1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
HSI brought a large group — around 125 to 130 people — to Udaipur for two days, with a clear set of intentions: fun team building, collaboration, communication, and big picture thinking.
That last one is where large groups usually come undone. A gathering of 130 naturally fragments into teams, and teams naturally start competing. The energy that competition produces is real, but it pulls directly against big-picture thinking — the moment a group of that size splits into rival camps, everyone optimises for their own table and the wider goal quietly disappears. HSI wanted the collaboration to extend across the whole room, not just within each cluster, which is a genuinely harder thing to engineer at scale.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The Lost Dutchman was chosen for Day Two because it targets exactly that fault line. It's a strategy simulation in which teams plan an expedition, manage resources, and make decisions across a series of rounds — but the scoring holds a quiet trap. Teams instinctively play to beat each other, then discover that the real optimum required cooperation between teams, not just within them. The best collective result was available the whole time; most groups only see it in hindsight.
For HSI's brief, that structure is close to ideal. It delivers the fun and the competitive energy up front, then uses the debrief to reveal how a room full of capable teams left value on the table by defining "winning" too narrowly. Big picture thinking stops being an abstract value on a slide and becomes a concrete, slightly uncomfortable realisation the group arrives at together — which is the version that actually sticks.
The Lost Dutchman closed a two-day arc that opened with Speed Networking and the Million Pixels Challenge on Day One — the latter itself a large-canvas collaboration where separate teams' pieces only make sense as a whole, priming the big-picture theme that Lost Dutchman then drove home.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
Day One opened with Speed Networking to get 130 people connected across the room rather than clustered among familiar faces, followed after lunch by the Million Pixels Challenge. Day Two gave The Lost Dutchman the clear runway of the first half.
Participants worked in teams through the planning and decision rounds, weighing resources and strategy under a competitive frame that felt entirely natural. Facilitators observed how the room organised itself — whether teams treated each other as rivals or as potential collaborators, and how they responded when the scoring logic started to reveal itself.
The debrief drew directly on what had just happened across the room, connecting the simulation's outcome to HSI's themes: how communication across teams (not just within them) changes results, and what big picture thinking actually costs a group that defaults to local competition. Sequencing Lost Dutchman after Million Pixels meant participants met the same lesson twice from different angles, and made the connection themselves.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The Lost Dutchman gave HSI's group of 130 a shared, memorable demonstration of how narrowly-defined competition leaves collective value unclaimed. Teams experienced the gap between winning their own round and achieving the best result available to the room as a whole.
Across two days in Udaipur, the programme moved a large group from competing in clusters to thinking as one room — closing on a lesson about big-picture collaboration that a group of 130 could feel rather than just be told.