1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
PSA had just come through a demanding workplan meeting — the session where departmental KPIs are set with the leadership team — and wanted to give employees a way to rejuvenate afterward. The brief had a specific, easy-to-underestimate requirement: the activity had to be engaging enough that the leaders themselves would want to join in, not merely watch.
That's a real constraint. After a heavy, numbers-focused planning session, energy in the room is low and slightly drained, and leaders in particular often hang back and observe rather than participate. An activity that felt like more "work," or one that only the junior members threw themselves into while leaders stood at the edge, would have missed the point entirely. PSA also wanted genuine substance underneath the fun — clear team-bonding and collaboration takeaways, with the bigger why behind the activity made explicit in the debrief. And as a returning client who had run a programme with us the year before, they needed this one to feel fresh rather than repeat what came before.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The Comic Strip Challenge was chosen because it's the rare activity that levels a room. Teams create an original comic strip together — inventing characters, building a narrative panel by panel, and landing a story within a set time. It demands no artistic skill, no physical exertion, and no specialist knowledge; it rewards imagination and teamwork, which means a department head and a new joiner start on exactly equal footing.
That equalising quality is what makes leaders comfortable diving in. Nobody is exposed, everyone can contribute, and the humour that naturally emerges from building a comic together dissolves the post-meeting stiffness fast. As a counterpoint to a KPI-setting session, it's almost the perfect palate cleanser — creative rather than analytical, collaborative rather than evaluative, playful rather than serious. Beneath the fun, it delivers exactly the themes PSA asked for: teams have to align on a shared story, divide the work, and communicate to make the pieces cohere — collaboration and team bonding in action, ready to be drawn out in the debrief.
The Comic Strip Challenge was paired with Drone Around the World, with teams deliberately reshuffled between the two so participants worked with different colleagues across the session.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The 40 participants, leaders included, were divided into teams and briefed on their mission: create an original comic strip, working from titles and themes tailored to PSA in advance so the stories felt relevant to the group rather than generic. Teams moved through concept, characters, and panels, negotiating creative direction and dividing the work against the clock.
Two facilitators ran the session, weaving it cleanly into PSA's wider agenda so the shift from the serious workplan meeting into the engagement segment felt seamless. Facilitators observed how each team organised itself — who shaped the story, how decisions got made, how the group aligned on a single narrative — and used those observations to anchor a debrief that connected the creative play back to the bigger why: how the same collaboration and communication that made a good comic strip underpins how the team works together day to day. Teams were then reshuffled for Drone Around the World, giving participants a second set of collaborators and keeping the energy fresh through to the close.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The Comic Strip Challenge gave PSA's team — leaders included — a genuine reset after an intensive planning session. On a level creative playing field, the whole room participated, and the humour and shared storytelling rebuilt the energy and connection that a day of KPI-setting had drawn down.
For a session designed to rejuvenate and reconnect, the challenge did exactly that — proof that the right creative activity can bring an entire team, leadership and all, back into the room together.