The Power of Teams

What Escape Rooms Teach Us About Collective Intelligence and Collaboration

Over the weekend, I celebrated a friend’s birthday in a Harry Potter-themed escape room. Six grown adults, locked in a sequence of rooms, deciphering riddles, finding clues, and solving puzzles to escape. It was chaotic, hilarious, and deeply satisfying.

Admittedly, this wasn’t my first escape-room adventure. My family and I once tackled one in Perth, but this Shanghai experience brought an entirely new layer of challenge. Many clues were written in Mandarin, so our one Chinese-speaking friend became the translator-in-chief. Another had an encyclopaedic memory of every Harry Potter book ever written. Others contributed sharp logic, lateral thinking, or a knack for observation.

By the end, we were laughing, patting ourselves on the back, and feeling accomplished. We commended each other on how well we had “escaped” and how utterly ridiculous some of the clues were. We shared the success, and we shared the pain.

Escape rooms are social fun, but they also offer powerful lessons about what makes successful teams.

The success of a team depends not on any single person’s intelligence but on how effectively that collective intelligence is mobilised. In our case, success emerged from interdependence, everyone relying on one another’s strengths.

For this to occur, one essential element needed to be in place. Amy Edmondson (2019) calls it psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Laughter, light-hearted teasing, and shared excitement reduced tension and self-consciousness, allowing us to collaborate freely.

“When teams feel psychologically safe, they don’t just share ideas, they multiply them.”

When teams feel safe, they speak up, ask questions, and build upon one another’s ideas, all of which are essential to innovation and problem-solving (Edmondson, 1999). Escape rooms create that environment almost by design: there’s a time limit, a shared purpose, and a clear need for open communication.

As we moved from room to room, natural roles emerged: the analyst, the communicator, the memory bank, the translator, the problem-solver, and the motivator.

This reminded me of Belbin’s (2010) research on team roles, which shows that effective teams balance different strengths: thinkers, doers, and social glue.

There were moments of frustration, over-talking, even chaos, but those were quickly diffused by humour. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) might call this group flow or shared flow, the state where people lose themselves in a shared task, fully engaged and mutually attuned.

“The laughter wasn’t a distraction; it was the rhythm that kept us moving together.”

There we were, six fully grown adults, absolutely playing.

And it was real play. The kind Stuart Brown (2010) describes as the route to creativity, empathy, and connection, not the opposite of work. In the escape room, we rediscovered the joy of curiosity and exploration, the very qualities we try to nurture in our students and teams!

These moments of shared problem-solving remind me that learning and joy are not mutually exclusive. When people are engaged, emotionally safe, and united by a common goal, they do their best thinking, whether that’s decoding magical spells or re-imagining school systems.

Somewhere between the laughter and the clues, I also learned something about myself.

My relentless questioning and action, exploratory mindset came to life in each room. I wanted to read everything written on the walls, quickly scan and absorb my surroundings, and understand what resources were available so I could leverage them to solve the next task.

I realised that this instinct, to question, observe, and connect, is not just a game strategy. It’s how I approach learning, leadership, and change. In many ways, an escape room is a mirror for how we navigate complex problems: with curiosity, energy, and a drive to make sense of what’s around us.

In education and leadership, we often talk about collaboration as if it’s a box to tick. But perhaps the real lesson lies in rediscovering the joy of working with others.

Whether in a school, a boardroom, or a Harry Potter escape room, the formula for success remains the same:

Shared goals. Psychological safety. Diverse strengths. A sense of play.

And maybe a little magic, too!

References

Belbin, R. M. (2010). Management teams: Why they succeed or fail (3rd ed.). Butterworth-Heinemann.

Brown, S. (2010). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.