1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
Mercer set an unusual logistical brief: run the same programme at the same time in two different cities — 40 people in Gurgaon, 40 in Mumbai — as a single, unified experience rather than two disconnected events. The focus areas were change agility and communication, and the intention was for both groups to feel part of one shared programme despite being 1,400 kilometres apart.
That geography is the whole challenge. It's straightforward to run two separate sessions; it's much harder to make two cities feel like one room. The risk is that you end up with two parallel events that happen to share a name — same content, no shared experience. Mercer wanted the opposite: a genuine sense that both groups had been through something together. On top of that, the twin themes had to land cleanly in both venues, delivered by separate facilitation teams, with enough consistency that the shared debrief actually made sense.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The Columbus Challenge was chosen because it puts change agility at the centre of the experience. Framed as an expedition into the unknown, teams set a goal, plan a route, and allocate limited resources — then must adapt as conditions shift and the plan meets reality. It's a direct, felt lesson in agility: the teams that succeed aren't those with the most perfect initial plan, but those that adjust fastest when the unexpected arrives. Communication runs right through it, since a team can only adapt together if information moves cleanly under pressure.
The design's real cleverness was in the close. Rather than two separate debriefs, both cities were connected virtually for a single shared debrief — Gurgaon and Mumbai in the same conversation at the same time. That turned a logistical constraint into the programme's signature: 80 people who had just done the same challenge in two cities compared notes live, discovering that the lessons about agility and communication held true across both rooms. The change-agility theme was reinforced by the very format — two locations, one experience, adapting technology to bridge the gap.
The Columbus Challenge was paired with the Big 5 Challenge in each city, giving both groups a consistent two-activity flow.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
Two facilitation teams ran the programme in lockstep — one in Gurgaon, one in Mumbai — delivering the same activities on the same schedule so the two cities stayed in sync through the day. In each location, participants worked in teams (five to six for Columbus, four to five for Big 5) through the plan-and-execute cycle, with facilitators observing how teams set their course, allocated resources, and adapted when conditions changed.
The programmes were deliberately paced so both cities arrived at the debrief together. The two groups were then connected virtually, and the closing debrief was run jointly — facilitators in both locations drawing out the themes of change agility and communication while participants across the two cities shared what they'd experienced. Coordinating a synchronised virtual debrief across two venues took careful setup, but it was what delivered the "one programme, two cities" experience Mercer was after.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The Columbus Challenge gave Mercer's two-city cohort a genuinely shared experience of change agility — not just as a theme inside the activity, but embodied in a programme that spanned two locations and united them in a single live debrief. Eighty people across Gurgaon and Mumbai came away having done something together.
As a logistically ambitious two-city programme delivered as one unified experience, the day did exactly what Mercer set out to achieve — proof that with the right design, distance doesn't have to mean disconnection.