Team building days don’t always go to plan. Sometimes Melbourne’s weather has other ideas.
That was the situation for Medibank‘s SAP Practice team — 80 people booked for Urban Quest’s outdoor Ocean’s Eleven experience in Melbourne’s CBD. Heavy rain on the day made the outdoor format impractical. Rather than cancelling or postponing, Medibank and Urban Quest made a quick decision together: switch to Black Friday — the fully indoor version of the Urban Quest experience set within Melbourne Central and Emporium.
The transition was seamless. The schedule held. And the team that came out the other side wasn’t just dry — they were connected in a way they hadn’t been before.
Who Was in the Room
The Medibank SAP Practice team is a group that works together professionally but doesn’t always work together directly. New staff had joined. People knew each other’s names but not necessarily each other’s strengths, communication styles, or personalities outside of a work context.
That’s the social dynamic that makes a team building event genuinely useful rather than merely enjoyable — and it’s the dynamic the Medibank team described clearly in their interview.
“We’ve got new staff and we haven’t really worked together at work. So it was really nice to just — you know — figure it out together.”
“Working with team members that we don’t actually work with directly. It was really nice to interact, to meet each other in person and to chat in person.”
That second observation — “to meet each other in person” — is a reminder of how much professional interaction now happens through screens. People who technically work on the same team can go weeks without a face-to-face conversation. An Urban Quest event collapses that distance in two hours.
What the Indoor Format Produced
The switch from outdoor to indoor didn’t change what the experience produced. It changed the setting.
Black Friday runs through Melbourne Central and Emporium using the same smartphone-guided challenge platform as Ocean’s Eleven — the same cryptic clues, the same augmented reality elements, the same competitive team format. The challenges require genuine collaborative thinking rather than physical endurance, which means the indoor environment is equally suited to producing the outcomes that matter.
The Medibank team noticed this directly:
“It’s not going to be an awkward ‘Hey, I have no idea who you are.’ It’s more like — ‘Hey, this is more interacting.'”
“Makes you think a little laterally and work as a team a bit more — as opposed to almost working by yourself.”
The lateral thinking observation is worth noting specifically. Lateral thinking is one of the capabilities that’s hardest to develop through standard workplace interaction — meetings tend to reward convergent thinking, quick decisions, and established frameworks. A challenge that requires approaching problems from unexpected angles, where the obvious answer is often wrong, activates a different mode of thinking. And doing that alongside colleagues who are also surprised and uncertain creates a different kind of social connection than collaborating on familiar work tasks does.
Inclusive by Design
One of the most consistent observations Urban Quest events produce across corporate groups is that the format includes people who might drift to the margins in other activities. The Medibank team noticed this too:
“You don’t get bored in by playing the game. Everybody — yeah. It’s inclusive for everyone.”
That inclusivity isn’t accidental. Urban Quest’s challenge structure requires multiple types of input simultaneously — navigation, clue reading, problem solving, and answer verification — which means different team members contribute at different moments. No single skill set dominates. The person who is quiet in meetings might be the one who spots the pattern in a cryptic clue. The confident extrovert might need their quieter teammate to decode an augmented reality puzzle. The format makes contributions visible and necessary from everyone.
The Weather Contingency — What It Means for Organisers
For HR managers and event organisers, the Medibank story answers a specific and common concern: what happens to our event if the weather turns?
Urban Quest’s answer is built into the product design. Every Ocean’s Eleven and Questbusters booking includes Black Friday as a same-day weather contingency — no rebooking, no additional cost, no disruption to the schedule. The decision to switch can be made on the morning of the event based on the forecast.
Medibank’s 80-person group made that switch, and the event ran exactly as planned. The scale — 80 participants — is well within Black Friday’s operational capacity, and the indoor Melbourne Central and Emporium setting handles large groups comfortably across its multiple levels and open spaces.
☀️ Weather contingency: All Ocean’s Eleven and Questbusters bookings include Black Friday as a same-day indoor switch at no extra cost. Decide on the morning based on the forecast — no rebooking required.
What Changed Afterwards
The measure of a team building event isn’t what happens during it — it’s what’s different when people return to work. The Medibank team’s own words capture this best:
“You’re already working with somebody else — I’ll let her know. Just have fun.”
The person recommending Urban Quest to a colleague who hadn’t attended is the most organic possible proof of value. Not prompted, not asked — just a natural conversation that happened because the experience was worth sharing.
Explore Urban Quest’s corporate team building formats →
Learn more about Black Friday — our indoor weather-proof experience →
See results from our clients →
Medibank’s SAP Practice team of 80 participants ran Urban Quest’s Black Friday indoor experience at Melbourne Central and Emporium following a last-minute weather switch from the outdoor Ocean’s Eleven format. Urban Quest has delivered team building events for Medibank across multiple cohorts.
