1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
EY GDS brought 30 senior leaders together for two full days in Sri Lanka. The seniority of the room shaped everything about the design.
Senior leaders are a demanding audience for experiential work, and reasonably so. They have sat through the exercises. They can identify the intended lesson from the briefing and, if the activity is thin, spend the rest of it being politely cooperative while learning nothing. Anything that feels like a game with a moral attached loses them immediately.
What holds a room like this is an experience that shows them something about their own behaviour they didn't expect — under conditions they can't manage their way around.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
Relay Radio was placed on Day One, and it works on senior leaders for a specific reason: it targets the thing they are most confident they are already good at.
A vision holder envisions a model and expects an exact replica. The vision passes to managers, who relay it to frontliners doing the building — with all three layers in separate locations, connected only through designated channels. Any misinterpretation at any level shows up in the final build, and there is no arguing with it. The model either matches or it doesn't.
For people who spend their working lives communicating strategy downward through exactly this structure, the experience is pointed. They discover that the distortion isn't caused by anyone being careless — it's caused by each layer filling a small gap with a reasonable assumption, and the assumptions compounding. That is a recognisable description of how a strategy arrives at the frontline looking nothing like what was decided in the room. Relay Radio makes it happen in twenty minutes, with the evidence sitting on a table.
The activity develops active listening, clear communication, information sharing, reducing assumptions, and working under pressure — and empathy, because you cannot brief someone well until you understand what they can and cannot see from where they stand.
Day One ran Speed Networking, the Pyramid Challenge, and Relay Radio; Day Two followed with Cosmic Laser and Solar Fusion.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The 30 participants were assigned roles across the three layers — vision holders, managers, and frontliners — positioned apart and restricted to their designated channels. Team sizes were kept flexible to suit the group.
Two facilitators ran the session, observing as the vision travelled down the chain: who verified rather than assumed, who noticed ambiguity in their own instruction before passing it on, who protected clarity when the clock tightened.
Speed Networking opened Day One, so participants arrived at Relay Radio having already connected across the room. Each leader worked from a printed workbook throughout the two days, in keeping with the learning-programme format, giving them somewhere to capture reflections as they went rather than trying to hold two days of insight in their heads.
The debrief drew on what facilitators had just watched rather than on theory — which is the only kind of debrief that works with an audience this experienced.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
Relay Radio gave EY GDS's senior leaders a compressed, unarguable demonstration of something they manage every day at full scale. Teams watched a clear vision degrade across three layers — not through carelessness, but through the ordinary accumulation of reasonable assumptions — and left with a sharper sense of what verification actually costs versus what its absence costs.
Across two days in Sri Lanka, the workshop gave 30 senior leaders a shared language for how communication succeeds and fails inside their own organisation — grounded in something they had done rather than something they'd been told.