1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
Okta runs a monthly engagement session for its global team, and the brief was refreshingly direct: make it fun. No transformation agenda, no learning objectives to hit — just an hour that people across time zones would actually be glad they joined.
Simple briefs are rarely easy ones. A virtual session with 50 people has to earn attention it cannot assume; there is no room to hide a slow start, and anything that drags loses the room to their inboxes.
There was also a technical constraint that mattered more than most. Okta is a security company, and a previous programme run by a different vendor had faltered when the game link failed against their firewall. Whatever we ran had to work — first time, without whitelisting requests, without an IT ticket, without twenty minutes of the hour lost to troubleshooting.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The Comic Strip Challenge was chosen with both constraints in view. Teams create an original comic strip together — building a narrative panel by panel, making creative calls quickly, and landing a punchline within a tight window.
It suits a distributed group well. Comics are visual and immediate, so nothing depends on audio quality or accent or bandwidth. The format has room for every kind of contributor — the person with the idea, the one who can draw, the one who sharpens the joke — and a 50-person room breaks naturally into small teams where nobody can quietly disappear. Most importantly, it produces something at the end: a finished strip the whole room can see and laugh at together, which is the moment that makes a virtual session feel like an event rather than a meeting.
Technically, it ran on infrastructure Okta's environment already trusted — Zoom Whiteboard and Google Slides, no external game link, no whitelisting required. Our team tested the setup against their environment in advance rather than discovering the problem live.
The Comic Strip Challenge was the first of a three-programme package Okta booked for their monthly engagement series.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The 50 participants joined over Zoom and were divided into mixed teams — deliberately cutting across function and geography so that people worked with colleagues they don't encounter day to day. Teams were briefed and moved straight into creating, with a hard one-hour clock running.
A team of three to four facilitators ran the session, moving between breakouts to keep energy high, unstick teams, and hold the pace. That ratio matters at this scale: with 50 people across breakout rooms, a single facilitator inevitably leaves groups waiting, and in a one-hour session, waiting is the thing that kills it.
Teams worked through concept, panels, and punchline, then brought their finished strips back to the main room for a full-group reveal.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The session did exactly what Okta asked of it. Fifty people spread across the globe spent an hour making each other laugh, and left with a set of comic strips their team had produced from nothing.
Just as importantly, the hour was an hour. Nothing broke, nothing needed a whitelisting exception, and no time was lost to a link that wouldn't open — a meaningful contrast to their previous experience and a non-trivial win inside a security company's environment. The mixed teams put colleagues together who rarely cross paths, and the reveal turned individual efforts into a shared moment for the whole global group.
Okta booked the Comic Strip Challenge as part of a three-programme package for their monthly engagement series.