Enhancing Entrepreneurial Skills with the Tower Building Exercise

Most entrepreneurship training programs rely heavily on lectures, case studies, and business plans. But one of the most powerful tools for building real entrepreneurial skills is a deceptively simple activity: stacking wooden blocks. The Tower Building Exercise, rooted in Achievement Motivation Training, puts participants in conditions that closely mirror the uncertainties, pressures, and collaborative demands of running an actual business. What happens in those five minutes reveals far more about a person’s entrepreneurial mindset than a written exam ever could.

What the Tower Building Exercise actually involves 🔗

The exercise requires three participants and a facilitator. One participant plays the role of the entrepreneur – the person doing the physical work. The other two play supporting roles, either as parents (in Round 1) or as a mentor and an investor (in Round 2). The entrepreneur is given approximately 22 cube-shaped wooden blocks and asked to set a personal target: how high a tower can they build?

The conditions, however, are deliberately difficult. According to the Babson Collaborative’s teaching note on the exercise, the entrepreneur is blindfolded and must use their non-dominant hand. The supporting members cannot touch any blocks – they can only provide verbal guidance and encouragement. The team has just five minutes to reach their agreed-upon target.

The rest of the class observes in silence, filling out structured record sheets that track decision-making, encouragement, guidance, anxiety levels, and the builder’s confidence throughout the task.

The exercise is typically run across three rounds with new volunteers each time, allowing the class to observe how different teams handle the same challenge and what factors drive or limit performance.

Goal setting under pressure: the first entrepreneurial test 🔗

Before the blocks are even touched, the exercise begins with a critical moment: each team member privately writes down their individual target (how many blocks they believe the tower can reach), and then the group has two minutes to reach a consensus. This seemingly small step exposes some of the most common goal-setting errors entrepreneurs make.

In practice, targets vary wildly. Documentation from the Commonwealth of Learning’s entrepreneurship curriculum shows that in one session, the entrepreneur set a target of 22, one associate suggested 12, and another proposed 21. The group consensus landed at 15 – and the actual achievement was just 9. This gap between ambition and outcome is not a failure of effort; it’s a lesson in realistic planning.

The exercise quickly makes one thing clear: setting a target too high leads to disappointment and wasted momentum. Setting it too low, however, is equally problematic. As the facilitator in one documented session pointed out, a group that targets just 2 blocks and meets that target has achieved nothing entrepreneurial – they took no risk at all. The exercise reinforces the principle that entrepreneurial behavior means taking calculated risks – not reckless gambling, and not playing it so safe that growth becomes impossible.

Why targets shift between rounds 🔗

One of the most revealing moments in the exercise comes when the facilitator asks participants – before Round 3 – to revise their individual targets under a new condition: no guides, no encouragement, just the blindfolded builder working alone. The majority of participants lower their targets. This response illustrates how deeply confidence depends on perceived support. People tend to underestimate their own capabilities when external scaffolding is removed, a pattern that mirrors what many entrepreneurs experience when they lose a key advisor, co-founder, or early investor.

Decision-making and confidence building 🔗

The Tower Building Exercise is specifically designed to surface three core entrepreneurial competencies: goal setting, self-confidence, and persuasion. All three come under pressure simultaneously during the exercise, which is what makes it so effective as a training tool.

The blindfold is not just a physical constraint – it’s a metaphor. The Babson teaching note explains that when entrepreneurs start a new venture, they face a similar situation: they are unaware of many things, including how government regulations might change, how markets will respond, or what resources will actually be available. The blindfold simulates that informational uncertainty. Using the wrong hand adds an additional layer of discomfort – the kind that comes from operating outside one’s comfort zone, which is a daily reality for most entrepreneurs.

What’s particularly instructive is what happens in Round 3 when the facilitator works with a participant who has the lowest target. After the facilitator asks them to close their eyes and try stacking a few blocks, the participant discovers they can do it – using their sense of touch. This moment of self-discovery consistently produces a shift: the participant voluntarily raises their target and, in most cases, outperforms both previous groups. The lesson is direct: we tend to focus on our constraints rather than our unexplored strengths, and this bias quietly limits how high we set our goals.

Persuasion within the team 🔗

During the consensus-building phase, participants must negotiate a shared target. Who speaks first? Who gives ground? Who holds firm? Observers are asked to note exactly who tries hardest to influence the decision. This part of the exercise trains participants to recognize the dynamics of persuasion – how to make a case for a goal, how to listen to pushback, and how to arrive at a decision that the whole team owns. These are not soft skills; they are the mechanics of co-founder relationships, investor pitches, and team management.

Learning from group dynamics 🔗

The audience of observers is not passive in this exercise. They are actively recording structured data on every round – guidance quality, encouragement levels, emotional reactions, and confidence of the builder. After each round, the facilitator draws observations from the class and builds broader conclusions together.

The shift in roles between rounds – from parent/child in Round 1 to mentor/investor/entrepreneur in Round 2 – is intentional. It asks participants to consider how the nature of a relationship shapes the kind of help offered. A parent might instruct; a mentor might empower; an investor might push for results. The Tower Building Exercise is explicitly structured to help participants understand goal-setting ability, helping behavior, positive reinforcement, and decision-making – all within the context of entrepreneurship.

The difference between guidance and encouragement 🔗

One of the discussion questions the facilitator raises at the end is telling: “Why was guidance provided more than encouragement?” In most rounds, the supporting members spend more time telling the entrepreneur where to place blocks than affirming that they can do it. This imbalance is common in real business environments too – managers over-instruct and under-motivate. Recognizing this pattern in a low-stakes game makes it easier to correct in high-stakes professional settings.

The exercise also shows how dependency develops. When the entrepreneur receives constant instruction, they stop relying on their own judgment. When that instruction disappears (as it does in Round 3’s solo condition), performance drops – not because ability decreased, but because the habit of self-direction had never been built. As the Babson teaching note generalizes: the more we rely on guidance, the more dependent we become, and dependency erodes self-confidence.

Feedback as a performance accelerator 🔗

Achievement-motivated individuals have a documented need for feedback – they want to know how they’re performing so they can adjust. Research on entrepreneurial motivation consistently shows that this feedback-seeking behavior is one of the clearest markers of high achievement drive. The Tower Building Exercise builds this habit structurally: every round ends with direct debriefing, public data recording, and group reflection. Participants learn to treat outcomes – success or failure – as data rather than verdicts.

What entrepreneurs take away from the exercise 🔗

By the time the exercise concludes, participants have experienced in real time what it feels like to set a goal under uncertainty, rely on teammates they cannot see, adjust to unexpected constraints, and either meet or miss a self-declared target. The debrief ties all of this to business realities. Targets set too ambitiously without grounding in resources and conditions lead to failure. Goals set with consultation but without independent judgment lead to over-caution. The sweet spot – a challenging but achievable target, pursued with adaptive confidence and selective help-seeking – is exactly what high-achievement entrepreneurial behavior looks like.

The exercise also reinforces a broader truth about team-based problem solving: no entrepreneur operates alone. But the nature of collaboration matters. Effective teams don’t remove the entrepreneur’s agency – they expand it. The best mentors and investors in Round 2 are the ones who help the builder discover their own capacity, not the ones who micromanage every move.

Because the exercise generates real data – actual block counts, recorded targets, observable group behavior – the generalizations drawn from it feel earned rather than abstract. Participants aren’t told that overconfidence leads to poor planning; they see it happen in front of them and in themselves. That experiential shift is what makes the Tower Building Exercise far more memorable, and far more effective, than a lecture on goal-setting theory ever could be.

What do you think? When you set goals – personal or professional – do you tend to anchor too high out of optimism, or too low to avoid risk? And in your experience, does the support around you tend to guide you toward independence, or create a quiet dependence that’s hard to notice until the support disappears?

References

1. https://agriculture.institute/entrepreneurship-and-marketing/achievement-motivation-in-entrepreneurship/
2. https://www.babsoncollaborative.org/uploads/8/0/3/4/80347618/tower_building_game.pdf
3. https://opentextbooks.colvee.org/basicsofentrepreneurship/chapter_w4-02-tower-building-exercise.html
4. https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/essay/entrepreneurship-essay/developing-achievement-motivation-among-entrepreneurs/40676
5. https://sites.google.com/view/ed-dlh/ed-am-satq/edam-exercises-and-games-for-entrepreneurial-motivation-training
6. https://www.chartcourse.com/building-tallest-tower-team-building-exercise/