In almost every really successful play experience, there’s a glorious moment when someone who is normally very serious and composed finds themselves doing something faintly ridiculous and suddenly realises it.
It’s especially good if the person is highly competent and usually very polished, but they’re now wet, muddy and laughing their head off.
In that magical moment, something important can shift – with lasting consequences for the organisation. Challenge 24 was built around that shift.
An international private equity firm came to us with a very clear challenge. Historically, their internal events had been impressive, but punishing and athletic: Ironmans, triathlons, epic endurance feats and so on.
But the feedback they’d had from team members was telling: these events rewarded toughness and selected for a particular type of person. Heroes and winners would emerge, but the events didn’t leave much room for shared experience, or for the kind of connection that builds trust across a whole organisation.
The client took that feedback seriously, so they asked us to design a corporate fundraising event that would unite their entire European team and be genuinely inclusive – an event that could bring everyone into the game, but without losing ambition or edge. It needed to be creative and wildly engaging, too.
So we designed Challenge 24: a 24-hour, points-based adventure that blended the spirit of The Crystal Maze, Wacky Races, Fort Boyard and Gladiators – and then threw in campervans, a tidal island, night-time challenges, torrential rain and the world’s longest inflatable obstacle course for good measure.
It was playful and absurd, true… but the silliness involved was taken very seriously.
From the outside, Challenge 24 looked like chaos, but inside it was carefully designed, with each element doing a job.
Play creates a different kind of space: one where hierarchies and official workplace roles blur, and people interact with each other as humans first, job titles second.
At two in the morning on an inflatable obstacle course, progress depends on who’s willing to wait, to help someone back up, to laugh things off, and to keep going together when everyone is tired and soaked. The normal work roles are entirely irrelevant.
Shared play does something that workshops and presentations rarely manage: they reveal character.
Over the course of 24 hours, people began to notice qualities in one another like kindness, humour under pressure, integrity, patience and unshowy leadership. Deeper bonds emerged naturally, through shared experience.
The morning after the event, George and Charlie received an email from the client’s Managing Partner, James. It’s rare to get feedback that so clearly captures what play does when it’s properly designed:
“To say that Challenge 24 was a powerful, even quite emotional event, would be an understatement.
In my 27+ years I have done a lot of team-building events, but this one was particularly special. It brought out leadership, determination, integrity, generosity and kindness.
We have all come out better people for having taken part.”
That “better people” is so important and fascinating. A challenging shared experience like a 24-hour physical and mental obstacle course can build more trust than any number of seminars or declarations of values. When people see each other act, struggle, support and recover together, trust and mutual respect grows very quickly.
When we look back at Challenge 24 through the lens of the Transformational Power of Play philosophy, the outcome makes perfect sense:
When those elements are present, certain outcomes reliably follow. In this case, the dominant one was Belonging – the deep, human sense of “we’ve been through something together”.
A sense of belonging is the foundation of real, resilient trust and a sure sign of a healthy, happy, effective organisation.
Challenge 24 was so powerful precisely because it was somewhat ridiculous. Behind every great team, there’s surprisingly often a moment when someone sensible did something silly, and suddenly discovered they could rely on the people around them.
Read more about the serious benefits of play in our free white paper The Transformational Power of Play.
