Problem solving activities, tasks & training
Hands-on activities that present teams with real problems, then show them exactly how they solved it and what got in the way. Reusable kits you run yourself, indoors or outside, with no formal training required.
Why problem solving skills matter
We start learning to problem solve around the same time we learn to walk and talk. But even the most capable teams still get stuck at work, and usually in the same four places:
They start solving before they understand the problem
They see what they expect to see rather than what is actually there
They can't separate the problem from the noise around it
They lose sight of the wider context
Put a group together and the issues compound: loud voices dominate, someone who's worked out the answer doesn't say anything in case it sounds stupid. Nobody wants to be the one challenging the obvious approach.
And none of that gets fixed by explaining a model. For decades, the research on problem solving - from Schoenfeld's work on resources, heuristics, control and beliefs, to Newell and Simon's General Problem Solver - has pointed to the solution being practice under pressure followed by an honest look at what just happened - which is what exactly what MTa activities are built around.
Why choose MTa Learning for problem solving activities?
The same logic runs through every MTa activity: a group gets a task, a limited set of materials, and a constraint that makes the obvious approach fail.
What happens next is the content: who takes charge? Who goes quiet? Does anyone read the brief twice? What does the team do when the first plan stops working?
Our problem solving activities:
Run from 10 minute tasks to half-day challenges
Are suited to groups of 4 to 40+
Are reusable, so the same kit can be used year on year
Some are quick and competitive, others are slow and deliberately frustrating. All of them end with a structured review, which is where the learning actually happens.
We have activities for all settings...
☑️ Team problem solving activities for the workplace
In these tasks, the difficulty is other people as much as the problem itself.
In Digital Display, the frustration is integral: every person holds one piece of a bigger job, nobody is allowed to speak, and some finish early while others sit stuck.
In Over the Bridge, teams have to agree what they are actually trying to achieve before they are allowed to build anything. Both show you how your team behaves when the plan stops working.
☑️ Problem solving games and challenges
Shorter, competitive tasks for when you want focussed bursts of energy. Useful as session openers, as problem solving challenges for wider team days, or as standalone tasks between longer pieces of work.
The Stack, Rectangles and Hold Everything are three examples of activities you can run in ten minutes, each spotlighting a different aspect of problem solving.
☑️ Problem solving activities for young people and teens
The MTa STEM Kit is built for ages 10 to 18. It's got 24 activities that up to 30 young people can work on at once, from 10 minute challenges to hour-long ones.
It's used in schools, colleges, cadet units and youth groups the world over, and is demonstrably effective in engaging with young people and teens.
☑️ Indoor and outdoor problem solving activities
Every MTa kit works in both settings. The components are just as comfortable on a meeting room table as on grass, in a sports hall or in a car park.
If you've got an outdoor session and it rains you can move inside and carry on. Worth knowing if you are planning outdoor problem solving activities and need a fallback that isn't cancellation.
Planning a problem solving workshops or training session? We can help
Choosing an activity is one thing, but building a session around it is another.
A problem solving workshop needs structure: the right task for the group, enough time to let them struggle, and a review phase that turns the experience into lasting learning they can use at work.
Every MTa kit ships with facilitator guides, participant briefs and reflection questions to do that, and we've outlined the process for each step here.
And if you need extra help you can -
Running a problem solving workshop
Session formats, group sizes and timings
Facilitating and coaching problem solving
Recommended MTa kits for problem solving
Four of our kits map particularly well onto problem solving. MTa Insights explores for how individuals think, MTa Team Kit explores how groups work together, MTa STEM Kit is tailored to young people, and MTa KanDo Lean is build around process and workplace efficiency. All four are one-off purchases with unlimited reuse.
MTa Insights for behavioural problem solving
Six dedicated problem solving activities within a 53-activity kit
Running from 30 to 90 minutes each
Targeting the specific blocks that stop people solving problems: jumping to solutions, seeing what you expect, missing the context
240 components, facilitator guides and participant briefs in two travel bags
Suits apprentice to C-suite, 4-20 participants
MTa Team Kit for collaborative problem solving
Sixteen activities built around the tension between individual and team success - the thing that makes real workplace problems hard
Activities target logic under pressure, clarifying objectives and planning before building, and more
186 components and seven facilitator guides
Designed for 4-16 participants, teams at any level of maturity
MTa STEM Kit for STEM and engineering problem solving
Twenty-four activities for ages 10 to 18, from ten minutes to an hour
Covering structures, forces, motion and design
Activities nurture problem solving capabilities through STEM activities
Six bags of components with facilitator guides, participant briefs and reflection questions
Up to 30 young people at once. Used in schools, colleges, cadet units and youth groups
MTa Kando Lean for process and lean problem solving
A five-phase programme covering the seven wastes, 5S, Kanban and visual controls, demand variation and dispersed supply chains
Teams find the waste in their own process rather than being shown a slide about it
Over 300 components, facilitator guide and participant workbooks
90 minutes to a full day
3-15 participants
Used by Nissan, Britvic, United Biscuits and the US Air Force.
Choosing your problem solving kit
Not sure which?
If you're developing managers and leaders, start with MTa Insights
If there are issues with how a specific team works together, use MTa Team Kit
If you are working with under-18s, choose the MTa STEM Kit
If the problems are in a process rather than in people, use MTa KanDo Lean
And if you want to talk it through, book a call with our experiential learning experts.
Compatible with your existing problem solving framework
MTa activities don't require an overhaul of your current training program - they sit alongside whatever structured problem solving approach you already use.
If your organisation runs A3 thinking, 8D, PDCA, DMAIC, a four-step or eight-step model, five whys, root cause analysis or something you've developed in-house, none of that needs to change.
These frameworks assume the underlying problem solving capability is already there - that a team can:
Define a problem accurately
Challenge an assumption
Listen to the quiet person
Resist solving before they understand
That capability is what MTa activities build. Teams run a task, hit the common failure points in a setting where the cost is a collapsed tower rather than a missed deadline, and then review what happened to carry the learning forward to the higher stakes workplace situations.
Many customers run MTa activities as the practical component of a wider training programmes, using their preferred problem solving framework for the structure and the activity to make it stick.
How MTa compares with other problem solving training options
MTa kits | External activity days | Classroom / slides | E-learning | Improvised in-house | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
What it is | A reusable physical kit, run by your own people | A facilitated event booked from a supplier | A trainer presenting models and frameworks | Self-guided online modules | Free activities found online, run ad hoc |
Cost model | One-off purchase | Per event, per head | Per session or trainer day | Per licence, renewed yearly | Free |
Cost over three years | Falls with every session you run | Repeats in full, every time | Repeats in full, every time | Renews every year | Free, though staff time is not |
Who delivers it | Your own trainer, manager or teacher | The supplier's facilitators | An internal or external trainer | Nobody: self-directed | Whoever volunteers |
Indoors or outdoors | Both, same kit, any flat space | Usually outdoors, weather dependent | Indoors, room required | Anywhere with a screen | Varies by activity |
Group size | 3-40+, parallel teams above that | Fixed by the supplier's format | Limited by room capacity | Unlimited, but individual | Varies - depends what you find |
What it develops | Behaviour, observed under pressure | Behaviour, though review varies | Knowledge and models | Knowledge only | Behaviour, unstructured |
Structured review | Built in: review sheets and guided questions for every activity | A debrief, if time allows | Group discussion | Multiple-choice quiz | Rarely, likely to be unstructured |
Materials included | Facilitator guides, participant briefs, review sheets | Supplied on the day only | Slides and handouts | Built into the platform | None - you build them |
Repeatable with new starters | Immediately, at no extra cost | Requires a new booking | Requires a new session | Yes, per new licence | Yes |
Transfer to the workplace | Planned explicitly in the review | Depends on the debrief | Depends on later application | Low - no practice element | Low - no review step |
Works with fully remote teams | No - the kits are physical | No | Sometimes, if run over video | Yes | Some activities |
When MTa isn't a good fit
If people need to absorb a lot of knowledge (regulations, a product range, etc) a course or an e-learning module is a better fit.
If your team is fully remote and will not be in a room together, our kits are physical, which may be a limitation - but we do offer online experiential learning activities.
If you're looking for a day out that lifts morale with no development objective attached, an activity day company is a good fit.
And if you genuinely only need to run one session, with one group, once, then hiring someone for the day probably makes more sense.
Our customers are usually running sessions repeatedly - for new intakes, different teams, over several years. This is where a reusable kit wins.
Proof that MTa kits work for problem solving
We've got evidence that our kits and activities deliver problem solving learning for organisations around the world. Here's a look at what they've achieved running our activities with their own teams.
Case studies
Ammunition technicians at Defence Munitions Kineton run MTa STEM Kit with cadets and school groups - nearly 200 events in two years on a single kit.
As Staff Sergeant Frazer Stark puts it, their own work means "complex situations where there is no manual", so the sessions build problem solving under pressure rather than technique.
Leeds University Business School used MTa Insights to explore how people from different cultures approach the same problem, with half of each group observing and giving feedback so students could see their own problem solving from the outside.
143 international Masters students from 35 countries, working in seminars of 30.
At St John's Deaf School, deaf and hearing pupils from four schools worked in 15 mixed teams. Threading Needles sets deliberately ambiguous constraints, so teams have to work out what the brief actually implies before they act. When Tall Stack stalled, facilitators called a five-minute thinking pause rather than offering a hint.
What our clients say
We use the MTa [Team] Kit almost every other day
Training Department, Toyota Car Manufacturing
HSBC works in 77 countries and has 10 training centres around the globe. We use MTa materials (all of them!) in a variety of situations: assessment events, small workshops for specific groups, on our graduate training programmes, on foundation and middle management skills courses, in tailored functional development events, for train-the-trainer events in local areas, and for country-level top team workshops. We have also used the kit when working with specific large-scale business issues, such as merging local businesses into regional structures.
Martha B. Birtles, HSBC Holdings plc
MTa is my go to product really well designed and so adaptable.
Bill Robinson, Head of HR & Leadership Development @ PwC Middle East
We use the MTa [Team] Kit almost every other day
Training Department, Toyota Car Manufacturing
HSBC works in 77 countries and has 10 training centres around the globe. We use MTa materials (all of them!) in a variety of situations: assessment events, small workshops for specific groups, on our graduate training programmes, on foundation and middle management skills courses, in tailored functional development events, for train-the-trainer events in local areas, and for country-level top team workshops. We have also used the kit when working with specific large-scale business issues, such as merging local businesses into regional structures.
Martha B. Birtles, HSBC Holdings plc
MTa is my go to product really well designed and so adaptable.
Bill Robinson, Head of HR & Leadership Development @ PwC Middle East
Problem solving resources and downloads
Facilitator materials and participant worksheets come with every kit. These samples show what you would be working from.
Sample learning review worksheet
The review sheet participants complete individually before the group discussion. This is what stops the loudest voice setting the agenda, by prompting each person to record what helped, what hindered, and what they would change - letting them arrive at the review with a position of their own.
One sheet per participant per activity, included with every kit.
Facilitator guides and participant materials
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