Teaching Communication and Teamwork Under Pressure: An Experiential Activity Using Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

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Background/Introduction/Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present an experiential classroom activity designed to help students develop communication and teamwork skills under conditions of time pressure and information asymmetry. Methods/Design: This paper presents a teaching activity rather than an empirical study; no research design, sample, instruments, or analytic procedures are reported. The paper describes and contextualizes an experiential learning activity using the cooperative video game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Drawing on research in experiential learning, cooperative learning, and simulation-based instruction, the paper outlines learning objectives, materials, implementation procedures, observer roles, and structured debriefing strategies suitable for undergraduate and graduate management courses. Results/Findings: The observations reported here reflect instructor experience across multiple course sections rather than systematic assessment. Students quickly encounter communication breakdowns, coordination challenges, and role clarity issues that are often underestimated in traditional group work. Across repeated rounds and guided reflection, students appear to use more precise language, coordinate more deliberately, and become more aware of how stress and cognitive load influence team performance. Conclusions/Discussion/Implications: This paper illustrates how a commercially available cooperative game can be translated into a structured, theory-informed instructional activity for teaching teamwork and communication. The activity provides instructors with a low-cost, adaptable, and engaging method for experiential learning, with clear guidance to support implementation, scaling, and adaptation across course formats and class sizes. As such, it is well suited for use in undergraduate courses and readily adaptable to graduate and executive education contexts. More broadly, this work contributes to experiential learning by illustrating how off-the-shelf materials can be repurposed into pedagogically grounded exercises, offering management educators a practical, accessible, and replicable tool for developing teamwork and communication skills in applied settings.

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