When 23 colleagues from Kaplan Business School came together in Melbourne for their team building day, they arrived from four different states — Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales, and Victoria. Some had worked together for years without meeting in person. Some knew each other’s names but not their strengths. Some had never been in the same room.
Ben Bagshaw, General Manager of Kaplan Business School, organised the Urban Quest Melbourne CBD experience specifically to address this — 23 people who work for the same organisation but operate out of offices that are thousands of kilometres apart.
Three Cities, One Team
Niraj and Marissa flew in from Adelaide. Marcela came from Perth. Victoria was home territory. Within the first few minutes of the Urban Quest briefing, they were a team — not colleagues from different offices, but four people with a shared goal and a leaderboard to climb.
The strategy they landed on was immediate and specific:
“The first thing was communicating with each other, and then delegating the roles — because if everyone is doing the same thing at the same time, it doesn’t make sense. Divide and conquer.”
That decision — to split tasks rather than cluster around every challenge — is one of the key tactical choices Urban Quest teams make in the first ten minutes. Teams that figure it out early move faster. Teams that don’t tend to bottleneck at every challenge location.
What Each Person Brought
The divide-and-conquer approach only works if the division is based on actual strengths rather than assumptions. The Kaplan team figured that out quickly too:
“We all had our strengths. I knew all the shops. Alex knew all the movies. Marcela knew movies. And I was the dedicated typing person on the phone.”
That kind of rapid strength mapping — discovering in real time who is fast at what, who notices what others miss, who should be the team’s central communicator — is one of the specific outcomes Urban Quest’s challenge design produces. The variety of challenge types means different skills become valuable at different moments. The person who is fastest at recognising visual clues might struggle with a logic puzzle. The systematic thinker who cracks the hard clue might slow the team down on the speed challenges. The team learns each other’s capabilities under actual pressure rather than in a workshop.
“If It’s Fun, You Can Achieve Anything”
The Kaplan team’s verdict on the experience is the most concise summary of what Urban Quest produces that we’ve heard from any participant:
“If it’s fun, you can achieve anything. It’s understanding everyone’s strengths and exploring that.”
That observation — that fun is not the opposite of productive but the condition that makes genuine effort possible — is the argument for team building that most HR presentations take three slides to make. The Kaplan team arrived at it themselves, in real time, after winning.
What Carries Back to Work
The connection between the Urban Quest experience and workplace performance was explicit in the team’s reflection:
“It helped us build a strong connection between us, that will help us in the workplace. When we get back to work — a good team.”
For a geographically dispersed team that operates primarily through screens, that strong connection has a specific and practical value. Colleagues who have shared a competitive experience, discovered each other’s strengths under pressure, and won together carry a different understanding of each other into their next video call than colleagues who have only ever interacted professionally. The familiarity — the shared reference point — changes the texture of every subsequent interaction.
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Read what actually changes after a team building event →
Ben Bagshaw is the General Manager of Kaplan Business School. Urban Quest delivered a 23-person Melbourne CBD team building experience for Kaplan Business School, bringing together colleagues from offices in Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales, and Victoria.
