Category: Corporate

There is no stronger endorsement Urban Quest can receive than the one that brought Matt Stirling and 70 Melbourne Airport colleagues to the Docklands on a Friday afternoon. The people who recommended Urban Quest weren't event planners or external consultants. They were employees who had done it before — and loved it enough to suggest it to their Executive General Manager as the wrap-up activity for a major company strategy day.

That first Urban Quest event, run for Melbourne Airport's finance and commercial team, was covered in an earlier article on this blog. What happened next tells you everything you need to know about how Urban Quest generates repeat business: participants walked away from that smaller CBD experience and kept talking about it. When Melbourne Airport began planning their broader strategy day at Marvel Stadium, the recommendation came from within.

Matt Stirling is Executive General Manager of Planning, Infrastructure and Environment at Melbourne Airport. He joined the 'Questbusters' experience in Docklands as the CEO-equivalent decision-maker for his division — and agreed to be interviewed on camera at the finish line, at The Hof Downtown in Docklands, while his team was still celebrating around him.

Why Melbourne Airport Chose Urban Quest for a New Team

The strategy day context matters here. This wasn't a routine social event or an end-of-year celebration. It was the wrap-up of a serious planning and strategy day at Marvel Stadium — a day designed to align a newly formed team around shared goals and ways of working. The team building activity that followed needed to deliver something the presentations and workshops couldn't: actual human connection between people who were still finding their footing with each other.

Matt was direct about what the group was hoping to get from the experience:

"We just wanted an opportunity for the teams to really connect together, have a bit of fun, have a bit of competition — but also a new team coming together and actually connecting with each other, to collaborate and do some problem solving, to help a bit of forming of a new team."

That phrase — "a bit of forming of a new team" — is worth sitting with. It's the honest language of someone who understands that teams don't form through org charts or workshops. They form through shared experience, specifically through the kind of low-stakes but genuinely engaging challenge that lets people show different sides of themselves than they bring to a meeting room.

The 'Questbusters' Docklands format was a natural fit. Starting from Marvel Stadium — where the strategy day had been held — and finishing at The Hof Downtown, the route made geographic sense for the group. No buses required. No travel to an unfamiliar venue. The whole afternoon flowed directly out of the working day into something entirely different.

What a 70-Person Group Looks Like on the Day

Running a team building experience for 70 people is a different logistical proposition than running one for 20. The 'Questbusters' Docklands experience — which uses Urban Quest's smartphone-guided platform, with teams navigating the Docklands precinct through a series of challenges — scales to this group size without losing the intimacy that makes the format work. Teams of four to five people compete independently, which means that even within a group of 70, every individual is in a small enough unit to have a real role and real stakes.

For a newly formed team specifically, this matters. In a group activity where the whole cohort moves together, it's easy for quieter participants to disappear into the crowd. In the Urban Quest format, there is nowhere to hide — and as Matt observed, that's exactly what the day revealed.

What the Experience Revealed About the Team

Matt's answer to what he noticed about his team during the experience is one of the most candid observations Urban Quest has heard from a participant at any level:

"Some people surprised me, other people were exactly as I suspected. It showed that some natural leaders who I didn't think were leaders really rose to the top — and you just learn a little bit about each other through the process."

This is the outcome that structured, competitive team experiences are designed to produce — and it's the outcome that a day of presentations and breakout sessions almost never delivers. The competitive format, the time pressure, the unfamiliar environment, and the requirement to make real decisions together strip away the professional personas people bring to a conference room. What emerges is more accurate and more useful than anything a personality assessment or a facilitated workshop can surface.

The phrase "natural leaders who I didn't think were leaders" is particularly significant at the executive level. For a senior leader building a new team, understanding who the real influencers and decision-makers are — as distinct from who holds the formal titles — is operationally valuable information. Urban Quest surfaces it in two hours in a way that would otherwise take months of working together to reveal.

The Energy at the Finish Line

The 'Questbusters' Docklands experience finishes at The Hof Downtown, Urban Quest's partner venue in Docklands, where teams gather for the scores announcement and awards ceremony before transitioning into drinks, meals, and the kind of relaxed conversation that follows a shared challenge well done.

Matt described the energy at that point in terms that anyone who has been to a successful Urban Quest finish line will recognise immediately:

"Everyone's finished. They're a bit tired, but they're also on Cloud 9. It was a really good energy and a great way to wrap up what was a great strategy day for us."

That specific combination — physical tiredness alongside genuine elation — is the hallmark of an experience that asked something real of its participants. It's different from the slightly awkward energy that follows a team dinner where people are just being polite, and it's different from the post-conference fatigue of a long day in a meeting room. People who have competed, collaborated, and succeeded together feel something specific when they cross the finish line. It shows up in exactly the way Matt described.

From Strategy Day to Everyday Work

The question of whether a team building experience carries over into how people actually work is the one that sceptical HR managers and senior leaders always ask — and rightly so. Matt's answer is worth reading carefully:

"Kicking off with strategy and then cementing it with connection and an experience like that helps people be more aligned and to take that back to their day-to-day jobs in the office when we're all back to the busy day-to-day."

The sequencing he describes is deliberate and important. The strategy day at Marvel Stadium established the direction. The Urban quest team building experience then gave the team a shared reference point — a memory of working together under pressure, of discovering things about each other, of winning or losing as a unit — that they carry back into the office. That shared reference point is what changes how people interact when they return to their desks. It's not the activity itself that drives alignment. It's the memory of the activity, and what it revealed, that does.

What Makes Urban Quest Different at Scale

When asked to compare Urban Quest to other team building activities Melbourne Airport had run previously, Matt was precise about what distinguished it:

"This was a really different and unique team building experience. It was all reasonably well contained and accessible. We're able to do it in the city — something quite different, unique, but accessible and easy and fun."

"Accessible and easy" is a phrase that resonates particularly for event organisers managing large groups. The Urban Quest Docklands experience requires no special equipment, no travel to an external venue, and no complex briefing process. Participants arrive, receive their instructions, and the platform guides everything from there. For 70 people following a full day of meetings, that frictionlessness is a genuine feature — not just a logistical convenience but a meaningful part of why the energy at the end of the day was what it was.

Would Matt Recommend Urban Quest?

His recommendation was framed not just as personal endorsement but as practical advice for other senior leaders considering a similar format:

"A really good way to get a large group together to cross-pollinate across teams, to drive a bit of competition, and to learn a bit about each other. A really good opportunity."

"Cross-pollinate across teams" is exactly the language used by organisations managing the complexity of bringing different functions and reporting lines into a single cohort. It's also the specific challenge that Urban Quest addresses most effectively — because the team allocations cut across existing reporting structures, placing people with colleagues they don't usually work alongside and asking them to perform together under genuine time pressure.

For Melbourne Airport, the outcome of that cross-pollination was visible immediately. For the teams that recommended Urban Quest to their EGM in the first place, it had already been proven at a smaller scale. The fact that those recommendations were trusted enough to shape the strategy day activity for a 70-person group is, in itself, the endorsement that matters most.

If you're planning a strategy day, conference wrap-up, or large-group corporate event in Melbourne and considering Questbusters in Docklands, you might also find the article on how to choose the right Urban Quest format for your team useful for matching the experience to your group's specific objectives.

Matt Stirling is Executive General Manager of Planning, Infrastructure and Environment at Melbourne Airport. Urban Quest delivered a Docklands team building experience for 70 Melbourne Airport staff as the wrap-up to their strategy day at Marvel Stadium.

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