Most teams believe they collaborate well. Then pressure arrives. Tight deadlines, competing priorities and other teams they depend on but cannot fully see.
Under that pressure the cracks show. People retreat into silos, protect their own patch and chase a local win at the expense of the shared one. Telling a room what good collaboration looks like rarely changes what they do the next day.
You cannot lecture people out of those habits, but you can design an experience that makes them impossible to miss. Built to Win drops an entire room into exactly the pressure that breaks collaboration down, lets them live the consequences, then holds up the mirror while the behaviour is still fresh and personal. That is when the insight lands.
Built to Win is centred around one high-stakes tension: teams under pressure who need each other to win, who have to collaborate with diverse stakeholders and who have to deliver a result for an end customer.
It is challenging, tactile and genuinely fun, and it scales from a single team to a conference hall of hundreds.
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Built to Win, a 40 second snapshot. Click to play.
A high-stakes construction project is short on vital supplies. Every day of delay costs millions of dollars. That is the problem. It is also the opportunity: teams can make serious money if they procure the supplies in time.
The clock is ticking. Whichever team makes the most money wins. What follows is fast, competitive, on-your-feet negotiation and problem solving that reveals exactly how a group behaves when the pressure is real.
A simulation creates learning by shining a light on the real decisions and behaviours of everyone in the room. Rather than telling participants the messages, we let them experience them first. The insight comes during the activity and in the debrief that follows: experiential learning at its most dynamic.
It also transforms the energy of the room, filling it with laughter and bustling activity. It is consistently the highlight of any conference or offsite, and the shared reference point teams come back to for months afterwards.
A typical run of Built to Win takes around two and a half to three hours, and flexes to fit your agenda:
People of Influence is the consultancy through which Michelle Rushton and Shaun Kenny deliver leadership programs, team offsites and impactful conferences.
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Leadership Engine is our proprietary platform for measuring and improving leadership effectiveness with diagnostics, dashboards and behavioural nudges.
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