1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
AXA operates in an industry being reshaped from every direction — new technology, shifting customer expectations, and a pace of change that asks people to keep learning while still delivering. AXA wanted an engaging, high-energy experience for 200 participants with a clear line of sight to three questions its people were grappling with: How do I handle rapid change in my business? Why is upskilling important today, and how do I do it? And how do I balance quality and speed at work?
The constraints were sharp: two hundred people in a single room, seated in clusters of ten, in a tight window of roughly two and a half hours straight after breakfast, with a debrief that had to land real reflection in just fifteen minutes using questions reviewed and approved by AXA in advance.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The Thought Bulb brought in Big 5 — a layered, table-based challenge built for large groups — delivered as a TTB Lite in-person programme. Its structure mirrors the working reality AXA wanted to explore: objectives that unlock one after another, each demanding a different skill, with the pressure of the clock ever present.
Objective 1 — Assemble the Board Game. Each table's first task was to put together the game they would be playing: a deliberate opening to organise quickly, divide the work, and agree on how pieces fit.
Objective 2 — City-Tech: Solve the 5 Codes. Teams entered City-Tech, where five codes stood between them and the next stage. Each demanded a different kind of thinking — logic, observation, pattern-spotting, lateral leaps. Tables that shared information moved fastest.
Objective 3 — Build a Functional Tech Buddy. Using a kit, each team had to assemble a working Tech Buddy confirmed as functional by a facilitator. That single requirement brought the quality-versus-speed tension to life — rush the build and it fails the check; overthink it and the clock runs out. Every completed Tech Buddy was handed back to AXA to live on in the office.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The first ten to fifteen minutes were all about energy: the room was warmed up with music and movement coming straight out of breakfast. Teams were formed at random, so colleagues who don't usually work together ended up around the same table.
Each table received a briefing, a kit, and a set of roles to allocate. From there, the three objectives ran back to back. The cluster-seating layout — around ten people per table — kept every group self-contained, so a room of two hundred never felt like an audience. Facilitators moved between tables to verify each Tech Buddy before a team could claim completion.
The programme closed with a focused 15-minute debrief. Three slides, one per theme, with questions approved in advance by AXA. Instead of a facilitator lecturing from the front, volunteers from the room stepped up to answer — connecting what had just happened at their tables to their own work.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
Big 5 gave AXA something difficult to achieve at this scale: two hundred people fully engaged at the same time, and a shared experience that translated directly into conversation about the organisation's real priorities.
Scale without spectators. With around twenty self-contained tables, every one of the 200 participants was hands-on for the full programme. New connections across the business. Random teaming placed people alongside colleagues they don't usually work with. Themes lived, then discussed — change, upskilling and the quality–speed balance were the very experiences participants had just worked through together. A volunteer-led debrief meant the insights came from AXA's own people, in their own words. And every completed Tech Buddy returned to the AXA office as a physical keepsake of the morning.
