Teams have ninety minutes and a scored list of things to photograph. It works in a city, in an office building, or entirely at home for a distributed team, and the scoring list is where all the design effort goes.
What it is good for
- CollaborationWorking a shared problem where no one person holds all the information.
- Creative thinkingGenerating options before judging them, and building on other people's ideas.
- Pure funNo learning objective. Sometimes that is the correct answer.
- Cross-team networkingConnecting people who would otherwise never share a meeting.
What you need
- A scored list of twenty-five items
- Phones
- A shared album or channel for submissions
The run sheet
Write twenty-five items across three tiers (prep)
Easy finds worth one point, interpretive ones worth three ('the saddest plant in the building'), and two or three worth ten that require real effort or a stranger's cooperation. The interpretive ones generate every good photo.
Teams of four, phones out (10 min)
Mixed teams. Everything submitted to one shared album with the team name and item number.
Set boundaries, literally (2 min)
A map or a floor range, a hard return time, and the rules: no trespassing, no asking strangers for anything beyond a photo, nothing that needs anyone to run.
Hunt (75 min)
Facilitator stays at base and answers adjudication questions by message, which are half the fun.
Judge together on the screen (20 min)
Go through item by item with everyone watching. The judging is the event — the hunt is just how you generate material for it.
Facilitator notes
- The interpretive items are where the whole activity lives. 'A photo of your team looking like a band album cover' produces something people keep; 'a red car' does not.
- Reserve the right to award bonus points arbitrarily and say so. It keeps the scoreboard unpredictable and the mood light.
- Get consent before any photo of a member of the public, and say that in the briefing rather than hoping.
Debrief questions
Ask these immediately afterwards, not next week. Fifteen minutes of these is what turns the activity into something the team refers back to — see the debrief guide.
- Which photo is going in the team channel permanently?
- How did your team split up the list, and did that work?
Variations
At-home edition
Everyone hunts in their own home against the same list, on a call, five minutes per item. Genuinely good for remote teams and needs no travel.
New-city edition
Run it on the first afternoon of an offsite in an unfamiliar city. Doubles as orientation and people remember the city afterwards.
Access and inclusion
Ninety minutes of walking is not available to everyone. Write at least a third of the list so it can be completed without leaving the building, and let teams split rather than requiring everyone to move together.
Running it remotely
The at-home edition works well: call out one item at a time, five minutes to find and photograph it, everyone back on camera to show it.