Puzzle Break Escape Room Team Skills: Information Analysis

In our last Puzzle Break Team Skills blog post, we discussed team cohesion and why your team needs it to succeed both in our escape experiences and in business. Today we’re going to talk about a more subtle focus area, a skill your team members should be nurturing individually and as a group: information analysis.

We turn to Monash University in Australia to explain: “Analysing means carefully examining information in order to understand, interpret and explain it. This can involve identifying assumptions, gaps and connections between such things as data, reasoning or evidence.” Most of us do some sort of information analysis as a part of our jobs; whether it’s examining the terms of a contract, studying data sets for patterns, interpreting client feedback – you get the idea.

So how do we apply that to our escape experiences? For that, let’s turn to our Creative Director and Co-Founder, Dr. Lindsay Morse, who is also a Greek and Latin philologist: “The Greek root words for analysis are ‘ana’ meaning ‘up, throughout’, and ‘lysis’ meaning ‘to break apart’. So, ‘analysis’ literally means to break things apart. Information analysis in a puzzle-solving context is, to me, taking the clues you are provided, examining them, and interpreting them in such a way that you can make progress on the puzzle.”

Our escape experiences require participants to parse a lot of information in a short period of time. Instructions, riddles, pictures, colors, hints of every kind, all of which is overwhelming by design. We want our guests to flex their information analysis muscles, sift through all of that data, and find the details they need to succeed at their objectives and grow their skills.

• Sometimes that means reading instructions very carefully to find context clues about what they need to do next.

• Sometimes that’s evaluating obvious clues to figure out how they relate to a specific puzzle.

• Sometimes it’s just figuring out whether a piece of information is relevant at all, or if they are recognizing patterns where there are none.

All of these scenarios are aspects of the same skill, and with the timer constantly ticking down analyzing information quickly is critical to your team’s success.

Apart from teaching how to scrutinize information for its value and application, we teach teams how to work together to make this process faster. After observing a decade’s worth of teams attempt to solve our puzzles, we can almost immediately tell when a team is going to be successful or not. The difference often comes down to a group’s ability to verbalize the information analysis process. When teammates work together on information analysis you get the benefits of the whole team’s scrutiny, knowledge, and resources. One person may see something another doesn’t or may present a data point that challenges someone else’s assumptions. When you have many eyes looking at the same information, you often discover unexpected perspectives and hidden value, and that’s at the core of every successful team.

– Nate

Looking to take your team’s performance to the next level? Puzzle Break’s Team-Building Experiences have been enjoyed by millions of participants across the globe. Whether you are hosting a:

• Leadership Development session

• New team member orientation

• Networking session

• Sales kick-off

• Virtual Team off-site

for a team of 5 or 500+, every experience is curated and moderated by our expert team at the time of your choice and is painstakingly designed to maximize participant buy-in, deliver proven employee development results, and provide a valuable morale and teamwork boost. Puzzle Break Team-Building Experiences are available now for unlimited players, anywhere. To get started click the link here or email booking@puzzlebreak.com to learn more.

Nate Martin

Dubbed the "Founding Father of Escape Rooms," Nate Martin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Puzzle Break, the first American escape room company. Puzzle Break is headquartered in Seattle with locations in Long Island, Massachusetts and on Royal Caribbean ships. Prior to Puzzle Break, he was a senior executive at Microsoft and Electronic Arts. He has shipped software used by billions of users as well as some of the most beloved video games of a generation. @GuyFromTomorrow on Twitter.

More posts by Nate Martin