Bajaj Finserv - Case Study

At an annual offsite, people tend to stay in familiar circles. Information moves freely inside a team and gets stuck between teams, and cross-team collaboration happens by chance rather than design. Bajaj Finserv wanted to change that for 86 people in one room, with an experience that felt fresh and competitive and carried meaning for a company celebrating a century.

Part 1: Hi-Tech Quest. Our mobile-based treasure hunt sent teams through pre-set locations at the offsite venue, solving cryptic clues and taking on facilitator-led challenges against the clock. For Bajaj we customised the format so that collaboration and communication were built into how the hunt worked, instead of being a by-product of it.

• Within teams: Clues needed logic and multitasking, so teams had to split tasks, share findings clearly and decide quickly, with different members taking the lead as the challenge changed.
• Across teams:  No team held everything it needed to finish on its own. Parts of the information behind each clue sat with other teams, so teams had to find each other, ask the right questions and share what they knew before they could move ahead. 

The race against time kept the pace high and showed early how well each team’s information was moving.

Part 2: Press Banner. An 80-piece jigsaw in which each piece was held by a different participant or team. Together the pieces formed one large picture of the journey of Bajaj and its 100 years. People had to describe what they held, find where it fitted and coordinate across groups before the picture became visible. It showed how each individual contribution is part of a larger story, and it gave the company’s history a physical form that the whole room built together.

Part 3: Circuit Fusion. A replica of F1 racing in three stages: building the race car, designing the track, and racing at the end. Teams worked in parallel on their own parts and then had to fit their work together with the other teams’. And what came out beautifully was how the teams have transitioned from competition to collaboration.

The Debrief. We anchored the reflection on three questions:

• Smooth information sharing: What flowed freely, and where did it get stuck?
• Intra- and inter-team collaboration: How did people work within their own teams, and how did they work across teams?
• Thought before action, or action before thought? When did planning pay off, and when did acting first and adjusting later work better?

The 86 participants moved from a fast, competitive start to a shared build and then to a live race. The debrief gave the group a common language for how they share information, how they work within and across teams, and how they decide between planning and acting.