CASE STUDY
Helping Grant Thornton bring collaboration and psychological safety to life at a global leadership conference
SECTOR: Professional Services
AUDIENCE: Global leadership conference
GEOGRAPHY: Hilton Metropole, London
GROUP SIZE: 500+ delegates
FORMAT: 60-minute interactive plenary plus rolling breakout sessions over 3 days
PROGRAMME LENGTH: Multi-session conference engagement
CORE CHALLENGE
Helping leaders understand and practice collaboration and psychological safety in a way that felt engaging, practical and relevant to real workplace behaviour.
The Challenge
Grant Thornton knew that too many business conferences have a packed agenda, but little impact. The People team wanted Connect, the Grant Thornton global leadership conference, to feel different. They engaged Hoopla to create engaging experiences around their two key conference themes: collaboration and psychological safety.
The challenge was that both topics are easy to talk about in principle, but much harder to make tangible in practice. It is one thing to tell leaders that collaboration matters, or to define psychological safety on a slide. It is another to help people recognise what those behaviours look like in real workplace situations, spot what undermines them, and understand what they can do differently.
What Hoopla designed and delivered
Hoopla designed and delivered two bespoke engagements. A 60-minute interactive plenary, Improv Your Collaboration. This used interactive improvisation to explore collaboration in a way that felt energising, inclusive and directly relevant to leadership and team performance.
Alongside the plenary, Hoopla created a second strand of activity in People World, Grant Thornton’s breakout space. Over three days, we delivered rolling sessions on psychological safety using our Act/React™ methodology - a forum theatre-style learning experience designed to bring workplace behaviour to life.
Working with Grant Thornton’s People team, we wrote realistic and entertaining scenes based on recognisable workplace situations and behaviours, both good and bad. These scenes were then performed by Hoopla’s cast of actors in a custom-built set on site. In the session itself, the audience first watched a scene unfold, then analysed what the leader was doing that made the environment feel psychologically unsafe, before helping shape an improvised re-performance of the same scenario with better behaviours in place. The session closed with practical takeaways on how leaders can build psychological safety day to day.
This approach allowed delegates not just to hear about psychological safety, but to see what it looks like ‘in the wild.’ Further, audience participation was key. Instead of positioning delegates as passive observers, Hoopla invited them into the process. That made the learning more active and more memorable, while also reducing the distance between ‘interesting concept’ and ‘usable leadership practice.’
The Outcomes
The programme helped Grant Thornton create a conference experience that was both high-energy and high value.
Outcomes included:
A bespoke interactive plenary for a global audience of 500+ delegates
A multi-day breakout experience that kept engagement going beyond the main stage
Post-conference feedback showing that the interactive design helped keep people engaged throughout
‘I loved the psychological safety sessions and the final plenary. The feedback I heard was that it was a unique way of looking at the topic and communication overall. Thank you to Max, and the team for a job well done!’
— Parita Kuttappan
Director, Global People and Culture, Grant Thornton
Planning something similar?
If you want to bring leadership themes to life at conference scale in a way that is interactive, practical and memorable, get in touch.