1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
Andritz runs a Catalyst Journey for its fresh graduates, built on the promise together we commit, together we deliver. The journey maps the values that carry a new joiner from arrival to impact — sense of urgency, collaboration, forward thinking, growth mindset, learning agility — and the aim of this day was to connect a new cohort over theme-based experiential activities, build synergy, and get them networking, with four outcomes named specifically: ownership and accountability, big picture thinking, communication, and collaboration.
The audience makes those values hard-won rather than given. Fresh graduates arrive sharp, competitive, and used to being measured as individuals — university rewards personal performance far more than collective outcomes. Left unchecked, that instinct shows up on day one of a career as people optimising for their own visible win rather than the team's result. The programme needed to surface that tension early and safely, in a setting removed enough from real work that the lesson landed without anyone feeling exposed.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The Cricket Auction League was selected as one of three activities across the day, carrying a specific piece of the theme: Together We Commit by making collective decisions.
Teams enter a live, fast-paced auction with a fixed budget, bidding strategically to build a high-performing squad of at least seven players; the team with the highest total stars at the end wins. Beneath the energy and the noise, the simulation is a decision-making pressure cooker. A limited budget forces teams to prioritise, evaluate, and make sharp choices; high-value players carry high-value risk; and internal alignment before placing a bid is the difference between a balanced squad and a budget blown on one marquee name.
For a graduate cohort, the core discovery is exactly the right one. Teams that treat the auction as a contest of individual instincts — everyone chasing the player they personally rate — burn their budget fast and end up unbalanced. Teams that pause to agree a strategy, define roles, and commit to decisions collectively build the stronger squad. Participants learn, in the space of one auction, that success is not about individual stars but about building the right team and deciding together — while practising collaboration, resource optimisation, and quick decision-making under pressure.
The Cricket Auction League ran alongside Radio Relay (Together We Commit by communicating effectively) and The Smart City Challenge (Together We Deliver because everyone owns the outcome), each mapped to a different facet of the Catalyst Journey.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The day opened with energisers to warm up a room of people who mostly didn't know each other, then moved through three activity blocks of 90–120 minutes with a break, closing with a consolidated debrief and high-energy close.
For the Cricket Auction League, the cohort was divided into teams and set loose in the live auction, managing their budgets and bidding in real time. Facilitators observed how each team made decisions under pressure — whether they aligned on a strategy before bidding or competed on individual impulse, how they handled the trade-off between a star signing and a balanced squad, and who took ownership of the team's collective call.
Name tags were used throughout so facilitators could track individual contribution across the day rather than just team output. The debrief drew directly on those observations, connecting the auction's outcome to the Catalyst Journey values, and the day closed with a digital scenario-based assessment measuring collaboration and growth mindset. Andritz received a post-programme report summarising facilitator observations of participant behaviour and performance.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The Cricket Auction League gave Andritz's graduate cohort a fast, memorable demonstration of a lesson that matters most at the start of a career: the winning team is rarely the one with the flashiest individual picks, but the one that agrees a strategy and commits to it together.
For a cohort at the very start of their careers at Andritz, the day did what the theme asks: it showed that committing together and delivering together begin with the willingness to make decisions as a team rather than a collection of individuals.