The Story behind Orchestrate

We first launched Orchestrate back in 2006. By then we had already become market pioneers, leading a new wave of collaborative team building products. Our burgeoning blue-chip client base appreciated our intuitive approach, as the choice of team activities back then was limited to outdated competitive values. Catalyst were setting new trends in the team building industry. We were moulding team building activities to reflect emerging company values of that period: Passion, Integrity, Excellence and One Vision.

To a certain extent, Orchestrate was born out of our own success. Having established ground breaking products, like Big Picture, and Beatswork, we had client trust. With the added pressure of a very healthy repeat business rate we were forced to innovate to meet the annual demands of our clients.

Then came the big question: what next? What activity is congruent with this new value stream and how can we mould it into an engaging and practical reality? The answer was relatively easy - an Orchestra! But, the development as a team exercise was another story, and one that challenged our collective experience as game designers to the max.

Finding the maestro

We set about researching talent that could help make Orchestrate a reality, and having contracted a well known composer, renown for several famous BBC scores, we gave him the most challenging brief of his career: Write a score with seven or eight instrument sections, that builds to an uplifting finale, with each section playing a limited number of notes. And, one more thing, uh, yes all and the musicians playing… they will be complete beginners.

That composer was a total pro, and absolutely nailed the brief with an exclusive musical score for Orchestrate called Universe. This, coupled with some clever ‘accelerated tutoring’ techniques,gave us the tools for a first test run with forty friends, family and work colleagues. Having fined-tuned the experience through rigorous ‘in house’ testing, we were confident, and ready to launch the product for real.

The debut

We risked investing around £60K in instruments, and invited clients, events agencies, producers and the press to a 100+ launch event in London (the invitees were to be willing participants). A nerve wracking moment for sure. Not only valued clients, but the national press were there. It was a total success, and certainly a milestone in my team building career in bringing it all together.

The concept develops, popularity grows

With this confidence we went on to sell many events, positioning a focal point of highly produced conferences and meetings in the UK. The Catalyst partner in France then developed the concept further with a version of Carmina Burana. This version spread this around the globe, and today over many Catalyst partners sell Orchestrate. With a vast network of facilitators, and instruments positioned around the world, Orchestrate is pretty much available in any location. Our partners share resources to help make Orchestrate a reality for clients who appreciate quality, and who want the ultimate team building challenge.

The Story Behind Need 4 Speed

During the economic downturn back in 2010, our global partners identified a need for a niche team building product with a focus on efficiency, cost saving, time management, and developing a culture of sharing best practices.

Here at HQ, we rose to this challenge and set about brainstorming how these business issues could be explored in a fun context, while also offering a level playing field for review and reflection.

After locking ourselves away in our ‘ideas shed’, we rattled our brain cells, bounced ideas around, and settled on some form of construction/reconstruction exercise with the added constraint that activities should be table based and instantly engaging for all participants.

Exiting ‘the shed’ with a firm brief in hand, we split up and set about individually scouring the market for a tactile, high-quality construction toy to base our concept around. Ever aware of our strategy - to offer consistent team building games on a global scale, the challenge was on to source a widely available product. This search proved harder than we thought, and we had already ruled out Lego, an option we all felt had been ‘done to death’ in the training world.

Keep your “Eyes WIde Open”

Another of our team building mantras in developing products is ‘keep your eyes wide open’. The Eureka moment came to me,  while looking for my nephew’s birthday present. Suddenly, in a small shop down the cobbled streets of Lewes, East Sussex, I unwittingly found myself holding the solution - Automoblox Cars!  “This is it!”, I shouted triumphantly, while bemused shoppers gave me a safe distance.

The solution I found was a tactile, contemporary, award winning educational toy. One that gave us the right level of complexity for a new game. From that point on we formulated a clever game structure, and supporting software that has ensured Need for Speed remained one of our top ten selling business games for the past 10 years.

Need for Speed proved to us that even in times of austerity, business still perceives team building to be important providing that they see clear ROI. With an increasing awareness of the importance of a sharing culture, and agile teamwork, we foresee Need for Speed remaining relevant for many years to come.  

Many years ago, the ‘dreaded’ trip to Ikea that we all fear actually turned out to be very positive from a business perspective, and inspired a fresh new direction in the Catalyst portfolio. Surprised by my own pride in assembling flat pack furniture, I wondered if that feeling of achievement could be transferred to a team context with an outcome that had to be more rewarding than a wood chip wardrobe. This moment of clarity lead me to explore the world of creative cardboard constructions.

And the award goes to Flat Out…

Our initial cardboard research threw us in at the deep end of the pool. We bought the designs for a flat pack boat from an Australian company, and quickly realised that the material itself was capable of building much more complex shapes. So, a series on ‘team transportation’ was conceived. Inspiration flowed from many sources: My Love of film - Ben Hur the defining Roman movie made in 1959 spawned Flat Out Chariot Challenge; my passion for travel in the Himalayas bought back the Flat Out Rickshaws. All the team building activities developed up to this point had achieved instant notoriety, and sales success. But, the crowning glory to the fleet must surely be the full-sized replica cardboard racing cars of Flat Out F1.

Our clients just love these cars and their big wide wheels! Impressed by Catalyst‘s global footprint, Google's HR team selected Flat Out F1 recently, as a bolt on team building activity in a series of regional leadership training days. They were looking for a consistent exercise that could be delivered locally by trusted supplier with international reach. I’m proud to say that after their first event in April 2014, we’ve now run over 150 Flat Out F1’s for Google offices worldwide.

Since my ‘Ikea moment’ nearly 20 years ago, Catalyst has led the charge in cardboard team building construction exercises. We even have a Flat-Out Collaborative Pyramid build, which remains uncontested to this day.

The benefits of teamwork in Flat Out

I really feel that this early innovation exemplifies ‘Catalyst Quality’, and our exacting standards in everything we produce. From beautifully designed team instruction packs, to intricate 3D CAD drawings, we are fanatical about how things look and feel. These designs are not as simple as they first appear, with months of research, and rigorous safety testing going into every vehicle.

The team working benefits of our Flat-Out series are equally well considered. Six to ten separate plans per vehicle present, and highlight, an intelligent project management challenge. To succeed, teams must align roles, but are all individually responsible for their part in the whole project, a link that is highly relevant in today’s working environment: accuracy, open dialogue, and communication.

On July 25th, 1992, Michael Jackson played the Royal Dublin Showgrounds as part of his Dangerous world tour. But, Catalyst had already pre-booked the arena. So a compromise was reached with MJ: we use your stage the day before you, so you can set up in advance.

That day, July the 24th, (the England company was still in its infancy and Microsoft Office 3.0 was just being launched) saw 380 Microsoft employees playing in a Samba band,  as Irish River Dancers wheeled a jig on stage to Samba music. Beatswork was born, and from that day forward for the next two years the phone never stopped ringing with clients saying, ‘We want that Samba thing to close our conference.’ We were so busy, the sales team didn’t have to sell, just close the calls.

The turning point

How did Catalyst come up with the first use of Samba in a corporate environment in the UK? Six months prior to this, we had the Royal Albert Hall booked for Microsoft, and the  annual summer conference was going to be presented by speakers popping up from members of the orchestra. The brief had been to highlight the need for all teams in Microsoft to pull together, stop the infighting between sales and marketing, and work as one. Guy Baker had picked an orchestra as a metaphor and Microsoft were delighted. Three months later the entire conference was moved to Dublin, reflecting Microsoft’s setting up of their Irish operations – European.

Corporate Drumming - Drum Cafe is born

The invention of  ”Drum Cafe”(corporate drumming): Creation flow on the go. Guy was driving past Birmingham on the M62, looking at motorway signs and thinking, ‘What is like an orchestra, but not an orchestra?’ The signs made him think of Samba as the 4 sharp blasts on the whistle which tells the players that there is going to be a change in the instrumentation in 4 bars. Just as a motorway sign tells you when a junction is coming up.

It’s a whole new language made up of whistles and hand signals, but can it be taught quickly?

No, said the Liverpool school of Samba, no said the London school of Samba, no said the Manchester school of  Samba. Yes said a special needs music teacher.Right, let's get you all together in one room and agree we are not learning pure Samba with respect to the Samba schools. We are learning to play as a Samba band.

And so corporate drumming, or as its often called “Drum Cafe”, was born. More than 4000 instruments were purchased to cope with demand. Passports were filling up quickly as staff were flown to all corners of the world to deliver Beatswork.

At Catalyst we had at least two clean years of domination before the copycats jumped on the action. The original is often the best, and with the experience that Catalyst gained in those first two years, taking thousands of people all over the world through a wonderful, uplifting, celebratory experience, Catalyst has been able to fine-tune the experience so that it still remains the best in the world.

This unique programme took longer to create than to plan a mountain expedition and achieve the climb. Huge teamwork was required in its creation, from ideation to creative interpretation, and finally, through to the App design team, who had to make the game matrix work on the tablet. Two years to be precise. So how did it begin?

For many years now, I have been visiting Nepal annually to explore the Himalayas. Over twenty-five, trips have seen me kayak down rivers, hike and fly mountains with my para-glider, and more recently conquer several of its 6500m peaks. It was on the last peak attempt to climb Ama Dablam, surely one of the world's most beautiful mountains, where I became convinced that some of the decisions we were making would make an excellent basis for a team game, and Peak Performance started to take shape.

At this time in 2014, and '15, Mount Everest had two disaster years back to back. In 2014 an ice fall killed 16 Sherpas.

In the wake of this tragedy, one of the trip leaders, who lost 5 of his Sherpas, came to stay with me in Lombok to recover and find peace. I learned much from him during our discussions, and some of his knowledge became the foundation for Peak Performance. The following year, on 25 April 2015, Nepal had a terrible earthquake, and 19 bodies were recovered from the ice fall. I knew an 'ice fall' would have to be an important part of the challenge, and I wanted to replicate the haphazard nature of crossing it and reveal the dangers.

Working on the matrix, we used real-life scenarios, looking at guides, high-altitude camps, the use of oxygen, different routes on the mountain, and the management of risk.

Peak Performance reveals how people perform different tasks in each successful bid for the summit. Weather plays a huge part, and so does faultless planning. But, planning needs to be agile and responsive to changing conditions on the mountain. We created the largest leader's guide of any activity we had ever designed. These manuals contain everything our hand-picked partners worldwide need to know to effectively prepare, deliver, and in this case, review the activity. Our in-house App development team were magnificent in interpreting and helping develop the outcomes of virtual actions.

Adding three-dimensional challenges, such as tent pitching and crossing ravines on ladders, adds that extra bit of fun to what is proving to be a challenging but enjoyable immersion in the world of high-altitude mountain climbing. Partners around the world are now availing themselves of guest speakers – people who have scaled these heights and can add that little bit extra to what is already a fantastic new activity.

The Story behind the Big Picture

The Big Picture is born circa 1995.

Pilot error, smash crack inverted knees and blood. Making my way like a snail with a paraglider bag on my back down a cliff with my smashed knees it was hard to imagine the silver lining that would become the Big Picture. Following a paragliding accident in Wales with a sentence of a leg in plaster for 8 weeks, I decided to take on a Picasso. Loving to paint but not so good at drawing, I projected his breakthrough proto- Cubist masterpiece, the 8 sq. ft Les Demoiselles d'Avignon on to a canvass and enjoyed the next 8 weeks painting a pretty good replica.

As I was mixing the colours, I began to think, if this painting was actually being attempted by multiple teams, then there would need to be a lot of communication between members to ensure the colours matched and there was a seamless transition from one canvas to the next. The Big Picture was born and initially corporates simply painted their version of famous masters paintings. We quickly realised that there was an opportunity to tailor the output to include clients’ messages and it transformed from one of copying art to creating billboard sized graphic designs with content and impact. As we refined the process, the overall quality improved, using detailed pre graphic designed questionnaires, bespoke software to transfer designs to canvas and we have a huge portfolio of happy clients. Previous artwork we have, nailed the process to what it is today, a fine art.

The spectacular curtain drop/finale

It’s moved a long way from ’’painting by numbers‘’ to a sophisticated exercise with extra art based challenges and techniques to guarantee that nearly every team has to communicate with the other teams on the painting and no one has an overall picture of what they are creating, until the final spectacular reveal. The curtain drops, the confetti cannon explodes and people stand in awe of their very own masterpiece, unable to believe they have collectively created such a high quality image in such a short amount of time.

With almost 30 years history behind The Big Picture, we know now, what a successful recipe it is for clients to engage their employees and share a message in a truly artistic way. The Big Picture ensures multiple levels of communication between teams. This makes it the perfect demonstration of how collaboration, networking and a big picture focus can lead to outstanding results.