Passions TicTacToe

Hey, it’s Jackson here, and we’re going to do Passion’s Tic-Tac-Toe. Now, this can be done with a group of anywhere from, say, probably three or four people all the way up to maybe 20, 30, 40 people if you’re facilitating a large team event. The purpose of this exercise is to help increase connection and bondedness within teams. A really powerful way to do that is getting people to connect around their interests. There’s a kind of famous saying that says, “To be interesting, be interested.” And what that relates to is this idea that oftentimes when we connect, you know, how do you connect with someone? Well, you come from searching for having something in common. So this is a really kind of informal but maybe fun exercise you can do that helps to connect around some of those passions and those interests that we have in common.

So what you’re going to want to do is, everyone watching, go ahead and take a piece of paper and divide that up into boxes. Now you can do a three by three, you can do a four by four, up to maybe a five by five. The more squares you include, the longer the exercise is going to go. So if you can imagine a standard checkerboard, basically have two vertical lines, two horizontal lines, and together that creates nine boxes or a three by three. So once you have that, within each of those boxes, you’re just going to write down something that you’re interested in or that you’re passionate about. And this doesn’t have to be—I don’t know—it could be really anything crazy. I guess it could be, you know, something that is maybe a bigger thing like your family or religion or spiritual practice or philosophy. But it could also just be something small like, “Hey, I like to work out” or “I like country music.” So once you have an interest in each of those boxes, then here’s how the game—the tic-tac-toe portion—works.

Everyone’s going to just go around, and you can do this in a little more structured way or just a kind of a free-for-all. Either way works pretty well. Go around, and when you find someone that has the same interest as you, you both kind of initial or check off that box, right? And then maybe go around, you talk to some other people, and same thing, if you and another person have that common interest, you check it off, and you keep going like that until someone in the group gets that Tic-tac-toe. And of course, this is not a very competitive tic-tac-toe thing; it’s meant to just facilitate this connection. So you can keep going and say once everyone gets it or once five people get it, whatever you want to do as a group, you can do that, but now you have the general directive.

An example of how this might work, a final piece of this is having some flexibility around the extent to which it’s an exact match, right? So you might, for instance, say, “I have, oh, I really love country music,” and then someone else has written down maybe a specific artist like Luke Bryan. You can say maybe we both cross that off. It doesn’t have to be exact. Maybe I say, “I really love Italian food,” and this person really loves pizza. Great, you get the idea. So there you have it. To recap, you can go ahead and individually create your little tic-tac-toe board, however many squares you want to do. As a group, I suggest probably the traditional tic-tac-toe is a good starting place where you have two vertical lines, two horizontal lines, writing down a passion or an interest of yours within each box. And then you go around in small groups or one-to-one whenever you find someone else who has that same passion or interest, you both check it off, and you go until you get Tic-Tac-Toe. So I hope you enjoy and go ahead and get started.