1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
This was the pilot batch — the first campus cohort Haleon Business Services had ever hired — and that fact shaped the entire brief. For nearly 80% of the group, this was their first corporate experience of any kind. The median age was 21.4. And they were joining not a single team but a global capability centre spanning five distinct functions, where the whole operating premise is that no function delivers anything alone.
The workshop landed on day six of onboarding, which set a precise design constraint. Participants had already been introduced to HBS, learned about the business functions, started building relationships, and sat through Haleon's own onboarding sessions — including an internal campus-to-corporate curriculum covering Outlook, email management, and communication. Repeating any of that would have wasted the day. The client was explicit: complement the existing curriculum through experiential learning and behavioural development, not more content.
The success criteria were unusually human. By the end of the day, participants should feel proud to be the first HBS campus cohort, have built stronger relationships with one another, understand HBS and its role in the organisation, feel connected to Haleon, take ownership of their careers, and leave with a clear one-year commitment to their own growth. Career ownership in particular was named as one of the client's highest priorities — participants needed to understand that Haleon would provide opportunities, but that investing in their own growth was equally their responsibility.
There was one further consideration. Haleon had experienced our work before, with a different entity and a different cohort, and expected something fresh rather than a repeat of what came before.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The HBS Impact Challenge, built on the Ripple Effect business simulation, was chosen because it teaches the single most important thing this particular audience needed to understand — and teaches it by making them live it rather than hear it.
Each team runs its own company, complete with the key functions of a real business: tech, HR, sales, marketing, finance, operations. Across twelve sub-stages, they make a strategic choice at every stage, and here is the mechanism that does the work: every option carries a trade-off. A choice that boosts innovation might cost revenue, or customer trust, or employee engagement. There is no clean win. Decisions ripple outward across financial performance, customer trust, innovation, employee engagement, operational efficiency, and sustainability — and after twelve stages, the results reveal which company scaled the most.
For a cohort joining a shared-services organisation, the fit is almost exact. These are people about to spend their careers in Finance, or Procurement, or Supply Chain, and the greatest risk for any new joiner in a function-based organisation is optimising for their own function's metrics without seeing the downstream cost. Ripple Effect makes that visible in a single afternoon: functions are interdependent, every decision is a trade-off, small choices create big impact, collaboration produces better outcomes, and good strategy drives sustainable growth. It delivered the client's behavioural themes — precision, cross-functional collaboration, speed and quality, continuous learning, ownership, delivering value, and global collaboration — as lived experience rather than a list on a slide.
Crucially for a group who had already spent six days being taught, it was a simulation rather than a session. Nobody was told how business functions interconnect; they discovered it by running a company and watching their own decisions ripple.
The Impact Challenge was paired with a Career Journey module, jointly designed with the client, helping participants visualise their path within Haleon, understand that career growth at HBS is not linear, and think about the different routes available across business functions — the direct vehicle for the career-ownership priority.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The workshop ran roughly 10 AM to 4 PM at the HBS office in Bangalore, delivered by a lead facilitator and a co-facilitator. Ahead of the day, a facilitator alignment discussion with the client finalised module flow, business context, debrief approach, and functional examples — ensuring the simulation was framed in the language of HBS's actual functions rather than generic business terms, and that the whole workshop reflected the shared-services context rather than the commercial business.
In the Impact Challenge, teams took on their companies and worked through the twelve decision stages, weighing each option's benefits against its trade-offs. Facilitators observed how teams reasoned: whether they chased a single metric or balanced the whole picture, how they handled disagreement, and whether they anticipated the downstream consequences of a choice before committing to it. The debrief drew on those observations and on the client-supplied functional context, connecting what happened in the simulation to how HBS actually operates—why precision matters, where cross-functional collaboration changes outcomes, and what delivering value looks like in a global capability center.
The Career Journey module then turned the lens inward, moving from how the business works to how each participant's path through it might unfold—supported by business context and career information the client shared—and closing on the one-year growth commitment the client wanted participants to leave with.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The HBS Impact Challenge gave Haleon Business Services' first campus cohort something six days of onboarding could not: a felt understanding that the functions they were joining are interdependent, that every decision carries a trade-off, and that small choices ripple. For a group whose careers will be spent inside a shared-services organization, that lesson arrived before day seven.
As the workshop marking HBS's pilot campus intake, the day set out to leave 21-year-olds proud of being first, connected to Haleon, closer to each other, and clear that owning their careers starts now—a foundation for the cohorts that follow.