The need
The company was brand new and setting out to compete nationally against the established players in used-car retail. To do it, they'd poached five exceptional executives from big-name competitors. Every one of them was genuinely great — and that was part of the problem. Working virtually, never side by side, each protected their turf, fought to look better than the others, and treated the team as a contest. Their focus was in exactly the wrong place: on each other, not on building the business. The CEO came to us asking for an intervention.
The outcome to engineer: dissolve the egos, replace the turf wars with genuine bond, and reset the team around a shared sense of priority and purpose. The industry was vehicles — so the entire retreat was built around vehicles. Every element below exists to serve that one function.
Act one · A reason to talk instead of fight
They were told only that they were flying to Denver. We booked each executive onto the earliest possible flight from their home city, with a long layover engineered into the route. Waiting in each airport was a hired actor, briefed on that specific executive's profile and personality, with instructions to spark a strange, vivid, completely random encounter — and to end it by handing over a sealed envelope with their next gate inside.
It was obviously a setup, and that was the point. When the five finally converged, they had something to do other than posture: compare notes. "Wait — what happened to you? That's ridiculous. That's amazing." For the first time, they shared an experience instead of competing through one.
Act two · The homework, and what it exposed
In Denver we paired them up and handed out far more homework than anyone could finish on the flight home — and they had real jobs demanding attention too. Most chose their inboxes over the assignment. That choice was the lesson.
When we'd interviewed their employees beforehand, one theme dominated: no clear priorities. No one knew what mattered most, so people worked on whatever they worked on — friction everywhere, important things missed, almost no direction from the top. The homework quietly recreated exactly that experience for the executives themselves. They were about to feel what their own teams felt every day.
Act three · The bus, and the reason
In Los Angeles we collected their homework and took their luggage. We handed them locker keys, an address, a 1:00 deadline, and a rule: the whole team, together, had to carry everything in those lockers there — using only public buses. The lockers were loaded with deliberately miserable cargo: a half-full five-gallon water jug, an eight-foot duffel of blankets that took two people, a rolling case full of electronics. Three bus transfers, hours of hauling. They arrived furious.
We sat them down and asked if they wanted to know why. Then we played a video: a single mother of three in an LA food desert, no car, who takes the bus with her kids and hauls everything they need to live — exactly what the team had just done — just to buy groceries. The room went quiet. The anger turned to something else entirely.
"They walked in furious. They watched the video and felt awful. Then we told them what their effort had earned — and they got furious all over again. Every emotion was deliberate. Emotion is motion."
Act four · You get what you put in
Then the twist: we'd graded the homework. Based on the little they'd actually done, the team had collectively earned $2,378. They had sixty minutes to find a vehicle online for no more than that — because that was the effort they'd put in, and that was what it bought. The protest was immediate and universal: "If you'd told us what the homework was for, we'd have done all of it." Which was precisely what their employees had been saying about priorities all along. The lesson landed because they'd lived it.
Act five · The desert that wasn't a resort
A shuttle took them to a private jet and flew them toward a five-star golf resort in Death Valley — or so they were told. Their luggage was headed there; they'd just take a quick excursion first. Jeeps were waiting on the tarmac. The "quick excursion" became two days stranded high on a desert pass, with only the blankets and gear they'd hauled all day, a little food, and each other. It was a constructed scenario from start to finish — built so that five rivals would have no choice but to depend on one another.
They never set foot in the resort. They came out filthy, exhausted, and bonded in a way no conference room could manufacture.
Act six · The reveal
Back at the strip mall, a vehicle waited under a reveal blanket. We pulled it off — and it wasn't the bargain car they'd found. It was a minivan, provided through the company's own program that put a family who could never otherwise afford one into a reliable vehicle, subsidized by its other customers. This was the very first recipient: the single mother of three from the video. And they weren't done.
We split the exhausted team into three and sent them to a grocery store, a toy store, and a general store with one hour to fill that van — food, household basics, toys for the kids. Then we drove it to her home, unannounced. She came outside, saw it, and broke down. And five ego-driven executives stood in her driveway hugging each other, crying, and playing with her kids. Every shred of turf-protection was simply gone.
The result
That night, showered and rested at last, the team debriefed over dinner and the next morning did the real work: deciding what would be different, and — crucially — building their own methodology to make sure they never reverted to who they'd been. We tracked the new behaviors with our behavioral habit tracker for the following 30 days.
By day 30, teaming behaviors toward one another had improved 178%. They said it felt like a completely different team. They picked up the phone and called each other. They stopped avoiding, stopped backstabbing, started pulling the same direction. A line had been drawn in the sand — and it held.
Client identity anonymized. Scenario details shared with permission; some specifics generalized to protect the client and individuals involved.