Last week, I gave my leadership group a sneak peek of a larger systems thinking activity I’ll be running later this week—a modified version of the Anti-Company Game mixed with Jenga—and honestly, it ended up being one of those moments where you could see the lightbulbs going off in the room.

The setup was simple. Every Jenga block represented part of an organizational system—communication, staffing, morale, policies, trust, scheduling, customer service, training, leadership decisions, institutional knowledge…all the invisible things holding an organization together. As participants pulled blocks, they also had to react to different workplace scenarios and decisions that affected the “system.”

At first, people approached it like strategy. They were focused on whether their move caused the tower to wobble. Did it fall? Did they “get away with it”? Did their action create an obvious problem?

But then one participant said something that completely shifted the conversation.

She realized that even if her move didn’t immediately cause damage, it may have made another part of the system unstable for the next person.

And there it was.

That’s systems thinking.

Not every bad outcome comes from one huge catastrophic decision. Sometimes it comes from a series of small actions that seem perfectly reasonable on their own but slowly shift pressure around the system until something becomes fragile.

That’s what made the Jenga activity work so well. People could physically see the instability building.

One block gets removed and the tower still stands.
Another shift happens and things seem fine.
Someone adapts.
Someone compensates.
The structure survives.

Until suddenly it doesn’t.

What really struck me was how naturally the conversation moved toward unintended consequences. We talked about how organizations often focus on immediate results without realizing how much pressure gets transferred elsewhere.

Maybe a process becomes more “efficient,” but now another department is overloaded.
Maybe communication gets shortened to save time, but trust quietly erodes.
Maybe one team absorbs extra responsibilities because they’re capable…until burnout shows up six months later.

The instability doesn’t always appear where the original action happened.

That realization really landed with the group.

And honestly, that’s why I love experiential learning activities so much. I could stand in front of a room and lecture about interconnected systems for an hour, but watching people physically interact with the tower created a completely different level of understanding. They weren’t just hearing about systems thinking—they were experiencing it.

There was also something really powerful about the emotional side of the activity. People laughed. They got competitive. They panicked a little when the tower started swaying. They warned each other. They joked and strategized. And in the middle of all that playfulness, they started having genuinely thoughtful conversations about leadership, communication, and organizational culture.

That’s the thing about good training design. Sometimes people lower their guard when something feels playful, and that’s when the deeper learning sneaks in.

What I loved most was that nobody intentionally tried to destroy the tower at first. Most people thought they were making reasonable choices. Which honestly feels very true to real life. Organizations rarely become unstable because one person wakes up and decides to ruin everything. More often, instability builds quietly through disconnected decisions, competing priorities, lack of communication, and people only seeing their small piece of the larger system.

The Jenga tower became the perfect metaphor for workplace systems:
every action shifts pressure somewhere, small choices accumulate over time, and even when things look stable, the system may already be under strain.

I’m excited to see what happens when we run the full version of the game later this week, because even the preview sparked conversations that felt deeper and more meaningful than a traditional discussion ever could.

Want to know more? Check out Systems Thinking in Libraries due to be released in early 2027!