1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
Haleon brought 120 people to Goa for its annual offsite with a clear, upbeat brief: fun, team bonding, and collaboration. An annual offsite carries a particular kind of pressure — it's the one event that gathers the whole group, and it's expected to deliver energy and genuine connection in equal measure.
The scale set the bar. Keeping 120 people fully engaged, across eight teams, means an activity with enough spectacle to fill the room and enough substance to leave collaboration as the takeaway rather than just a scoreboard. The natural risk with a large, competitive format is that it produces plenty of noise and rivalry but very little of the togetherness the offsite was actually for.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The Game of Thrones Catapult Challenge was built to resolve exactly that tension. Teams design and build catapults, then put them to the test — but the whole contest was staged in a kingdom format, with two kingdoms at war. The framing is the clever part: within each kingdom, separate teams have to collaborate to win a shared battle, while the two kingdoms compete against each other. Competition and collaboration run at the same time, and neither works without the other.
That structure is what makes it land for a bonding brief. Pure competition splits a room; pure collaboration can lack energy. The kingdom format harnesses the buzz of rivalry while forcing teams that would otherwise compete to align behind a common cause — which is a close mirror of how real organisations work, where internal groups must cooperate to compete in the wider market. The result is loud, fun, and genuinely collaborative all at once.
To set the tone, each kingdom opened by creating and performing its own war cry — a high-energy ritual that got 120 people loud, laughing, and bonded to their side before a single catapult was built.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The 120 participants were organised into eight teams, distributed across two warring kingdoms. Proceedings opened with the war cries — 20 to 30 minutes of each kingdom rallying itself, which set the energy for everything that followed. Teams then moved into designing and building their catapults, coordinating within their kingdom on strategy and execution before the battle itself.
Two facilitators ran the session, keeping eight teams and two kingdoms briefed, paced, and in sync across the 90-to-120-minute flow. Throughout, facilitators watched how the intra-kingdom collaboration held up under competitive pressure — whether teams within a kingdom genuinely pooled effort or quietly competed with their own allies. The debrief drew that out directly, connecting the kingdom dynamic back to Haleon's theme of collaboration: how the winning side was invariably the one that cooperated best internally, and what that says about competing successfully as one organisation.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The Game of Thrones Catapult Challenge gave Haleon's team a loud, high-energy demonstration of a subtle truth: you compete best when you collaborate first. Across two kingdoms and eight teams, 120 people experienced how shared purpose within a group beats individual rivalry — the collaboration the offsite was there to build, delivered through a genuinely fun contest.
For an annual offsite built on fun, bonding, and collaboration, the challenge delivered all three at once — and sent 120 people home with a war cry, a battle, and a shared understanding of what winning together actually takes.