Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own local model: paste this prompt and your AI will co-facilitate this exercise with you.

Help me prepare and run the exercise below. First ask for my participant count, time, setting, access needs and intended result. Check these against the stated limits. Use the supplied rules and materials. Explain any proposed changes before using them, and label them as adaptations. Do not invent source claims or require personal disclosure. Give me one step at a time when I say start. I manage the people, physical activity and clock; do not claim to observe the room. Ask me what happened before choosing a next step.

Reference revision: f0f53503674df49d041a9386edccd243c12bc8c5460e14979db8c410d54bee6f

# Who and Why

Participants identify trust and distrust factors by privately examining real people from public life, their personal lives, and work. They compare notes in pairs, compile team Dos and Don'ts posters, and draft a personal trust-building action plan.

**Time:** 25 minutes. Thiagi specified 20 to 45 minutes; structured here as a concise 25-minute sequence.
**People:** 6 to 24. Solo reflection, paired exchange across suit colors, then small teams of 3 to 5 (with overflow joining an existing team)

## Choose this exercise

**Purpose:** Identify behaviors that increase or decrease workplace trust and draft one personal action to test immediately.
**Use it when:** Use during team launches, leadership development, or culture retrospectives when colleagues need concrete behavioral definitions of trust without personal exposure.
**Skip it when:** Skip during acute internal disciplinary investigations or when severe interpersonal hostility makes discussing workplace relationships unsafe.

## Materials and tools

- Standard deck of playing cards (half red, half black, one card per participant)
- Lined scratch paper and pens (one per person)
- Flipchart paper (one sheet per small team of 3 to 5)
- Chisel-tip marker pens (one per small team)
- Roll of masking tape
- Countdown timer or chime

## Before participants arrive

1. Count out playing cards equal to the number of participants, splitting colors as evenly as possible.
2. Place one playing card, scratch paper, and a pen at every participant seat.
3. Position flipchart paper, markers, and masking tape at group work tables.

## Say this to open

We make judgments about trust every day. In this session, you will examine what earns your confidence and what breaks it. You will choose six real people in your mind, but keep their names private. Your job is to extract the concrete behaviors that influence your trust, combine those factors with your peers, and pick one behavior to improve this week.

## How to run it

### 1. Select trusted figures and write trust factors (3 minutes)

Introduce the session using the opening script. Ask participants to silently write down the initials of three people they trust deeply: one public figure, one friend or family member, and one colleague. Under each, participants list concrete behaviors or attributes that earn that trust. Remind them to keep identities completely private. Signal when three minutes are up.

### 2. Select distrusted figures and write distrust factors (3 minutes)

Ask participants to silently write down initials of three people they distrust: one public figure, one personal acquaintance, and one colleague. Under each, they list specific actions or traits that caused distrust. Reassure the room that identities stay anonymous. Signal when three minutes are up.

### 3. Pair up across card colors to compare factors (4 minutes)

Direct everyone to pick up the playing card at their seat. Have each person find a partner holding a card of the opposite color (red pairs with black). If attendance is odd, the facilitator pairs with the remaining participant. Partners take turns sharing the behavioral factors from their lists without disclosing names. Stop after four minutes.

### 4. Draft team Dos and Don'ts posters (5 minutes)

Ask participants to leave their pairs and form teams of 3 to 5 people holding cards of the same color (red or black). If an odd group leaves someone without enough same-color peers, that person joins any existing team to form a group of 5 or 6. Distribute flipchart paper and markers. Teams create two columns, Dos and Don'ts, pooling shared factors into observable workplace actions. Stop at five minutes.

### 5. Gallery walk (3 minutes)

Teams attach their posters to the wall with masking tape. Everyone walks the room to read other posters, noting repeated rules and unique items. Ring a chime after three minutes to reconvene the full room.

### 6. Debrief and individual action planning (7 minutes)

Lead a brief debrief using the debrief questions, taking three to four observations total. Then ask each participant to review the posters, select one concrete trust factor, and write down an individual action step they will execute this week. Those who wish may share their commitment with a neighbor.


## Debrief questions

- Which trust or distrust factor appeared on nearly every poster?
- Which factor on the walls is most frequently neglected in daily work?
- What is one concrete behavior that creates the quickest rise in trust when practiced consistently?

**Finished output:** Posted team Dos and Don'ts flipcharts defining trust behaviors, plus an individual written action commitment on each participant's paper or private document.

## Remote

Run in an online meeting platform. Participants do the six-person reflection on private scratch paper. Assign breakout rooms in pairs for four minutes, then reconstitute into breakout groups of 3 to 4 with edit rights to a shared digital whiteboard template containing Dos and Don'ts columns. Bring everyone back to view the board together during debrief. Participants record their personal action step privately or post it into the chat if they choose.

## Hybrid

In-person attendees form room pairs and post physical flipcharts; remote participants pair via video breakouts and record on a shared digital whiteboard. An in-person facilitator camera or photo upload displays the physical posters to remote attendees, and the digital whiteboard is projected in the room for the joint gallery walk and debrief. Remote participants record their personal action commitment on private paper or in a private document, with optional chat sharing.

## Access and participation choices

- Names and identities of selected people remain completely private throughout the entire session.
- Writing is brief; bullet points, keywords, or dictation to a partner are welcomed.
- Participants may silently review posters during the gallery walk and keep their personal action commitments private without reading aloud.

## If the session gets stuck

**A participant begins gossiping or names specific colleagues during pair sharing.**

Intervene immediately and redirect the conversation to the underlying behavior: 'Keep the focus strictly on the action, such as keeping commitments or taking credit, rather than the individual person.'

**Two teams produce vague buzzwords like 'integrity' or 'excellence' on their posters.**

Prompt them to convert abstract nouns into verifiable actions: 'What does integrity look like on a Tuesday afternoon when a deadline slips?'


## Terms used here

- Trust factor: A specific, observable action or behavior that leads another person to feel safe relying on you.

## Sources and adaptation

Observed in Thiagi GameLetter (August 2013), edited and published by Sivasailam Thiagarajan (The Thiagi Group).

The original newsletter issue (August 2013) contained an article titled 'Structured Sharing: Who and Why' by Sivasailam Thiagarajan, which laid out the core mechanic of examining three trusted and three distrusted people across public, personal, and workplace domains, followed by card-based pairing and flipchart poster creation. The prior corpus copy wrongly indexed this issue under generic podcast summary sentences. UWT restored the complete 'Who and Why' structured sharing framework, eliminated whistles in favor of softer chimes, added explicit group formation math for odd group counts, and established explicit time boxes totaling 25 minutes.

[The Thiagi Group](https://thiagi.net/archive/www/pfp/IE4H/august2013.html)

[The Thiagi Group](http://thiagi.net/archive/www/pfp/IE4H/august2013.html)

Current run sheet: https://unitedwetransform.com/exercises/tgl-august-2013/