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Team Development & Team Effectiveness at Cowi Sweden by Gustav Sjoholm
- The COWI Sweden team used Miki Island to experience collaboration, communication, and decision-making under pressure.
- The simulation highlighted the importance of staying agile, adapting quickly, and making informed choices together.
- Participants saw how pausing to reflect can improve problem-solving, alignment, and overall team effectiveness.
- The experience reinforced how teams move through different development stages on their journey toward high performance.
Team Development & Team Effectiveness at Cowi Sweden by Gustav Sjoholm
Building Stronger Teams Through Experience 🌱
What happens when you take a team, place them on a remote island, and ask them to navigate uncertainty, make decisions, and collaborate under pressure?
You get a very different kind of team development experience.
That’s exactly what the team at COWI Sweden experienced during a recent Miki Island workshop facilitated by Gustav Sjöholm, Miki Island Partner in Sweden.
The session gave participants the opportunity to step away from their everyday roles, experience their team dynamics in action, and reflect on what helps a team perform at its best.
From Everyday Work to an Immersive Challenge 🏝️
Set on a digital South Sea island, Miki Island places teams inside a fast-moving scenario where progress depends entirely on how effectively they work together.
Participants must share information, make collective decisions, respond to changing circumstances, and continuously adapt their approach.
While the setting is fictional, the behaviours that emerge are very real.
The same patterns that shape collaboration in the workplace quickly become visible inside the simulation: how information flows, how decisions are made, who takes initiative, how teams respond when plans change, and whether people create enough space to pause and learn.
For the COWI Sweden team, this created an engaging way to explore familiar team challenges from a completely new perspective.
Making Team Dynamics Visible 💡
Throughout the experience, several important themes emerged.
Communication mattered at every step. Teams quickly saw the difference between simply exchanging information and making sure that everyone had the clarity needed to move forward together.
Decision-making had to remain agile. With incomplete information and evolving conditions, participants had to assess situations quickly, make choices, and adjust when circumstances changed.
Reflection proved just as important as action. One of the strongest takeaways was the value of stopping, looking at what had happened, and learning before moving forward again.
In busy working environments, teams can easily default to constant action. The simulation reinforced that taking a moment to reflect can often improve both the quality of decisions and the way people collaborate.
Understanding the Journey to High Performance 🔄
The session also created an opportunity to reflect on how teams develop over time.
Teams rarely move directly from coming together to high performance. They pass through different stages as trust develops, roles become clearer, ways of working evolve, and people learn how to navigate differences effectively.
Miki Island helped bring those stages to life.
Instead of discussing team development purely as a model, participants could recognise elements of it in their own behaviour during the simulation — creating a more practical conversation about what teams need in order to progress.
Learning Through Experience 🤝
One participant described the session as:
“A really fun and rewarding way to develop as a team!”
That combination of enjoyment and meaningful reflection is central to the Miki Island experience.
People become immersed in the challenge first. Then, during the debrief, the experience becomes a shared reference point for deeper conversations about communication, collaboration, decision-making, and performance.
Rather than talking about hypothetical situations, teams can reflect on what they actually did, what worked, and what they might approach differently next time.
More Than a Team-Building Activity 🚀
For COWI Sweden, the workshop was not simply about spending time together.
It created a space to experience teamwork differently, surface real behaviours, and build greater awareness of what strong collaboration requires.
The team left with practical insights around communication, agility, reflection, and team development — alongside a memorable shared experience they could carry back into their everyday work.
A big thank you to Gustav Sjöholm for facilitating the session and to the COWI Sweden team for bringing such energy and openness to the experience.
Because sometimes the best way to understand how a team works isn’t to talk about teamwork.
It’s to experience it. 💛
