The Other Side of the Table | Games for Trainers

Have you ever sat through a session and thought "they clearly have no idea what it's like to be on my side of this"? Most of us have. And most of us have also been the person on the other side, equally convinced we understood the full picture. The Other Side of the Table is a game that gently — but very effectively — challenges that assumption. You switch roles with someone from the other side of a familiar workplace situation and spend about twenty minutes trying to actually be them, not just imagine being them.

It's one of those activities that sounds almost too simple when you first hear it. Then you watch it happen in a room and you understand why trainers keep coming back to it. It takes about thirty minutes, needs almost no materials, and the conversations it sparks tend to follow people home.

How the game works

Everyone gets a role card that flips their usual position. The manager becomes the new hire trying to figure out the unwritten rules on day three. The trainer becomes the person in the back row who's been sent to training they didn't ask for. The compliance expert becomes the frontline worker who just got handed yet another policy update mid-shift. The customer service rep becomes the customer who's already explained their problem four times to four different people.

In pairs or small groups, they work through a short scenario — a conversation, a decision, or something they need to sort out together — but entirely from inside the new role. The situations are ones people recognise immediately, because they've lived them. Just never from this particular seat.

"What surprises most people isn't how different the other side is. It's how reasonable it turns out to be."

After the role play, you ask one question: what did you notice that you wouldn't have noticed from your usual spot? That's where it gets interesting. The manager who just played the new hire will often go quiet for a moment before saying something like "I had no idea how much jargon we use that means nothing to someone who just joined." The trainer who played the disengaged participant usually comes back with "I never realised how dismissive 'this is really straightforward' sounds when you're the one who's confused."

The role pairs that generate the most insight

You can use this game with almost any workplace pairing, but the ones that tend to land hardest are the ones where there's a real knowledge gap or a real power difference — and where both sides have legitimate frustrations they don't usually get to voice. Pick the pairs that feel most relevant to your group.

Pairing 01

Manager ↔ New Hire

Shows how much experienced people assume others already know. Managers almost always come back from this one shaking their heads at how much they never actually explain.

Pairing 02

Trainer ↔ Resistant Learner

Gives trainers a taste of what it's like to be in a room you didn't choose to be in. The resistant participant usually isn't difficult — they just have a perspective nobody bothered to ask about.

Pairing 03

Expert ↔ Beginner

Reminds experts how genuinely confusing it is to be new. Once you know something well, it's hard to remember what it felt like not to. This pairing makes that visible in a way that's hard to argue with.

Pairing 04

Service Agent ↔ Frustrated Customer

Both sides get it — the agent sees why the customer is at the end of their rope, and the customer sees the constraints the agent is actually working with. Usually ends with a lot of "oh, I didn't realise."

Why it works — the science of perspective-taking

There's a well-known problem in social psychology that researchers call the empathy gap — basically, we're not nearly as good at understanding other people's experiences as we think we are. When we try to imagine what someone else is going through, we tend to substitute our own feelings for theirs. Which sounds like empathy but often isn't. It's more like projection.

What makes this game different from just asking people to "think about it from the other side" is that you're actually doing it, not just thinking about it. You're in the scenario. You have a goal, a frustration, and a constraint. You have to respond in real time to what the other person says. That's a very different experience from sitting back and reflecting — and it tends to produce very different results.

The other thing that helps is doing it with other people watching. When you can see your colleague struggling to explain something "obvious" in a way that makes sense to a beginner, it lands differently than hearing about the curse of knowledge in a presentation. You see it happen. And that sticks.

How to run it — step by step

Choose your role pairs

Pick pairings that your participants actually live with. If the room is full of managers and frontline staff, use that. If it's a group of trainers, flip them into learner roles. The closer the scenario is to their real life, the more it lands.

Write the role cards

Each card gives the person their role and three things: a concern they're carrying into the conversation, something they want to get out of it, and one thing they can't just say outright. That last bit is important — it stops people explaining the role and forces them to actually play it.

Set the scenario

Give each pair something specific to work through — a conversation, a decision, a moment of tension. The more concrete it is, the better the role play. "Discuss communication" goes nowhere. "Your manager just sent confusing feedback on a piece of work you spent a week on" gives people something to actually respond to.

Run the reversal

Give each pair 10–12 minutes to work through it in character. Try not to jump in unless things have completely stopped. The awkward pauses? Those are often right before the most useful thing someone says. Let them breathe.

Debrief in the whole group

Ask three questions, in this order: what surprised you about the role you were playing? What did you see from that side that you don't normally see? And — what's one thing you'll actually do differently back in your real role? That third question is where the conversation tends to get really good.

Adapting the game to different training contexts

Workshop Adaptations

Where this game travels well

Management development: Put managers in the role of being managed — particularly in situations like getting vague feedback or unclear expectations. It creates more genuine empathy than any session on empathetic leadership ever will.
Trainer training and train-the-trainer: Make trainers spend time as the person who doesn't want to be there. It's often uncomfortable, frequently humbling, and almost always changes how they open and run their sessions afterwards.
Customer experience workshops: Use real frustrations from real complaint data — not made-up composites. Frontline staff playing an actual type of customer they deal with regularly gets to the point much faster than a fictional scenario does.
Conflict resolution and mediation: Have each party spend time in the other's role before any formal discussion starts. People tend to stop defending their position quite so hard once they've had to argue from the other side for a while.
Cross-functional collaboration: Pair people from different departments and let them swap. Sales plays operations. Finance plays marketing. A lot of cross-team frustration comes from assuming the other side is being difficult — this usually reveals they're just working with different constraints.
Virtual delivery: Works fine in breakout rooms with a shared brief document. It's a bit less spontaneous than in person, but the insight holds up. Asking pairs to share a short clip or summary in the debrief helps bring it back to the full group.

What to watch for as a facilitator

Some people will start narrating instead of playing. You'll hear it — "well, if I were a new hire, I'd probably feel..." — instead of just being the new hire. Gently redirect them back into the role. The learning happens inside it, not describing it from the outside.

The quiet moments are often the ones that matter. When someone just stops and says "oh — I hadn't actually thought about it that way" — that's the game doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Don't rush past it. Let the room sit with it for a second.

Not every pair is going to have a breakthrough, and that's fine. Some scenarios resolve too neatly. Some pairs click too well. Some participants find the whole thing a bit artificial. Don't worry about it. Across the room, there will always be two or three pairs who come back with something worth talking about in the debrief — and that's usually enough to get the whole group thinking.

The takeaway

One of the hardest things to do in a training room is actually shift how someone sees another person's situation. You can tell people to be empathetic. You can show them research on it. But none of that quite does what twenty minutes of actually being on the other side does. The Other Side of the Table creates that experience without anyone having to be blamed, called out, or put on the spot. People discover things for themselves — which is, honestly, the only way most of us ever really change anything.

The people who get the most out of it are usually the ones who came in most confident they already understood both perspectives. Which probably tells you something worth thinking about.