1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
SATS India was at a genuine inflection point. Having opened its first central kitchen in Bengaluru in March 2024, the organisation had assembled a group of diverse leaders drawn from different backgrounds, each heading a different function — and each still forming a view of what this company was going to be.
The brief was correspondingly ambitious. Leadership needed to recognise the importance of a strong company culture and understand why every function had to perform as one cohesive unit rather than a collection of capable silos. They wanted the group to get to know each other properly, build trust and ownership, and reflect deliberately on how they wanted to drive culture forward. Beyond the two days, they were looking for practices that would embed a culture of high performance into the organisation as it scaled.
An added consideration: some participants had attended a Culture & Leadership workshop delivered by The Thought Bulb the previous year. The programme needed to feel fresh for them while working equally well for those experiencing it for the first time.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The AI Movie Making Challenge formed the centrepiece of Day One. Teams take on the role of filmmakers — conceiving a story, scripting it, and using AI tools to bring it to screen, all within a compressed timeframe. It was chosen for this group with intent.
Making a film is one of the few creative exercises that genuinely cannot be done alone. It demands a shared vision agreed early, distinct roles taken up quickly, creative disagreement resolved without stalling, and a hard deadline met together. For a leadership team learning to function as one unit, the activity surfaces exactly the dynamics that matter — who defers, who dominates, how a group aligns when everyone has a valid opinion — and it does so in a context far enough from daily work that people engage honestly rather than defensively. The AI layer added a further dimension, putting every participant on equal footing with an unfamiliar tool and rewarding curiosity over seniority.
AI Movie Making ran alongside The Throne Challenge on Day One, with Drone Around the World following as a half-day session on Day Two.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The 22 participants were divided into small teams and briefed on their mission: create an original short film, from blank page to final cut, using AI tools. Teams moved through concept, script, and production, negotiating creative direction and dividing responsibility as they went. Our facilitators observed the group dynamics unfolding in real time — how decisions got made, where friction emerged, who stepped forward and who held back.
Those observations anchored the debrief. Rather than presenting theory about team development stages, facilitators drew directly on what had just happened in the room, connecting the group's own behaviour to the dynamics of high-performing teams. The conversation moved from what happened during the film-making to what it revealed about how this leadership team operates — and how they wanted to operate going forward.
The programme was delivered by a facilitation team of three, with energisers and framing deliberately varied from the previous year's Culture & Leadership workshop to keep the experience fresh for returning participants.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The AI Movie Making Challenge gave SATS India's leadership team a shared creative achievement early in their journey together — and, more importantly, a common reference point for talking about how they work. Teams experienced firsthand how quickly a group can align around a vision when trust is present, and how easily momentum stalls when it isn't.
The session opened up honest reflection on the culture the leadership team wanted to build, moving beyond abstract values into specific, observable practices. Participants left with a stronger sense of each other as people, not just functions, and with the beginnings of a shared language for the high-performance culture SATS India is working to establish as it grows.