communication · teams · offline + online
Relay Brief.folder
Five constraints, a line of four — and whatever survives the last hop. Twenty minutes, and a side-by-side reveal that turns “I passed it on fine” into evidence of the leak.
// kit v2: a stage-ready HTML deck (presenter drawer, run-of-show timer, built-in QR codes) · poker-spec print-and-cut cards with backs and blanks · an A3 activity poster · manuals in A4 and US Letter with bookmarks · a 5-item pre/post measure with a printable answer sheet.
A telephone-game relay, built as a complete workshop folder: a timed run sheet, printable brief / rebuild / observer cards, and — for assessment-type sessions — a two-minute pre/post measure that shows how much a verbal handover really loses.
The props are poker-spec print cards (63.5 × 88.9 mm, bleed and cut guides included) — the original brief, rebuild-record cards, an observer tally. Nothing in this folder needs a projector, and nothing needs an account to download.
the run sheet
// this is the guide file, word for word — read it here, run from it here. the .md at the bottom of the page is the same text, offline.
Folder:
relay-brief· Category: communication · 8–20 people (lines of 4–6) · 20 min · offline + online · print props · assessment-typeLicense: CC BY 4.0
A five-constraint task brief is whispered down a line of four or six people, and the last person rebuilds it out loud. The distance between the original and the rebuild is the whole lesson: a verbal handover loses information at every hop, and everyone along the line felt certain they passed it on fine. Nobody has to be careless for this to happen — which is exactly why the exercise works on teams that blame inattentiveness.
Objectives
By the end of the activity, participants will have:
- Watched a five-constraint brief arrive with two or three constraints intact — while every hop was honest.
- Caught themselves or a teammate filling a hole with a plausible guess instead of a question.
- Named one written-handover habit they will use on the next real handover, from the loss they actually saw.
When to use this activity
- A team keeps getting work wrong downstream and blames inattentiveness; the real culprit is the handover itself.
- You want a fast, visceral demo of why specs need to be written down and read back, not "cleared up" in a call.
- You have twenty minutes and a line of 4–6 people (run two lines in parallel for a bigger room).
What one hop does
Each hop does three things to the brief: drops a constraint, compresses a number ("by Friday the 12th" becomes "soon"), and injects a plausible guess to fill the hole. Nobody lies — every person genuinely believes they passed it on accurately. That confident distortion is what the debrief lands on.
Setup
Clock: twenty minutes on the floor, measures included. A tight room can run the relay itself in eight minutes; the reveal and the debrief are what you protect.
Space: a clear line of four to six people standing or seated facing away from one another, far enough that neighbouring lines cannot overhear. Two or three lines can run in parallel in a normal training room.
Materials per line:
| Item | Source |
|---|---|
| 1 × brief card (facilitator only — never leaves your hand) | relay-brief-prop-cards.pdf (the Brief) |
| 1 × rebuild-record card per person in the last three hops | relay-brief-prop-cards.pdf (Your Rebuild) |
| 1 × observer tally card | relay-brief-prop-cards.pdf (Tally) |
| 1 × rule card — no notes, no repeats | relay-brief-prop-cards.pdf, or read it aloud |
| 1 × participant workbook per person | relay-brief-workbook.pdf (US Letter: relay-brief-workbook-Letter.pdf) |
| 2 × answer sheet per person | relay-brief-paper-form.pdf — one for the pre, one for the post |
Grouping rule: put the line together from people who actually hand work to each other — a real chain, not a random six. The transfer lands harder when the line is the team.
Roles: person one (the only reader of the brief), the middle hops (each passes once), the last person (rebuilds aloud), one or two observers (tally card, may not speak during the relay).
How to run it
| Time | Phase | Facilitator does | Participants do |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–2 | Pre-measure | "Five statements about your own last week of handovers — not about the game." | Answer alone on the answer sheet |
| 2–3 | Line up | Form the line, facing away. State the two rules: no notes, one pass only. | Stand or sit in line; the last three hold a rebuild card |
| 3–11 | Relay | Show the brief card to person one for ten seconds, then take it back. "Pass it on, once, quietly." Move down the line with the timer. | Each hop tells the next in private; the last three write their own version before hearing the next |
| 11–14 | Reveal | "Last person: state the brief as you heard it." Then read the original aloud, slowly. Line the two up in front of the line. | The line counts surviving constraints on the tally card, hop by hop |
| 14–18 | Debrief | Run the debrief sheet with both versions visible. | Name what was dropped, compressed, invented; choose one habit |
| 18–20 | Post-measure | Same five statements, now about what the relay just showed them. | Answer alone; compare the shift, not the person |
Then run the debrief — see relay-brief-debrief.md.
The brief card
Write one brief with exactly five deliberate constraints and show it only to person one. Each constraint must be something a line can lose. Example (swap in your own domain — keep the shape):
"Reprint the Q3 field guide, 250 copies, coil-bound, in matte, deliver to the Nairobi office by Friday the 12th."
The five work best as a mix: one quantity, one process, one finish, one place, one deadline. Vivid items survive; a bare date or a finish spec is what quietly falls out — the same thing that falls out of real handovers.
Failure modes
- People write notes. Rescue: hold the rule and say why — the leak is the point, and a note is a patch that hides it.
- One comedian breaks it on purpose. Their joke lands, but the room learns "someone messed up" instead of "the channel leaks." Rescue: reset the line — everyone passes honestly — and take the fun into the debrief, where the pattern is the finding.
- The room hunts a culprit. Rescue: read the hops in order — "hop three only had what hop two gave them." The system leaks; the person did not.
- A hop asks for a repeat. Rescue: no repeats is the only rule you must never bend. One telling is what a Tuesday afternoon voicemail is.
Variations
- Online: run the line as a serial chain of private messages, one hop at a time, each person forwarding from memory only, no scrolling back. The reveal is a screenshot wall.
- Large groups (20+): run two or three lines in parallel with a co-facilitator or an observer per line, then compare the surviving-constraint counts in plenary — different lines, same leak pattern.
- Written-handover variant: replace the whisper with a chain of forwards, each person writing to the next from what they received, thirty seconds per hop. The loss changes shape — the place survives, the deadline and the finish die — and the lesson about a written spec gets sharper.
- Short version (12 min): four-person line, one relay, no measures, six-minute debrief. Keep the reveal; without the side-by-side there is no evidence.
- Assessment-type: run the pre-measure before lining up and the post-measure right after the debrief — see
relay-brief-assessment.json. The interesting number is how confidence in "one clear telling" collapses, not the score.
Facilitation notes
- The strong moment is the first person hearing the final rebuild and realising it came from their own accurate telling.
- Read the original aloud at the reveal slowly, once. Rereading it softens the finding.
- Strongest transfer question: "Which handover this week went down a line like this one?"
Put it on the wall
Print relay-brief-activity-poster.pdf (A3) to put the run of show, what one hop does and the debrief questions on one wall while you facilitate.
Props in this folder
relay-brief-prop-cards.pdf— poker-spec print sheet (63.5 × 88.9 mm, bleed and cut guides): brief card, rebuild-record cards, observer tally, rule card, branded backs, blanksrelay-brief-guide.md— this run sheetrelay-brief-debrief.md— six debrief questions, failure modes of the debrief, scoring cuesrelay-brief-assessment.json— pre/post measure preset: 5 items, two reverse-scoredrelay-brief-paper-form.pdf— the measure as a print-and-fill answer sheetrelay-brief-workbook.pdf— participant workbook: the idea in plain words, the hop log, notes and action pagerelay-brief-slide-deck.html/.pdf— the deck for teaching or projecting, one idea per sliderelay-brief-run-sheet.pdf— the print edition: this run sheet + the debrief, bound as one A4 document with bookmarksrelay-brief-activity-poster.pdf— the whole activity on one A3 wall sheet: run of show, what one hop does, watch-outsrelay-brief-start-here.md— one page, thirty seconds, then print and gorelay-brief-license.md— what you may do with all of thisSKILL.md— machine-readable manifest for AI agents*-Letter.pdf— US Letter editions of the print documents
Agent version
Every file in this folder has a stable public URL — an AI agent can fetch the props, the debrief and this run sheet with three curl commands (see SKILL.md). The paper version needs no projector and no account: one card, one line, one reveal.
the debrief sheet
// the debrief questions, in full — the .md version prints on one page for the room.
Six questions, three failure modes of the debrief itself, one rule: both versions stay visible until the room is done with them.
Use with
relay-brief-guide.md. The debrief runs minutes 14–18.
How to run this debrief
- Write the original brief on one side of a flip chart and the rebuild on the other, in the words the last person used. Erasing nothing is the whole discipline.
- Go hop by hop, not person by person. The unit of analysis is the hop; the moment the room starts analysing people, the lesson is gone.
- End on a sentence someone will actually say out loud tomorrow. Insight without a script evaporates by Wednesday.
Read the two versions side by side
- What survived. Count the constraints the rebuild kept. Most lines land two or three out of five. That number is the data, not a score to defend.
- What was dropped. Which constraint vanished first? Usually the least vivid one — a bare date, a finish spec — which is exactly what quietly falls out of real handovers.
- What was invented. Point at a detail in the rebuild that was never in the original. Nobody lied; every hole gets filled with something plausible. That is assumption-injection, live.
The six questions
1. The line at work.
"Where in a normal week does your work go down a four-hop line like this one — stand-up, ticket, forward, 'as discussed'?"
→ Targets: transfer. Expect ticket comments, shift handovers, "I'll just tell them at stand-up". Ask which specific chain they mean.
2. Confident and wrong.
"Which hop felt most certain it passed it on clearly?"
→ Targets: the gap between certainty and fidelity — the finding itself. Do not let the room turn hop three into a character; the hop was certain because it had nothing else to work with.
3. The written form.
"What one written form — a spec, a checklist, a recap message — would have stopped the biggest loss you just saw?"
→ Targets: a concrete repair with an owner. A recap message costs ten seconds; the rebuild cost the line three constraints.
4. The invented detail.
"Point at something in the rebuild that was never in the original. Where did it come from?"
→ Targets: assumption-injection made visible. Naming one invented detail is worth more than a rule about "don't guess".
5. What fell first, and why that one.
"Which constraint vanished first in your line — the date, the quantity, the finish, the place? Why that one?"
→ Targets: salience. Vivid, concrete items survive a hop; bare numbers and qualifiers die. That ordering is what a written spec is for.
6. The restated brief.
"Who will restate the next real brief back to its author today? Say the sentence you will use."
→ Targets: rehearsal in words. "Can I read that back to you?" is a habit; "let's communicate better" is a poster.
Failure modes of the debrief itself
| Failure mode | Why it happens | The rescue |
|---|---|---|
| It plays as a party game | The dropped bits are genuinely funny | Laugh once, then point at the chart: "that exact loss is in your inbox this week." |
| The line blames the middle | One hop clearly dropped a lot | Read the hops in order — each had only what the last gave it. The channel leaks, not the person. |
| Nobody owns a fix | The debrief stalls at "wow" | End on one written-handover habit with a name and a when, out loud, in the room. |
Scoring cues (assessment-type sessions)
If you ran the pre/post measure (relay-brief-assessment.json), these observables during the relay are what justify the shift in the report:
| Observable | Points to |
|---|---|
| A hop asks a question and is correctly refused | The rule is understood, not resented |
| The rebuild keeps a qualifier nobody emphasised | Salience, not effort, decided what survived |
| Someone volunteers "I added that" about an invention | Assumption-injection recognised in themselves |
| At the reveal, a hop revises its own confidence | The measure's target construct, moving in real time |
Reading the pre/post
Score the individual before/after delta and the team's average shift (see relay-brief-assessment.json). Report total_delta and construct_deltas, honour report_note — and never rank a person by how much they dropped. A relay loses information at every hop by design; the finding is about the channel.
who it's for · what it leaves behind
Who is Relay Brief for?
Facilitators, trainers and coaches who need a fast exercise that makes the cost of a sloppy handover visceral. It runs one line at a time — any group from 8 to 20 (run two lines in parallel for more) — and it lands from sprint retrospectives to onboarding. No props beyond a printed brief: if participants can talk, they can run it.
What results does it produce?
Two things stay on the table after the debrief: the rebuild against the original — visible evidence of what your line dropped, compressed and invented — and a pre/post delta from the assessment preset. It measures how much the handover leaked, not who is careless, and people leave with one written-handover habit rather than a culprit to blame.
Can my AI agent use this folder?
Yes. Every folder ships a SKILL.md skill file: frontmatter for matching, plus runnable prep commands — fetch the props, pull the debrief, build the live pre/post measure with formlm-cli. The three-step workflow (discover, install, run) lives on the skills page, every folder ships a one-command zip bundle, and the machine index is skills.json.
Is it really free?
Yes — CC BY 4.0, no account, no email wall inside a folder. Download it, run it, copy it, rebrand it for your own workshop. Attribution keeps everything free.
make it live
The folder's paper pre/post measure runs in any room with a pen and the printed answer sheet. If you want the digital version — the same 5 items as a live form, each participant's before/after delta computed automatically — two ways:
for AI agents
$ formlm-cli smart generate --input "Pre/post measure for Relay Brief: 5 Likert items on info-retention, clarify-before-act, assumption-injection (reverse), rebuild-fidelity and single-source-confidence (reverse) — the same 5 items before and after the relay, so each person’s delta is computed automatically"
Step 4 of the agent workflow: npm install -g @formlm/cli, log in once, and the prep above runs itself. The form and its data live in your own workspace.
— or, with a mouse —
Open the free pre/post training quiz template on FormLM
and paste the 5 items from relay-brief-assessment.json — the template already runs the before/after comparison and scores it.
// optional, not required — the paper version in this folder is complete on its own. free account on their side.
put it on the wall
The folder ships a single-file HTML deck that presents full-screen from one laptop. To run the activity on the room's big screen — submissions land on the wall in real time, the countdown and the spotlight stay in your hands, and the whole room joins with one scan — the scan-and-project companion is QRCard-AI:
See the trainer live-screen mode on QRCard-AI — one QR code on the wall, participants join and follow from their own seats.
// optional, not required — the deck in this folder already runs full-screen on a single laptop.
Files in this folder
All files are free under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: “Relay Brief · WorkshopSkill · CC BY 4.0.”