reads carefully. The evidence divides across people well enough that the quiet ones end up holding the document everything turns on, which is usually the point of running this at all.
Open the case →Any size, in groups of four to six. Beyond six per group people disengage, so run parallel copies of the same case and compare verdicts at the end.
No. The case file supplies the structure. Someone should keep time and run the comparison afterwards, but they don't need to know the answer — in fact it's better if they don't.
For an in-person session, physical boxes — spreading evidence across a table is most of what makes it work. Digital files suit distributed teams on a shared screen.
Yes. Write to us with the number of groups and the date and we'll sort out bulk orders and invoicing.
