Room screenTwenty-two minutes, standing

Pick the exercise.

All three fill the same 22-minute block and use the same materials table. Choose on the diagnosis, not on preference. Click a step in any exercise to load its countdown onto the bar at the bottom of the screen.

Option A

Pain to Impact ladder wall

They know SPICED. Their notes are full of merchant context and thin on numbers. Deals stall after a good first call.

Option B

SPICED sort race

SPICED is new, or half the room has it and half does not. People use the words loosely and mean different things.

Option C

Critical Event date hunt

Pipeline is full and slipping. Leadership is asking why merchants who said yes are still not live.

Arrow keys move between screens. Press 1, 2, or 3 to jump straight to an exercise. Press C for the printable card set. Press S to start or pause the timer, R to reset it.

Option A22 minutes, standing at the wall

Pain to Impact ladder wall.

This is what the wall looks like before the pair step, and it is what merchant notes look like everywhere. Everything at the bottom. Point at the two empty bands and let the room look at it.

2 minStand and gatherAt the wall, Sharpie and yellow pad. Name the three bands. No questions yet.
5 minSilent writeThree yellows each. One merchant pain per note, from a real live account, in the merchant's words. Stick them on the bottom band. Say nothing for five minutes.
3 minLook at the wallRead five aloud at random, then point at the empty bands. "This is what our merchant notes look like."
8 minPairs climb oneEach person moves one of their own yellows up two bands, writing an orange then a green. Partner asks only "and what does that cost you?" until a number appears. Swap at four.
4 minPost and stand backOranges and greens go up. Three steps back. Fifteen seconds of silence before anyone speaks.

Debrief, at 0:40

"Which number on that top band did a merchant actually say out loud, and which one did you calculate for them?"

Option B22 minutes, standing at the wall

SPICED sort race.

Cards pile up under Situation and Pain while Impact and Critical Event stay thin, which is exactly the shape of a real merchant call. The dotted cards are the ones two teams placed differently, and those three are the debrief.

3 minStand, form fours, take a stackEach team at its own strip of wall with a shuffled deck of sixteen cards face down.
2 minRulesEvery card gets placed, none sit out. Split teams talk it out and commit to one column. Fastest team to place all sixteen calls it.
8 minRaceCirculate, say nothing, note which cards cause arguments. Those are the debrief and you will not get them by asking later.
4 minGallery walkTeams shift one strip right and read another team's wall in silence. Mark a dot on any card they would have placed differently.
5 minContested cardsPull the three most-dotted cards to the front. Which two columns did this land in, and what were you actually arguing about.

Debrief, at 0:40

"Which card did your team argue about longest, and what were you actually arguing about?"

Option C22 minutes, standing at the wall

Critical Event date hunt.

Every merchant right of the orange line has nothing forcing a decision. Do not narrate this moment. Let the room look at that column in silence.

2 minStand and gatherAt the wall with a Sharpie and blue notes. Walk the four zones left to right and name them.
5 minSilent writeThree blues each: the merchant name, and the date in their world that forces a decision. Peak, code freeze, incumbent renewal, replatform. No date known, leave it blank. Say out loud that a blank is an honest answer.
3 minPlace and lookEveryone places their three. Whole room takes three steps back and looks at the no-date column. Do not narrate it.
7 minPairs work the blanksPartner runs the merchant calendar out loud, one item at a time: peak, code freeze, renewal, replatform, budget, launch. Anything they can date, they write on and physically move. Swap at three and a half.
5 minCount what movedCount the notes that migrated out of no-date, out loud, as a room. Then count what is still sitting there.

Debrief, at 0:40

"For the merchants still in the no-date column, what would have to be true in their world for a date to exist at all?"

Sort racePrint, cut, one set per team of four

The sixteen cards.

Sixteen merchant statements an Affirm seller hears on a first call. Participant version, no answer key. Print this screen (the other screens page-break separately) and cut on the boxes. The key is in the run of show, for the facilitator only.

"About sixty-five percent of our checkout traffic is on mobile now."

"We are on Shopify Plus. We replatformed eighteen months ago."

"We already run three providers in the waterfall."

"People build the whole bundle, get to checkout, and disappear."

"Our average order value has been flat for six quarters."

"Our decline rate with the current provider is killing checkout completion."

"Almost seventy percent of carts over a thousand dollars never convert."

"That abandoned volume is somewhere around four million a year."

"One point of checkout conversion is worth about eight hundred thousand to us."

"If it is not live before Black Friday we give up the whole quarter."

"Our agreement with our current provider ends January 31."

"Code freeze is October 15 and nothing touches checkout until January."

"Finance has already approved a payments budget for this fiscal year."

"Our Head of Payments owns the PSP relationship, and they sign off, not me."

"I own checkout, but our CFO owns anything that touches take rate."

"It has to get into the platform team's integration queue."