When the CEO Beat the Facilitator to the Team-Building Exercise

I was just about to recommend using Totem Cards for a repeat client’s annual three-day strategy meeting when the CEO beat me to it.

Well…sort of.

Before the meeting, he had asked every member of his leadership team two deceptively simple questions:

1. What is your superpower?
2. What do you think each of your teammates’ superpowers are?

He collected their answers and used ChatGPT to create an elaborate set of personalized superhero cards for every member of the team.  And they were fabulous!

Each person had a superhero archetype, an origin story, a “secret power,” core gifts, pillars of impact, and even a signature phrase that sounded unmistakably like them.

Which left me, the professional facilitator, with a rather interesting question:  What the heck am I going to do with these?

Because creating something clever is one thing; turning it into a meaningful conversation about the team is another.

From Superhero Cards to a Three-Day Conversation

Even though the CEO had everyone receive just their own superhero card during check-in, I wanted the team to discover one another’s strengths through them.

So I created a second, stripped-down “Pick a Card” deck for myself. Each card contained enough information to recognize the person (the superhero headline, key attributes, and signature phrase), but not the person’s name or photograph.

On the first morning of our strategy meeting, the CEO explained the genesis of the cards, and then the fun began.  One person selected a card from my deck, and that person read the archetype and attributes aloud.  The team had to answer two questions:

1. “Who is it?”
2. And, more importantly, “Why did you pick that person?”

That second question changed everything, because now they weren’t simply playing a guessing game.  They were talking about one another.

• “That has to be _____ because she always…”
• “No, I think it’s _____. Remember when he…”
• “Oh, that is SO her!”

Whenever someone made a guess, I would look at the person they had named and tell the group whether they were right….Or not.

Once they finally figured it out, we put the person’s full superhero card up on the screen and handed each team member their professionally printed card with the intent that the entire team would have the complete deck of cards.

And that’s when some of my favorite moments happened.

• “I think I’m gonna cry! This is so nice.”
• “Look at that six-pack!”
• “Yep, the signature phrase is definitely YOU.”

There was laughter. There was teasing. There was genuine surprise.  And every few minutes, somebody saw themselves through the eyes of their colleagues.  That was the magic.

The Cards Weren’t Really the Exercise

We often use assessments, inventories, and other tools to help team members understand themselves and one another.  They can be incredibly useful, but this was different.

These “results” hadn’t come from an assessment.  The raw material came from the people sitting in the room.  Each person had described what they believed their own superpower to be. Their teammates had independently described what they saw as that person’s superpower.  ChatGPT simply helped transform those observations into a creative superhero persona, but the substance underneath it (and the language used) belonged to the team.

And then we added another important ingredient:

We made them explain their guesses.  Think about the difference.  If I show you a card and ask, “Who is The Conversation Catalyst?”, you might shout out a name.  But if I follow it with:  “Why do you think it’s her?”, now you have to articulate what you see.

• “She asks the question nobody else is asking.”
• “She gets us talking about the real issue.”
• “She can take five completely different opinions and somehow help us find the common thread.”
• “She makes sure everybody gets heard.”

Suddenly, this isn’t a guessing game anymore.  It’s recognition, which is priceless.

Don’t Do Them All at Once

There were about sixteen people on this team, and I could have turned the superhero cards into a single 60- or 90-minute team-building session, but I’m glad I didn’t.

Instead, I wove them throughout the three-day meeting.  We did four at lunch on the first day. Four during the morning of Day Two. Another four that afternoon. And the final four on the morning of Day Three.

Why four?  No grand facilitation theory here.  Four was just easier.  It was enough to create energy without allowing the activity to take over the agenda.  Because we kept coming back to it, the superhero exercise became a thread running through the entire strategy meeting.

• People began anticipating the next reveal.
• They got better at listening to the clues.
• They started recognizing patterns in one another.
• And, perhaps most importantly, the conversation about strengths wasn’t something we “did” for an hour and then left behind.  It stayed in the room.

There’s Something Powerful About Being Seen

One of the things that struck me most was the emotional response.  Yes, the cards were fun.  The superhero costumes certainly didn’t hurt.

Yet there is something undeniably entertaining about discovering that AI has given one of your colleagues superhero shoulders, flowing robes, or an impressive six-pack.  But underneath the laughter was something very human.  People felt seen.

Think about how often someone on your team hears what they’re doing wrong.  What needs to change.  Where they need to improve.  What they could be doing differently.  Now think about how often someone gets to sit in a room while their colleagues essentially say, “This is what is extraordinary about you.”  Not as part of a formal performance review.  Not because someone has been instructed to “say something nice.”  But because the team is trying to identify them from a description of the qualities their colleagues genuinely associate with them.

That’s a very different experience, and it explains why a funny superhero card could prompt someone to say, “I think I’m gonna cry.”

From My Superpower to Our Superpowers

But there was one more step.  And it may have been the most important one.

At the end of our three days together, after every individual card had been revealed, we brought the superheroes back together.

Now the question wasn’t:

What is your superpower?

It was:

What are OUR superpowers?

• What do we have in abundance on this team?
• Where do our strengths complement one another?
• What becomes possible when we deliberately combine them?
• Are there superpowers we may be underusing?
• And, as we look at the strategy we’ve just spent three days developing, how can we use these collective strengths to make it happen?

That moved the conversation from individual appreciation to team capability.  That is an important distinction.  A team isn’t extraordinary because it contains extraordinary individuals.  It becomes extraordinary when those individuals understand what each person brings—and learn how to put those strengths to work together.

AI Made the Cards. Humans Made Them Matter.

There’s another reason I’ve been thinking about this experience ever since.  It would be easy to describe this as an “AI team-building exercise.”  But I don’t think that’s what it was.

Yes, AI was the creative engine, but it took relatively simple human input and helped turn it into something imaginative, unexpected, and highly personalized.

• It gave us superhero archetypes.
• It helped shape the language.
• It created the visual world.
• It produced something far more engaging than a spreadsheet listing everybody’s strengths.

But AI wasn’t responsible for the moments I remember.

• It didn’t create the laughter when someone recognized a teammate from a signature phrase.
• It didn’t create the stories people told to explain their guesses.
• It didn’t create the expression on someone’s face when their superhero appeared on the screen.
• And it certainly didn’t create the relationships behind the observations in the first place.

The technology created the artifact.  The facilitation created the conversation.  The people created the meaning.

That distinction matters, especially as more of us experiment with AI in meetings, retreats, and team development.

The question isn’t simply, “What can AI create for us?”  A much more interesting question is, “What conversation could this help us have?”

The Cards Weren’t the Magic

Could we have had a conversation about individual strengths without superhero costumes, dramatic archetype names, and ridiculously flattering AI-generated physiques?  Of course.  Would we have had the same conversation?  I don’t think so.

• The creativity gave people permission to play.
• The guessing made them curious.
• The humor lowered the stakes.
• The words from their colleagues made it personal.
• The staggered reveals kept the conversation alive throughout the meeting.

And the final debrief helped sixteen individual superheroes recognize the extraordinary team they could create together!

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Want to Create a Superpower Team Experience With Your Own Team?

I’ve turned this experience into a complete Superpower Team Facilitator Kit including the team-input process, prompts for creating consistent superhero archetypes, card-design guidance, the Pick-a-Card reveal activity, facilitation instructions, debrief questions, the collective-superpowers exercise, and practical guidance for printing and presenting the finished cards.

If you’d like to create a superhero experience for your team, contact me and ask for the Superpower Team Facilitator Kit.

Because identifying someone’s superpower is fun.  Discovering what happens when an entire team puts its superpowers to work together?  That’s where it gets extraordinary.

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Design element from Canva