exercise · all tools
Fight Lab
In threes, one person names the block holding them back most in leadership or life, and the other two stage a scenario, in the moment, meant to trigger it. When it does, the person pauses — or raises a hand and keeps going — and the three explore what came up, brainstorm what might work, and run it again. Twelve minutes each. The last-day exercise of the Authentic Leadership Training; the manual says to run it only with people who have some training in connection work, with experienced facilitators walking the room.
Prerequisites
- The manual's own: participants with some training or practice in connection or leadership work, able to hold space and to roleplay difficult characters
- One to three experienced facilitators moving between the triads
- The design deliberately provokes a person's fight or freeze response and then works with it; the pause and the raised hand are the person's controls, and the manual's insistence on experienced facilitators checking that groups are 'actually following the rules of the game' is about exactly that
- The manual notes groups drift into talking about the block instead of trying an experiment; the facilitator's five-minute warning exists to stop that, and it is also what keeps the intensity in bounds
Practical
- Time
- 45-60 min
- Group
- 3–∞ · triads
- Settings
- in-person, online
- Mechanisms
- behavioral-rehearsal, emotional-processing, perspective-taking
- Change scope
- state → skill · repeatable
Instructions
- Where
- authrev.org/ar-games-manual — Authentic Relating Games Manual, paid
- Availability
- In the source document — the instructions live inside the material linked, on its terms
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0 (Authentic Relating Games Manual)
Source link checked 31 Aug 2026 — unchanged since we recorded it on 29 Aug 2026
This directory describes and points home; the instructions stay with the people who made them.
Origin
Sara Ness, from the Authentic Leadership Training — Authentic Relating (Authentic Relating Games Manual, 2025 edition)
In this directory via Authentic Relating Games Manual
Authentic Revolution runs free Fight Labs online (authrev.org/fightlab), and offers a course of the same name — see the Authentic Revolution source record.
status: checked · added 2026-08-31