Throwing Stars: The Key to Team Resets and Cohesive Collaboration

One of my all-time favorite card games to play with a group is also one of the simplest.

“The Mind” is a deck of 100 cards, each numbered 1 through 100. The objective is for players to collaboratively play their cards in ascending order, face up, without revealing their hands or speaking to each other.

I won’t get into all of the rules here (though this is a great blog post that does), but the game involves nonverbal communication and intuiting the value of cards in people’s hands without them telling you. 

As a cooperative board game, this means either the whole team wins, or the whole team loses. There are no heroes. 

What’s great about The Mind is that you will inevitably lose the first time you play it with a new group of people. Since you are essentially trying to communicate how big the numbers are on your cards, without talking to other players, people misread each other’s signals all the time. You can only win by working together.

It’s a lot like what modern team-building feels like at work. 

Whether in cooperative board games or real life companies, teams invariably get stuck, where one or more people don’t know what move to make next.

Do we expand our geographic reach or deepen engagement with our current users? Do we need to hire more people, or reskill the ones we have? Do we need to raise money? Get new advisors? Cement better strategic partnerships? Adopt an AI strategy? 

In the workplace, I’ve noticed that what happens next is the dividing line between good teams and great teams. Good teams figure out a way to fumble through some of these tough questions. But weak teams fall apart at the seams. When a weak team gets stuck, you might see one person barrel ahead with one strategy while someone else pursues a path in a completely different direction. Factions form. Nothing gets done.

Meanwhile as a team, you’re racking up penalties and eroding trust left and right. Someone calls it a product problem while someone else calls it a business development problem. There’s no consensus on the right next best step forward because everyone has lost sight of the baseline.

As for great teams? Not only can they tell when they are stuck, but they’ve normalized the behavior of signaling how to ask for help. And most important, they know how (and when) to signal a team-wide reset.

The game designers of The Mind have built this “team reset” concept into the game with a feature called a “throwing star.” When a throwing star is played, each player reveals one card from their hand, providing the team with additional information before the next move.

To signal that you're feeling stuck, you can raise your hand. If the rest of the team agrees (by also raising their hands), the throwing star is activated. This resets the gameplay and allows everyone to recalibrate, all without speaking.

There are two things I love about the throwing star concept:

1. It’s a way to wordlessly signal that you’re feeling stuck or need a little help.

2. You can only play the throwing star if everyone else agrees you need it.

It’s so obvious, yet so simple. If nobody knows what to do next on a team, you should reset (as a team). Of course the tough thing is feeling safe enough to be okay being the first person to raise your hand.

If you play The Mind enough times, you’ll notice that there are times when someone signals they are stuck, but someone else is more confident in the next move. Game play continues without needing to play the throwing star. This is a great feeling because it means you can save the lifeline for another time.

And then there are times when the team is fully operating in sync together. Everyone is in a flow state, aligned exactly with what needs to happen next, without saying anything at all. They are, one mind. No throwing stars needed.

I love the idea of nonverbal cues to signal help so much that my husband and I now incorporate the idea of “throwing stars” at home.

Picture this: A toddler has thrown themselves onto the floor, taken off both shoes and is shrieking like a cat while refusing to stand up off the sidewalk on West 72nd Street. (Hypothetically, of course.)

One parent has asked nicely for them to get it together. The other has enforced strongly. Neither approach has any impact. The screams escalate. You each recognize an urgent need to make a move. But what to do next?

Without further agitating the feral child, both parents simply lock eyes, and someone slowly raises a hand. Then, the other person does too. 

OK, there is agreement. Let’s take a reset.

The throwing star triggers the need to establish a new baseline. Each parent reads out what they know, they ask their kid for any more information. You might learn the kid is sad that they didn’t get to push the elevator button on the subway. If you’re a fellow parent, you’ll understand why that is very useful information to have. From there, you can regroup and keep going, maybe just with a promise that they can hit the elevator button at home.

Since COVID I’ve noticed that it’s a lot harder to feel “in the groove” with team dynamics at work. Harder to catch the drift of when a team is operating in a flow state, vs. struggling to catch a breath. Nonverbal communication just isn’t the same on Zoom as it is in a room. 

I’ve misinterpreted a lot of signals from people on Slack and Zoom over the past few years. Things that I thought were signals of help but weren’t. One time it took me 4 months to figure out the “ACK” Slack emoji icon they kept using in response to my to-do lists wasn’t an indication of dismay or frustration: It was shorthand for “acknowledged.” 

A remote-first work environment may make a “throwing star” a little trickier to catch, but not impossible. Maybe if you’re having trouble catching onto when your colleagues are feeling stuck, you should all play a game of The Mind together.