1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
Andritz runs a Catalyst Journey for its fresh graduates, built on a promise the organisation makes to itself: together we commit, together we deliver. The journey maps out the values that carry a new joiner from arrival to impact — sense of urgency, collaboration, forward thinking, growth mindset, learning agility.
The difficulty with values like these is that they read beautifully on a wall and mean very little until someone has felt the cost of ignoring one. Andritz wanted their graduates to connect over theme-based experiential activities, build synergy, and network with each other — with four outcomes named specifically: ownership and accountability, big picture thinking, communication, and collaboration.
The audience raised the stakes. Fresh graduates arrive technically capable and almost entirely untested on the things that actually determine whether a team delivers. Most have never had to discover that they communicated badly — because in university, the work was theirs alone, and clarity was optional.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
Radio Relay was selected as one of three activities across the day, and it carries a specific piece of the theme: Together We Commit by communicating effectively.
The setup is deliberately unforgiving. A CEO envisions a model and expects an exact replica. The vision passes to managers, who relay it to frontliners doing the building — with all three roles in separate locations, connected only through designated channels. Any misinterpretation at any level shows up in the final build. There is no hiding it; the model either matches or it doesn't, and everyone can see which.
For a graduate cohort, this is the lesson landing at exactly the right moment. Participants discover the gap between what they meant and what arrived — not as feedback from a manager six months in, but as a lopsided replica sitting on a table in front of them. They learn that the failure is rarely one bad communicator; it's a chain where each link dropped a small assumption, and the compounding did the rest. The activity develops active listening, clear communication, information sharing, reducing assumptions, and working effectively under pressure — and it develops empathy, because you cannot brief someone well until you understand what they can and can't see from where they stand.
Radio Relay ran alongside the Cricket Auction League (Together We Commit by making collective decisions) and The Smart City Challenge (Together We Deliver because everyone owns the outcome), each mapped to a different facet of the theme.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The day opened with energisers to loosen a room of people who mostly didn't know each other, then moved into three activity blocks of 90–120 minutes with a break between, closing with a consolidated debrief.
For Radio Relay, participants were assigned roles as visionaries, managers, and frontliners, positioned apart and restricted to their designated channels. Facilitators observed as the vision moved down the chain — watching who checked understanding versus who assumed it, who asked a second question, who noticed the ambiguity in their own instruction before it travelled.
Name tags were used throughout so facilitators could track individual contribution across the day rather than just team output. The debrief drew directly on those observations, connecting what participants had just done to the Catalyst Journey values, and closed with a digital scenario-based assessment measuring collaboration and growth mindset. Andritz received a post-programme report summarising facilitator observations of participant behaviour and performance.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
Andritz's graduate cohort left with the Catalyst Journey values grounded in something they had lived rather than been told. Radio Relay made the cost of imprecise communication visible in a way no briefing could: teams watched their own assumptions compound down the chain and arrive as a model that didn't match the vision.
For a cohort at the start of their careers at Andritz, the day did what the theme asks of them: it showed that committing together and delivering together are the same discipline, practised in the space between what one person means and what another person hears.