T-trade™ was developed at the request of Professor George Kohlrieser of IMD in Switzerland, to give senior delegates on a high level Negotiation Skills programme a practical negotiation in which they could apply the specific skills he was teaching.

The exercise, which involves face-to-face individual and team negotiations over a series of meetings, demands that three teams build relationships which will survive the challenges of the negotiation process whilst working to achieve their own team goals. They negotiate to build complex, multi-coloured cubes which have different values. Exchanging, buying and selling components, they seek to set up deals that will allow them to maximise the return from their resources.

Post-iT: a second complete activityA more collaborative, cross-team challenge

Included in the T-trade™ toolbox is a complete second exercise! Post-iT explores inter-team and remote working and requires trust building and communication against a background of uncertainty. Three separate teams, with restricted communication, need to work collaboratively to ensure that each team can achieve its own task by the exercise deadline. However, they need to influence each other to co-operate and seek the optimum solution. As in T-trade™, potential conflict does exist as a feature of the exercise design and strong emotions can emerge. Sufficient resources are included to run 2x parallel sessions of Post-iT.