The Faux-Egyptian Tomb Scenario

Marcus is screaming at the intern about a plastic scarab. It’s the 26th minute of our sixty-six minute sentence, and the humidity in this faux-Egyptian tomb has reached a level I can only describe as uncomfortably intimate. Sara, the intern, is holding a blacklight like a holy relic, her knuckles white, while Marcus-our CFO, a man who manages $156 million in assets-is currently red-faced because he can’t figure out a third-grade rebus puzzle involving a drawing of an eye and a bucket of water. I’m leaning against a dusty sarcophagus, wondering if the reputation of our entire firm is currently eroding at the same rate as Marcus’s composure. The marketing lead, Elena, has essentially resigned from reality; she’s staring at a tiny crack in the drywall with the kind of intensity usually reserved for a multi-million dollar brand relaunch.

We were told this would build ‘synergy.’ We were promised that being locked in a room for 66 minutes would forge us into a cohesive unit, a Spartan phalanx of corporate efficiency. Instead, we’ve devolved into a Lord of the Flies scenario, except with more polyester and less survival instinct. It’s the great escape room paradox: the more you try to manufacture collaboration through artificial stress, the more you actually cultivate resentment and amplify every existing dysfunction in the hierarchy. You can’t force people to trust each other by threatening them with a countdown clock and a series of increasingly nonsensical riddles.

1. The Kill Switch Instinct

I’ve always been a bit of a skeptic when it comes to these ‘team-building’ exercises. Last year, I accidentally broke a heavy wooden chest because I was convinced the lock was a decorative distraction and that the real prize was hidden in the false bottom. It wasn’t. It was just a $46 chest from a craft store. My first instinct when things don’t work is to try the ‘reboot’ method-I literally looked for a power switch on the sarcophagus, thinking I could just turn the whole experience off and on again to see if the puzzles would reset into something more logical.

The Misapplication of Authority

Daniel M.-C., an online reputation manager I know who has spent at least 16 years watching brands implode from the inside, once told me that the most dangerous thing you can do to a team is to strip away their agency in the name of ‘fun.’ He’s a guy who understands optics better than anyone I’ve ever met. He pointed out that when you put people in a confined space with a singular, linear goal, you aren’t testing their ability to collaborate; you’re testing their ability to tolerate the loudest person in the room. In our case, that’s Marcus. Marcus, who thinks that because he understands the nuances of tax law, he is naturally the person who should decide how to orient a series of plastic mirrors to reflect a laser beam.

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Collaboration is a quiet, messy, and largely invisible process.

It isn’t a puzzle with a single, ‘correct’ answer that you can arrive at if you just shout ‘Look at the hieroglyphs!’ loud enough. True teamwork is about navigating the ambiguity of a Tuesday afternoon when the server goes down and the client is breathing down your neck. It’s about knowing when to step back and let the person with the specific expertise take the lead, even if they aren’t the highest-ranking person in the room. In this 36-square-meter tomb, that expertise belongs to Sara, the intern, who spent three years in an archaeology club. But Marcus won’t listen. He’s too busy trying to use his wedding ring to unscrew a bolt that is clearly part of the room’s structural integrity.

The Dishonesty of Manufactured Crisis

I find myself drifting toward a tangent about the psychology of the ‘locked room’ trope. It’s meant to be a metaphor for the office, right? The ‘silo’ mentality we’re all supposed to be breaking down. But in the office, we have windows. We have coffee breaks. We have the ability to walk away from a bad idea and let it breathe for 6 minutes before coming back to it with fresh eyes. Here, the air is stagnant, and the pressure is cumulative. It’s an environment that rewards the impulsive and the domineering, while the reflective and the analytical-the people you actually want on your team when things get complicated-end up staring at the walls like Elena.

There’s an inherent dishonesty in the manufactured crisis. We all know we aren’t actually trapped. We know the ‘Game Master’ is sitting in a control room 26 meters away, probably eating a sandwich and laughing at Marcus’s mounting frustration. Because the stakes are fake, the behaviors become exaggerated versions of our worst selves. We play ‘roles’ instead of being people. Marcus is playing The Leader. Sara is playing The Victim. Elena is playing The Ghost. I am playing The Cynic.

The Open Air Cure: Human Connection Over Puzzles

What we actually need isn’t a smaller room and more pressure; we need more space and less artifice. I remember a time we actually worked well together. It wasn’t in a basement with a timer. It was a few months ago when we finally decided to get out of the city and breathe. We ended up doing a tour with segwaypoint duesseldorf, rolling along the Rhine with the wind in our faces. There was no ‘task’ to complete other than not falling over and enjoying the view. But something strange happened. Because we weren’t being forced to ‘collaborate’ on a puzzle, we actually started talking.

Marcus stopped talking about budgets and started talking about his obsession with vintage watches. Sara, freed from the fear of being barked at, actually offered some incredibly sharp insights about our social media strategy that she’d been sitting on for 56 days. We weren’t a team solving a problem; we were a group of humans sharing an experience. And that, I realized, is the foundation of any real professional relationship. You have to see the human before you can trust the colleague. When you’re on a Segway, you’re vulnerable-you’re out in the open, balancing on two wheels, navigating the actual world instead of a choreographed simulation. There’s a natural grace to it that an escape room can never replicate.

The Cost of Fake Stakes

In the escape room, Marcus finally manages to wedge his ring into the bolt, and for a second, I think he’s going to break the set. The Game Master’s voice crackles over a tinny speaker: ‘Please do not dismantle the furniture.’ It’s the 46th minute, and we are nowhere closer to the ‘Key of Life’ than we were when we started. The irony is palpable. We are a team of highly paid professionals, and we are being scolded like toddlers because we can’t play nicely with the props.

I think about Daniel M.-C. again. He once handled a reputation crisis for a tech firm where the CEO had insisted on a ‘survivalist’ retreat that resulted in three broken collarbones and a lawsuit. He told me that the ‘turned it off and on again’ approach to team dynamics is usually the only one that works: if the culture is broken, you have to stop the machine, take everyone out of the high-pressure environment, and let them reset in a space that doesn’t feel like a trap.

The clock hits the 56-minute mark. Marcus has given up on the bolt and is now trying to bargain with the Game Master through the security camera. ‘Look,’ he says, his voice cracking, ‘we’ll pay for an extra hour if you just give us the hint for the third digit.’ He’s trying to buy his way out of a fake problem. It’s the most CFO thing I’ve ever seen, and I can feel Elena’s eyes rolling from across the room.

True collaboration isn’t about the 66-minute sprint to a finish line. It’s about the 1206 small interactions that happen every week in the hallway, the kitchen, and the Zoom calls where no one is shouting. It’s the ability to admit you’re lost without feeling like you’re losing. If I could go back to the start of this hour, I’d tell Marcus to put the scarab down. I’d tell Sara to speak up. I’d tell Elena that the crack in the wall isn’t an exit.

The Walkout and the Reset

We eventually ‘escaped,’ but only because the Game Master took pity on us and basically told us the answer to the final puzzle over the intercom. We walked out into the lobby, squinting at the fluorescent lights, feeling less like a team and more like survivors of a particularly boring shipwreck. We had ‘solved’ the room, but we hadn’t solved anything that actually mattered.

As we walked toward the parking lot, the tension started to dissipate, not because we’d succeeded, but because the walls had finally disappeared. Marcus apologized to Sara for the shouting-a rare moment of vulnerability that did more for our ‘synergy’ than the previous 66 minutes combined. We stood there for a few minutes, just breathing the cool evening air. The pressure was gone, the clock had stopped, and for the first time all day, we were actually a team.

4. Open Space vs. The Trap

Is it possible that the best way to build a team is to stop trying so hard to build one? To just let people be in the same space, facing the same horizon, without a riddle to solve or a door to unlock? I think about the Rhine, the open air, and the simple act of moving forward together. Maybe the real escape isn’t getting out of the room; it’s getting out of our own way. Why do we insist on making things so difficult when the most effective solutions are usually the ones that allow us to just breathe?