What an Escape Room Can Teach Us About Working Together

Yesterday was a rainy Sunday, and my family didn’t have plans. So I booked an escape room for us to do together.

For anyone unfamiliar with escape rooms, you are placed in a themed room and given an hour to find clues, solve puzzles, open locks, and complete a larger challenge.

This was far from our first escape room. It was the first time, though, that I found myself thinking about the experience afterward.

There is a clear goal, and you probably aren’t going to reach it alone.

An escape room quickly becomes a small study in group dynamics. People try to understand the situation, disagree about what to do, settle into different roles, and eventually begin working together more effectively.

Psychologist Bruce Tuckman described group development through the stages of forming, storming, norming, performing, and, later, adjourning. Groups do not always move through these stages neatly, and an escape room compresses everything into an hour. Still, we experienced versions of all of them—sometimes several within the same minute.

There were moments of joy, forward progress, and outright zeal. There were also moments of annoyance, frustration, and intensity.

Raised voices were involved.

So were friction and repair.

One person noticed a clue someone else had missed. Someone interpreted a puzzle differently. An idea that initially seemed wrong opened the way to something none of us had considered.

The puzzle rarely yielded to the person talking the loudest. It usually required us to pause, listen, and combine what different people were seeing.

I think meaningful goals often work the same way.

When we slow down and consider what matters most to us, we may feel a jolt of motivation. But many of the things we care about cannot be accomplished entirely on our own. They require some degree of interdependence.

That means listening to people with different perspectives, working through frustration, repairing moments of friction, helping others, and allowing ourselves to be helped.

This applies within families, friendships, and teams at work. Working with other people does not always make a challenge easier. It often does make solutions possible that we would not have found alone.

In our case, the immediate benefit of working together was that we got out of a windowless, dark room.

At least until the next one.