The Reflector Profile

There are a few unwritten rules about escape rooms. Except for a few Red Herrings (items placed purely to distract players), everything has a purpose and will likely be used. Most items are typically used once and only once. When something is complete, it’s safe to put it aside and not come back to it later.

The Reflector is the teammate who diligently keeps a mental checklist of these steps and can recall them at exactly the right moment. Their encyclopedic memory helps the team reconnect past discoveries with present challenges - a role that is invaluable in both escape room training and real-world leadership training.

In the escape room I built at Google, there was one puzzle that required two distinct pieces of information to solve. One was a block of data, the other was the cipher to decode it. Depending on the order in which puzzles were tackled, it was very possible for players to find the cipher before they found the information it decoded. On its own, the cipher was useless.

Teams without a Reflector often became painfully stuck. By the time they found the second piece of information, they had already forgotten about the cipher - and no one remembered to use what was discovered earlier.

In the business world, Reflectors are just as critical. They’re the ones who connect past data, lessons, and experiences to present-day challenges. They recall pitfalls from previous projects and guide teams to avoid repeating mistakes. They leverage memory and reflection to help shape smarter decisions - a vital skill in team development training and leadership escape room training alike.

But Reflectors also face challenges. If their past experiences feel irrelevant, they may hesitate to suggest solutions. Sometimes they lean too heavily on history, assuming what worked before will work again, or that what failed before will fail again, without noticing how new environments can create entirely different outcomes.

Are you a Reflector? Take our 9 Key Profiles of Effective Teams assessment to discover your natural strengths - then see them come alive in Submerged, our immersive escape room Singapore workshop.

These are the kinds of insights we unlock in the world’s first B2B escape room Singapore program - designed for leadership training Singapore, experiential team building, and long-lasting team development training.