"So... do you just play games?"

I get this question a lot, usually with a slightly skeptical head tilt, and I want to fully address exactly what we do at Once Upon a Roll to build team culture through play.

So yes, we do play games.

But we also aren't really there to play games.

The game is the vehicle.

What we're actually doing is giving your team a place to practice the things you keep hoping they'll get better at, like speaking up, making decisions together, disagreeing without it getting weird, and trusting that the person next to them will catch the ball.

Short answer? It doesn’t work. 90% of information taught is lost within one week.

And there’s a simple reason why — we integrate what we practice.

We wouldn't prepare a sports team by showing them a powerpoint and then asking them to go play.

We get them on the field and we run drills, over and over, until the right move stops being something they think about and starts being something they do.

Your team deserves that same practice time.

Learning and Development teams knows this, which is why so many programs include mock sessions for negotiation or hard conversations. Those are good for pinpointing a skill and handing people the words to say, but they don't build the team, improve trust, or move the needle on culture. Those things don't change because someone learned the right phrasing. They change when people feel something together.

That's what a game does, and your team deserves that kind of practice time.

Here's what I find most interesting about play, though. The repetition doesn't stay inside the game. It bleeds into your life.

When someone plays at being the person who speaks first, or the one who takes the risk, or the one who holds the group together when everything goes sideways, they're not just performing it for an afternoon. They're building the muscle. And the next time they're in a real meeting with a real stake, that muscle is a little bit stronger than it was before.

What you play at, you can become. That's true for a person and it's true for a team.

Games make people three-dimensional to each other.

You can work next to someone for four years and know nothing about them except their function. Put that same person across the table in a game and within twenty minutes you find out how they think, what makes them laugh, whether they're a planner or an improviser, and how they behave when the plan falls apart.

That's not a soft outcome. That's the raw material of a team that can actually move fast together, because trust is what lets people skip the three cautious emails and just say the thing.

Play without structure is a nice afternoon. Play with structure is development. The QUEST Method is how we make sure our games have impact.

Q is for Qualify. Before we do anything, I want to know what's really going on with your team. Not what the org chart says, but what you'd tell me if we were getting a drink after work. What's stuck? What changed recently? What do you wish looked different by the end of the year?

U is for Uncover. Then we play, and what surfaces are the patterns, behaviors, and beliefs a team operates on without naming them. Every group has unspoken rules about who speaks, who defers, and what's actually okay to say. They're invisible in a meeting and obvious at a table.

E is for Evaluate. Then we stop and look at what surfaced. Naming a pattern is one thing, deciding whether it's serving you is another, and that's the conversation this part of the day is for.

S is for Strengthen. Then we connect it back to work. Whatever happened at the table on Thursday tends to be the same thing happening on Tuesday morning, and it's a lot easier to fix once a team can point at it and name it.

T is for Transform. Everyone walks out with one thing they're going to try. Small and specific. That's the next rep, and it's the one that counts.

A single session is the start. It's the first rep, plus a shared language for what everyone just saw, and that alone changes how a team talks to each other on Monday.

But nobody gets fit going to the gym one time. You get fit because you keep showing up, and the same is true here. Repetition is what moves the needle. One session opens the door, and the reps after it are what actually change how your team works together.

If you're curious what that would look like for your group, grab the Make the Case Kit. It's a free guide that walks through what a session actually looks like and gives you everything you need to pitch it internally.

Laura