What happens when an ambitious organisation designs an experience people can truly lose themselves in? Seven Secret Doors shows how immersion creates Flow – and why that matters long after the night ends…
A private equity firm approached us with an unusually ambitious brief: bring together 70 guests in an immersive dystopian-future narrative.
It should be something of a completely different order to a standard event, testing their creativity and stretching their thinking, and culminating in a shared celebration with a further 240 attendees.
They weren’t looking for just ‘entertainment’ but something truly immersive and surprising that would reflect their appetite for bold thinking.
In short: build a world worth losing yourself in….
Here’s what our creative team devised.
The year is 2054. Robots have taken control. Only those who can prove they haven’t been brainwashed may join the resistance.
From the moment guests arrived, they entered a fully realised world. Sets, characters, soundscapes and story arcs were woven together so the experience felt fully cohesive.
The doors opened, each revealing a different challenge. In one room, guests found themselves in resistance headquarters, immediately tasked with proving their humanity under playful interrogation.
In another, they stepped onto a surreal stage to conduct a live orchestra — discovering, to their surprise, that 20 musicians were waiting for their cue.
Then there was an ’80s-inspired game show, complete with high-energy hosts and racing countdown clocks, where teams competed in challenges that demanded quick thinking and composure under pressure.
Every zone had its own tempo and mode of engagement: some required strategic thinking while others rewarded humour or bold decision-making, but the whole was fully coherent, so guests never left the world we’d created for them.
Of course, behind the scenes, the S&G team was furiously having to employ all sorts of technical wizardry and complex choreography to bring this world to life. From the participants’ point of view, however, the night felt seamless, and the experience was fully immersive.
But something deeper happened, too: the 70 participants entered what psychologists call Flow.
Flow is the state we enter when challenge and skill are in balance: when goals are clear enough to focus us, but open enough to allow initiative and imagination.
In that glorious Flow state – similar to what athletes call ‘being in the zone’ – we stop being self-conscious and become fully present, so that our normal sense of time vanishes. We can operate at the edge of our capability without it feeling like a strain and we usually perform better than we could ever expect.
In our thinking about the Transformational Power of Play, Flow is one of three essential conditions that make play transformative, with real lasting benefits, not just ‘fun’.
The other two are Space and Connection.
Play needs a distinct arena (it can be psychological or physical or both) where ordinary roles vanish and experimentation feels safe. Seven Secret Doors quite literally involved seven physical thresholds, beyond which a surreal space clearly signalled: this is different. That separation gave people permission to commit fully.
Good play also needs to be relational, involving responsiveness to others. Throughout the evening, guests collaborated under light but clear rules. Success depended on communication and trust, the raw materials of genuine connection.
When Space, Connection and Flow are present together, play reliably produces three outcomes for organisations:
Ingenuity – novel scenarios unlock adaptive and creative thinking. People see one another’s capabilities differently, and often discover new sides to themselves, too.
Belonging – shared missions generate shared memories. Trust and a sense of belonging grow naturally through the experience.
Vitality – the incredible buzz and energy at the finale of Seven Secret Doors wasn’t just due to cocktails. It was the real and natural result of immersion.
The client’s reaction? “This is the best off-site ever, x 87. Need I say more?”
Seven Secret Doors was a spectacular and hugely enjoyable corporate night, yes. But it was also a carefully designed environment in which intelligent, ambitious people were invited into a deeper level of engagement.
When organisations are confident enough to create Space, foster Connection and calibrate challenge so that Flow can occur, the results go far beyond entertainment, delivering benefits that endure long after the doors have closed.
Read more about the serious benefits of play in our free white paper The Transformational Power of Play.
