The Same Work, Without the Bunker
A week ago I wrote about Hvis Krigen Kommer, the day we spend with teams sixty metres underground in a Cold War bunker in Nordjylland.
Since then, more than one person has asked a fair question: what if a team can't get there? What if they don't have the day, or the budget doesn't stretch to travel and perhaps extend the day with an overnight stay?
The honest answer is that the bunker is not the point.
It is an exceptional setting, and a very good way of getting to the point. But it is one way among several.
The setting can change. The work doesn't.
Each person completes an individual CliftonStrengths assessment, Gallup's tool for identifying the things they naturally do best, followed by a feedback session. I then facilitate a debrief that connects those individual strengths to how the team actually behaves together under pressure.
The team leaves with a Team Grid, an overview of everyone's strengths side by side. It becomes a working reference: when each person is likely to be at their best, when they're more likely to struggle, what they need from the team in that moment, and what their colleagues can reliably count on them for.
REGAN Vest gives us those real conditions in a particularly vivid form, a live scenario, decisions under pressure, limited time and nowhere to hide.
But you don't need a Cold War bunker to create a useful version of those conditions. A well-built roleplay, run in an ordinary meeting room over an afternoon, is a different experience, but it can put a team under enough pressure to reveal some of the same behaviours. The aim isn't to recreate the bunker. It is to create enough of a shared experience for the team to have an honest conversation afterwards about what happened, why it happened and what it tells them about how they work together.
The assessment gives us a language for individual strengths. The scenario, whichever form it takes, gives us behaviour to observe. The debrief is where those two things meet and turn into something the team can actually use.
And there is an element of EQ in that work too, understanding yourself more clearly, recognising what is happening for the people around you, and noticing how different strengths interact when the pressure rises. The aim isn't simply to understand individual strengths, but to develop the team's ability to read itself and respond to each other more effectively.
When there's time in the schedule, I'm also happy to bring LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® into the day, on top of the bunker or the roleplay, not instead of them.
Building with your hands works differently from talking things through. It shifts the way people think about a problem, and that often brings out more creative answers and a more playful energy in the room.
That is also why I keep coming back to some of Gallup's research on engagement.
The point of this work isn't simply to create a memorable team experience. It is to help a team understand what is getting in the way of working well together, and what might help it perform better.
Gallup's research, based on more than 3.3 million employees across more than 100,000 teams, finds that teams in the top quartile for engagement have 23% higher profitability and 18% higher sales productivity than teams in the bottom quartile. In low-turnover organisations, top-quartile teams also have 51% lower turnover.
Those figures make a strong case for paying attention to engagement. But they don't tell you what is happening inside any particular team.
And that is where the interesting work starts.
One team may be struggling because people don't see opportunities to develop. Another may be dealing with burnout or a lack of trust. Somewhere else, a stalled transformation may have less to do with the strategy itself and more to do with communication, relationships or how quickly people adapt when circumstances change.
The point is that the problem is rarely identical from one team to the next.
A survey can tell you where to look. It doesn't necessarily tell you what conversation this particular team needs to have next.
You need a consistent way of understanding what is happening, and then the judgement to know which thread to explore more deeply, with this particular team, at this particular moment.
That is the part of the work I care about most, whichever format it takes.
The bunker is memorable, and for teams who can make the day happen, I would still recommend it without hesitation. But the CliftonStrengths assessment, the shared experience and the debrief that follows are the real engine, and they travel well.
The bunker is the setting.
The real work is what the team discovers about itself.
And what people walk away with tends to outlast the day itself.
Teams keep using it afterwards: a clearer sense of how to collaborate, a better read on each other's energy so that friction doesn't quietly turn into draining conflict, and a working sense of who to pair with on what. Once a team understands its own strengths well enough, combining them stops being guesswork.
The Team Grid gives them something concrete to return to when they need to work out how best to use the strengths already around the table.
If a roleplay in your own office can create the conditions for that same honest conversation, that is a completely legitimate way to get there.
If you're weighing up which version makes sense for your team, the easiest thing is simply to have a conversation.
You can reach me at authenticleaders@outlook.dk.
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