Storming Stage Activities: Engaging Team Building Exercises for Success

What Does the Storming Stage Actually Look Like?

Storming is the second stage of Bruce Tuckman’s group development model, where team members stop being polite and start pushing back. It looks like arguments over roles, challenges to authority, and a growing sense that the team “isn’t working.”

The forming stage was the fake one. Everyone smiled, nodded, and agreed with whatever the boss said. That ends fast. In the storming stage, people start showing who they actually are: their working styles, their egos, their assumptions about how things should get done. And those don’t always fit together.

Tuckman first described this in his 1965 paper “Developmental sequence in small groups”, published in Psychological Bulletin. He and Mary Ann Jensen updated it in 1977 to add the fifth stage, adjourning. The model has held up for sixty years not because it’s perfectly linear (teams loop back to storming constantly) but because it names something every manager eventually sees: the moment the honeymoon ends.

In practice, storming shows up as:

• Two team members who keep arguing about the same process in every meeting
• Someone who challenges every decision the team lead makes, usually in front of others
• Sub-groups forming. People who “agree with each other” versus everyone else.
• Meetings that feel exhausting but produce nothing
• A general sense that the team is stuck, even though everyone is working hard

If that sounds familiar, your team is storming. That’s not a diagnosis of failure. It’s a sign that people care enough to fight about things. The alternative is worse: a team where nobody pushes back. That’s artificial harmony, and it usually means people have already checked out.

Is Your Team Storming or Just Dysfunctional?

Storming has a direction: it moves toward clarity. Dysfunction circles in place. A team that has been fighting the same fight for six months isn’t storming. It’s stuck, and no team-building exercise will fix it.

After twenty years of watching teams go through this, I’ve learned to separate the two. Storming is uncomfortable but productive. Dysfunction is comfortable in its discomfort. People have adapted to the misery and stopped trying to change it.

Here’s the difference:

The duration threshold matters. Practitioners in the r/management community consistently flag that storming lasting beyond six months usually signals a deeper problem: unclear roles, misaligned incentives, or a person who doesn’t belong on the team. If your team has been storming for that long, skip the activities below and have the staffing conversation you’ve been avoiding.

One more test: ask each person privately, “What would need to change for this team to work?” If you get specific, actionable answers, that’s storming. If you get shrugs, eye-rolls, or “nothing will ever change,” you’re past storming into something that needs a different kind of intervention.

Why Most Storming Stage Activities Make Things Worse

Trust falls, forced socials, and “get to know you” games during storming signal to the team that leadership doesn’t understand the problem. The people who study this for a living consistently say the same thing: don’t do it.

I need to say this before we get to the activities that work, because the internet is full of lists that put trust falls and bowling nights in the “storming” category. They shouldn’t be there.

The r/teamwork subreddit has a recurring thread about team building activities that actually help during storming. The consensus is blunt: forced fun makes storming worse. People who are already frustrated with each other don’t become less frustrated by being trapped together at a restaurant. The resentment follows them back to the office.

Here’s what goes wrong:

• Social bonding activities assume the problem is that people don’t like each other. Usually, the problem is that roles are unclear, someone feels unheard, or the team lead hasn’t addressed a legitimate grievance. A bowling night doesn’t fix any of that.
• Trust exercises require trust to work. Asking someone to fall backward into a colleague’s arms when they don’t trust that colleague yet doesn’t build trust. It builds anxiety and resentment.
• “Icebreakers” during storming feel tone-deaf. The team is past introductions. They know each other’s names. Playing “Two Truths and a Lie” while the room is full of unresolved tension tells the team that their leader is out of touch.

What storming actually needs is structure. The activities that work give people a framework to surface conflict safely, to disagree about the right things, in a controlled setting, with a path to resolution. They’re not fun. They’re not supposed to be. They’re supposed to work.

There’s a simpler way to think about this. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, spent decades showing that simple heuristics outperform complex decision-making frameworks in uncertain environments. His research suggests the same applies to team conflict: you don’t need an elaborate offsite with a $5,000-a-day facilitator. You need a rule of thumb. Here’s mine: if you wouldn’t say it to someone in a one-on-one, don’t make it a group activity. Start simple. The eight exercises below are simple.

8 Storming Stage Activities That Actually Work

The activities below are designed for teams in active storming, where conflict exists but hasn’t turned toxic. Each one gives structure to the disagreement and moves the team toward the norming stage.

1. Team Charter / Working Agreements

A team charter is a written agreement about how the team will work together. Communication rules, decision-making processes, and behavioural expectations. It’s the single most useful activity during storming because the act of writing it down forces the team to name what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

Atlassian’s Team Playbook reports that the majority of employees who ran their Working Agreements play felt empowered to speak up about changes they’d like to see. Their internal Teamwork Lab research, backed by citations to APA PsycNet studies on enhanced communication and psychological safety, found measurable improvement in team cohesion after a single session.

Time: 60–90 minutes
Group size: 4–12
You need: A whiteboard or shared document, a facilitator (ideally not the team lead if trust in leadership is part of the storming)

Steps:

1. Set the frame. Tell the team: “We’re going to write down the rules we’ll hold each other to. Not company policy — our rules, for how we work together.”
2. Individual brainstorm (5 min). Each person writes 3–5 working agreements they’d want. No discussion yet.
3. Share and cluster. Put all suggestions on the board. Group duplicates. You’ll see patterns fast. People who want “no meetings without agendas” are telling you something about the last three months.
4. Discuss and prioritise. For each cluster, ask: “Can we all commit to this?” If not, ask what would need to change. Don’t force agreement. Surface the disagreement.
5. Finalise 5–7 agreements. Write them down. Everyone signs or verbally commits.
6. Set a review date. “We’ll revisit these in four weeks and change what isn’t working.”

Debrief questions: “Which agreement was hardest to agree on? Why? What does that tell us about what we need to talk about?”

Why it works during storming: Storming is often conflict about unnamed expectations. Person A expects decisions by consensus. Person B expects the boss to decide. Neither has said this out loud. The charter forces it into the open.

2. Role Clarification with RACI

RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. It’s a matrix that maps every key task or decision to specific people and defines what their involvement looks like. During storming, it answers the question that causes most of the fighting: “Whose job is this?”

Atlassian’s Roles and Responsibilities Play cites Small Group Research journal findings that role clarity directly prevents misunderstandings and reduces conflict frequency. Their own data shows measurable improvement in employee engagement after running the exercise.

Time: 45–60 minutes
Group size: 3–8
You need: A list of the team’s key tasks/decisions, a blank RACI grid

Steps:

1. List the work. Write down every recurring task, decision, and deliverable the team owns. Aim for 10–20 items.
2. Individual mapping (10 min). Each person fills in their own RACI grid: who they think is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for each item.
3. Compare grids. Put everyone’s answers side by side. The disagreements are the point. They’re the storming made visible.
4. Resolve one at a time. For each disagreement, ask: “What should this be?” Not “What has it been?” The past is the problem, the agreement is the fix.
5. Document the final RACI. Share it. Refer to it in meetings for the next month.

Debrief questions: “Where was the biggest gap between what people thought their role was? How long has that been causing friction?”

Why it works during storming: Most storming I’ve seen in twenty years traces back to overlapping responsibilities or invisible work. This exercise makes both visible in about an hour.

3. Start/Stop/Continue Retrospective

A retrospective format where the team names what they should start doing, stop doing, and continue doing. It’s structured enough to keep the conversation productive but open enough to surface real grievances.

Atlassian’s Sprint Retrospective Play cites research from ResearchGate on team reflexivity and its role in preventing information-processing failures in teams. The format is borrowed from agile but works in any team context.

Time: 30–45 minutes
Group size: 4–10
You need: Three columns on a whiteboard (or a shared digital board for remote teams), sticky notes

Steps:

1. Set the rules. “We’re talking about processes and behaviours, not people. ‘Stop having meetings without agendas’ is fine. ‘Stop being difficult’ is not.”
2. Silent writing (5 min). Everyone writes sticky notes for Start, Stop, and Continue. No discussion.
3. Post and read. Everyone puts their notes on the board. Read them all out loud.
4. Cluster themes. Group similar notes. The biggest cluster is your team’s loudest problem.
5. Pick one from each column. “We will start X, stop Y, and continue Z.” One commitment per column. Not five. One.
6. Assign owners. Who makes sure it happens?

Debrief questions: “Which ‘Stop’ item has been bothering people the longest? Why didn’t it get said before?”

Why it works during storming: It gives people permission to complain, but channels it into actionable commitments instead of venting sessions.

4. “User Manual of Me”

Each team member writes a one-page “user manual” for themselves: how they prefer to receive feedback, what drains them, what motivates them, when they’re at their best. Then the team shares and discusses.

Time: 30 minutes individual writing + 30–45 minutes sharing
Group size: Any size (break into pairs for sharing if larger than 6)
You need: A template (four sections: “I work best when…”, “I struggle when…”, “The best way to give me feedback is…”, “Something people misunderstand about me is…”)

Steps:

1. Distribute the template. Give people 20–30 minutes to write. Encourage honesty, not corporate-speak.
2. Share in pairs or small groups. Each person reads their manual. Others ask clarifying questions.
3. Whole group patterns. “What did we learn about how we’re different? Where might those differences cause friction?”
4. Keep the manuals. Put them somewhere the team can reference: a shared doc, a Confluence page, a physical folder.

Debrief questions: “Whose manual surprised you most? Is there a friction point between two people that now makes more sense?”

Why it works during storming: It depersonalises the friction. “You’re difficult to work with” becomes “Your manual says you need written agendas and I’ve been winging it.” The problem moves from the person to the process.

5. “Elephant in the Room” Session

A facilitated session where each person names one thing the team isn’t talking about but should be. It’s the structured version of “let’s just say it.” Needs a skilled facilitator, ideally someone external to the team if trust in the manager is part of the problem.

Time: 45 minutes
Group size: 4–8 (larger groups need breakout rooms)
You need: A facilitator, index cards, a box or hat

Steps:

1. Anonymous writing. Each person writes one “elephant” on an index card. No names. Fold and put in the box.
2. Read them all. The facilitator reads each card aloud. No reactions, no discussion yet. Just hear them.
3. Cluster and prioritise. If themes emerge, group them. Ask the team: “Which of these, if we addressed it, would make the biggest difference?”
4. Pick one. Only one. Discuss it openly for 20 minutes. The facilitator’s job is to keep it productive. No personal attacks, focus on behaviour and process.
5. Agree on one action. What changes as a result of this conversation?
6. Close with acknowledgment. “This was hard. Thank you for being honest.”

Debrief questions: “How long has the team been carrying that? What would have happened if we’d said it three months ago?”

Why it works during storming: Storming persists when the real issue isn’t being discussed. This exercise makes the undiscussable discussable, with enough structure to keep it from becoming a shouting match.

6. Conflict Styles Assessment (TKI or DiSC)

A psychometric assessment that shows each team member’s default approach to conflict: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, or accommodating. The team takes the assessment individually, then debriefs together to understand their differences.

Time: 20 minutes for the assessment + 40 minutes for the debrief
Group size: Any
You need: TKI or DiSC assessment licenses (TKI costs roughly $20–25 per person; DiSC varies by provider)

Steps:

1. Take the assessment individually. Don’t discuss answers beforehand.
2. Share results. Each person shares their profile. “I’m a competitor in conflict. I push for my position.” “I’m an avoider. I withdraw.”
3. Map the team. Put everyone’s style on a board. Where are the clusters? Where are the gaps?
4. Scenario discussion. “In our last big disagreement, how did each style show up? What happened when a competitor met an avoider?”
5. Agree on adaptations. “When we’re in conflict, what do we need from each other’s styles?”

Debrief questions: “Which two styles are most likely to clash on this team? What can each person do differently now that they know?”

Why it works during storming: It gives people a vocabulary for what’s happening. “We clash because you compete and I avoid” is more useful than “you’re impossible to work with.” It moves the conflict from character to pattern.

7. Fishbowl Discussion

Half the team sits in an inner circle and debates a topic while the other half observes from an outer circle. No speaking allowed. Then they swap. It breaks the cycle of the same two people arguing in every meeting by forcing the quiet ones into the conversation and the loud ones into listening.

Time: 30–45 minutes
Group size: 6–12 (split evenly between inner and outer circles)
You need: Chairs in two concentric circles, a pre-selected debate topic relevant to the team’s actual storming issue

Steps:

1. Choose the topic. It should be real. The actual thing the team disagrees about. Not a hypothetical.
2. Assign circles. Put the quieter team members in the inner circle first. The louder voices observe.
3. Inner circle debates (10 min). They discuss the topic. Outer circle takes notes, not just on what’s said, but on how it’s said.
4. Swap circles. New inner circle debates the same topic, informed by what they heard.
5. Full group debrief. “What did the observers notice? What patterns did you see? What did you hear that surprised you?”

Debrief questions: “What was it like to just listen? What did you hear that you wouldn’t have heard if you’d been arguing?”

Why it works during storming: Storming teams often have two or three people who dominate every conflict. The fishbowl forces the others to speak and the dominators to listen. The dynamic shifts in a single session.

8. 5 Whys Root Cause Exercise

Borrowed from lean manufacturing and adapted for team conflict: you take the surface argument and ask “why?” five times in succession to reach the actual root cause underneath. What looks like a personality clash is usually a process failure, a resource constraint, or a misaligned incentive.

Atlassian’s 5 Whys Play walks through the seven-step process with examples. The technique originated at Toyota and has been adapted for team retrospectives across industries.

Time: 30–45 minutes
Group size: 3–6 (works best in smaller groups where the people closest to the problem are in the room)
You need: A whiteboard, a specific recurring conflict to analyse

Steps:

1. State the problem. “The marketing team and the product team keep arguing about launch timelines.” Write it on the board.
2. First why. “Why does this happen?” → “Because product changes the scope after marketing has started planning.”
3. Second why. “Why does product change scope late?” → “Because they get new requirements from the client after the brief is signed off.”
4. Third why. “Why do new requirements come in after sign-off?” → “Because the client doesn’t see the brief until it’s too late.”
5. Fourth why. “Why doesn’t the client see it earlier?” → “Because there’s no client review step in the process.”
6. Fifth why. “Why isn’t there a client review step?” → “Because nobody designed one when the process was built two years ago.”
7. Root cause found. The argument isn’t between marketing and product. It’s a missing step in a process designed two years ago by people who’ve since left. Fix the process, fix the fight.

Debrief questions: “How many of our recurring arguments are actually process problems dressed up as people problems?”

Why it works during storming: It redirects the team’s frustration from each other toward the system. Most arguments I’ve watched in twenty years of management trace back to a process gap, a missing handoff, or an outdated assumption. Not people being difficult on purpose.

How to Adapt Storming Activities for Remote Teams

Remote storming is quieter than in-person storming. It shows up as silence on calls, passive-aggressive messages, cameras staying off, and side-channel complaints that never reach the meeting. The activities above work remotely, but they need structural changes.

The r/agile community consistently recommends anonymous digital boards (Miro, Mural, Mentimeter) as the primary tool for storming in distributed teams. The logic is sound: people who won’t say something out loud on Zoom will type it anonymously.

Adaptations that work:

The one rule that matters more remotely than in person: never force cameras on during storming activities. People who don’t trust the room don’t want to be watched while they’re being honest. Let them type. Let them stay off camera. The honesty matters more than the eye contact.

When Storming Has Gone Too Far

Some teams can’t be fixed with an activity. When the same conflicts persist beyond three to six months, when people avoid each other outside meetings, or when one person has decided they’re not joining the team, no amount of facilitation will change it.

I learned this the hard way. I had one employee who never wanted to gel with the rest of the team. Wrong attitude, interests that kept pulling him in a different direction from everyone else. Every activity we ran, every conversation we had, he’d participate on the surface and then drift back to his own orbit.

What finally worked wasn’t a standard exercise. I put him in a game scenario, a simulation where the team faced a no-win situation and the only way through was to trust the person making the calls. I made him the one making the calls. He had to lead the team through a problem where none of the options were good, and the team had to follow his direction even when they disagreed.

It took a few rounds. But eventually he saw it — we all make mistakes, but we need to do what’s best for the team. Not because it feels good, but because the alternative is everyone going down separately.

That’s not a scalable technique. It worked because I’d spent months observing this specific person, reverse-engineering what made him tick, and designing something that spoke to his particular resistance. Most managers don’t have that luxury and shouldn’t need it.

Here are the signs that storming has gone past the point where activities help:

• One person has decided not to participate. Not reluctantly. Decided. They show up but have checked out of the team’s goals.
• The same conflict has been “resolved” three or more times and keeps coming back in the same form.
• People are documenting conversations. Saving emails, screenshotting messages, in case they need them later. That’s not a team anymore.
• HR has been involved and nothing changed. If the intervention didn’t stick, the person or the structure needs to change.
• You’re spending more time managing the conflict than doing the work. That’s not leadership. That’s firefighting, and it burns out the manager before it fixes the team.

Sometimes the fix isn’t an exercise. It’s a difficult conversation about whether someone belongs on the team. I’ve done that conversation more times than I’d like. It never gets comfortable. But it gets easier to recognise when it’s time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 4 stages of team development?

Bruce Tuckman’s model has four stages: forming, storming, norming, and performing. He and Jensen added a fifth, adjourning, in 1977 to cover what happens when teams disband. The stages aren’t strictly linear; teams loop back to earlier stages when new members join or the task changes.

How long does the storming stage typically last?

Most teams move through the worst of storming within a few weeks to a few months if conflicts are addressed directly. Practitioners in agile communities report that storming should show resolution signs within three to four sprints (roughly six to twelve weeks). Storming that persists beyond six months usually signals a deeper structural or personnel issue rather than normal team development.

Can a team skip the storming stage?

Not really, though some teams appear to. What looks like skipping is usually one of two things: the team is in artificial harmony (people are withholding their real opinions), or the team formed with such clear roles and norms upfront that storming was mild and brief. The r/projectmanagement community warns that avoiding storming entirely leads to worse problems later, because the disagreements still happen. They just happen in private, where they can’t be resolved.

What should a team leader do during the storming stage?

Facilitate, don’t suppress. Your job during storming is to surface the conflicts, give them structure, and guide the team toward agreements, not to make everyone get along or to declare that conflict isn’t allowed. Run structured activities like the ones in this article, listen more than you speak, and resist the urge to resolve everything yourself. The team needs to learn to work through disagreement, not learn to bring every fight to you.

What are some examples of storming behaviour in a team?

Common storming behaviours include: challenging the team leader’s authority in meetings, forming sub-groups or cliques, arguing repeatedly about the same process, passive-aggressive communication, one person dominating discussions while others withdraw, and open disagreement about goals or priorities. Not all of these are unhealthy. They become a problem only when they persist without movement toward resolution.

Is storming always bad for a team?

No. Storming that moves toward clarity is one of the most productive things a team can go through. The teams I’ve seen that never argued were either terrified of their boss or had already given up. Storming means people care. The goal isn’t to eliminate it. It’s to give it enough structure that it produces agreements instead of resentment.

Nassim Taleb would frame this differently. In his concept of antifragility, systems that experience stress and recover become stronger than systems that were never stressed at all. A team that has never stormed is fragile. One wrong hire, one missed deadline, and the whole thing falls apart because nobody knows how to disagree productively. A team that has stormed and worked through it has built the muscle for handling the next conflict. The goal isn’t to skip storming. It’s to survive it well enough that the team gets tougher.

The Bottom Line

Most team-building advice for the storming stage is backwards. It tells you to build trust through social activities when the team doesn’t trust each other yet. It tells you to “embrace conflict” without giving you a framework for what that actually looks like on a Tuesday afternoon in a meeting room.

The activities in this article aren’t fun. They’re not supposed to be. They’re tools, like a torque wrench or a diagnostic scanner. You use them because the team has a specific problem and these address it directly.

After twenty years of watching teams storm, here’s what I know: the teams that get through it are the ones whose leaders name the problem, give it structure, and refuse to pretend it isn’t happening. The teams that don’t get through it are the ones whose leaders try to fix it with a pizza party.

Your team is arguing. That’s not the emergency. The emergency would be silence.