The Collaboration Map
Time for the team building activity: 20–25 minutes
Setup effort: Easy (whiteboard or digital canvas)
Estimated cost: Free
Business value: Reveals collaboration patterns, reduces silos, and strengthens team awareness in team building sessions
What is The Collaboration Map?
The Collaboration Map is a visual team building activity where participants map how they collaborate with each other across projects, tasks, or functions.
The group creates a diagram showing:
who works with whom
where information flows
where collaboration is strong
where connections are weak or missing
The goal is to make the team’s collaboration network visible.
This often reveals surprising patterns such as:
overloaded individuals
isolated roles
missing communication links
It is widely used in organizational development and team effectiveness workshops.
How do you run The Collaboration Map?
Start with a blank whiteboard or digital canvas.
Write each participant’s name on the board (or use sticky notes).
Explain the objective clearly:
“We’re going to visualize how our team collaborates today.”
Ask participants to draw lines between people who frequently collaborate.
Then add context:
thick lines for strong collaboration
thin lines for occasional interaction
arrows for information flow
Once the map is complete, step back and observe the structure together.
Discuss patterns that emerge.
The full team building activity typically runs 20–25 minutes.
Why it’s great for a team
Many teams assume collaboration is evenly distributed, but visual mapping often reveals a different reality.
In one short team building exercise, it helps teams:
identify collaboration bottlenecks
recognize overloaded individuals
surface underused connections
strengthen awareness of team dynamics
encourage more intentional collaboration
Participants often notice that certain people become central communication hubs while others remain disconnected.
This insight helps teams rebalance responsibilities and improve information flow.
It is particularly effective:
in growing teams
during reorganizations
with cross-functional groups
in remote or hybrid teams
From an organizational behavior perspective, visualizing collaboration networks often helps teams reduce dependency risks and improve communication efficiency.
How to organize it effectively
Visualization clarity is the biggest success factor.
Use different colors or line styles to represent different collaboration strengths.
Encourage participants to add connections freely rather than overthinking.
As facilitator, ask probing questions such as:
“Who appears most central in the network?”
“Where do we see gaps?”
“Who might be overloaded?”
For large teams, consider mapping only a specific project or workflow.
In remote team building sessions, digital whiteboards work extremely well for this exercise.
End with a practical discussion:
“Which connection should we strengthen?”
“Where can we reduce bottlenecks?”
When well facilitated, The Collaboration Map is a powerful team building activity that turns invisible collaboration patterns into clear insights, helping teams improve communication and coordination.