Trust fall

A trust fall is an exercise in which one person deliberately lets themselves fall backward or forward, relying on one or more other people, called spotters, to catch them before they hit the ground. Variants include a person standing in the center of a circle and falling toward different points around it, or falling from a raised platform into the arms of a waiting group below. The activity became widely known as a team-building exercise used in corporate training programs, meant to demonstrate and build trust among coworkers through a controlled moment of physical vulnerability. Its popularity as a workplace exercise declined sharply from the mid-2010s onward as concerns grew about safety and liability, including cases where a failed catch led to serious injury such as traumatic brain injury. Research cited on the subject suggests that any trust built during the exercise itself does not reliably carry over into everyday working relationships, which has further reduced its use in professional settings.