Leave a measurable dent in how people actually show up (client )

I used to think our leadership off sites were pretty good.

We brought in smart facilitators, ran through well-designed models, and everyone left with action plans that looked great in the final slide deck. Then Monday happened, and the real world quietly undid most of it. Behaviour shifted a little, for a little while, then snapped back under pressure.

Our experience with Jenson8 was the first time I saw a team workshop leave a measurable dent in how people actually show up for each other.

Walking into theheadset moment

I run a large, cross-functional team spread across markets and business lines. We’d been wrestling with familiar, messy issues: siloed behaviour, cautious decision-making, and meetings where the most senior voice in the room quietly determined the outcome.

So when we bookedJenson8, I expected another clever simulation with a VR twist. What we got felt more like dropping my leadership team into a live case study written specifically about our dysfunctions – only in a different world.

We put on the headsets, and suddenly people who normally sit at the board table were negotiating under time pressure, misreading signals, over controlling, under listening, and trying to “win” as individuals within a shared problem. In other words: exactly what they do on a tough Tuesday, only visible, recordable, and impossible to gloss over.

The moment the model meets the mess

What impressed me wasn’t just the tech; it was how academically grounded the whole experience was.

Underneath the fun and chaos, the scenario was clearly built on real theory – team effectiveness research, social psychology, and behavioural science. You could see echoes of:

• Teamship vs. leadership: the shift from  heroic individuals to shared responsibility and mutual accountability.
• Psychological safety: who spoke, who held   back, and how quickly the environment either encouraged or shut down dissent.
• Cognitive bias and decision‑making: how  time pressure and ambiguity triggered confirmation bias, overconfidence, and group think.

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But here’s the key: nobody was taught those models upfront in a lecture. They discovered them by living through the scenario, making very human mistakes, and only then having the language handed to them to make sense of what happened.

One of my most experienced leaders said in the debrief, “This feels like Kolb’s experiential learning cycle weaponised – we actually did something, then dissected it while it was still hot.” That’s exactly how it felt: concrete experience, reflective observation, conceptual framework, then a direct line to active experimentation back at work.

Teamship under pressure: what we actually saw

The Jenson8 experience created something I’ve rarely seen in a classroom: honest, non-defensive visibility of real behaviour.

A few things stood out:

• The “quiet” people in real meetings often  became the sense‑makers in the simulation, spotting patterns   others missed.
• My “strong” leaders – the ones we all rely  on to drive decisions – sometimes became the very source  of bottlenecks, hoarding information or locking the team into a  single narrative.
• Our supposed “aligned” leadership team  actually held three completely different mental models of success. Under  pressure, those collided.

Because the environment felt playful and “other‑worldly”, people didn’t armour up. They took risks, they oversteered, they stepped on each other’s toes – and then watched the impact in real time.

In a traditional workshop, we discuss concepts such as distributed leadership, mutual accountability, and adaptive teaming. In the Jenson8 environment, those ideas stopped being bullet points and became survival strategies.

The debrief: wherethe science does the heavy lifting

If the immersive piece is the spark, the Jenson8 debrief is where the academic scaffolding quietly appears.

We weren’t just asked“How did that feel?” We were walked through:

• Patterns in communication   flow (who spoke to whom, when, and with what effect).
• How the team’s behaviour mapped onto     recognised team development models and research on high‑performing     teams.
• The relationship between stated     values (“we’re collaborative; we empower”) and observed     behaviour (“we interrupted, we overrode, we defaulted to hierarchy”).

The facilitators drew on research without smothering us in citations. It felt rigorous but accessible: psychological safety, social identity dynamics, cognitive load, and decision science – all translated into “Here’s what you did, here’s what it cost you, and here’s what a high‑performing team does differently in that moment.”

For a senior group, this matters. My team won’t tolerate gimmicks. They want to know that behind the spaceships (or whatever narrative you’re given) there is serious thinking: evidence‑based design, validated constructs, and clear hypotheses about behaviour and outcomes.

We got that.

From “interesting workshop” to changed behaviour

The biggest test for me wasn’t whether people enjoyed it. It was what happened in the weeks afterwards.

Here’s what I noticed:

• Meetings started with  clearer contracting: “What problem are we solving, who needs to  contribute, and what does a good decision look like?”
• People actively invited dissent:     “Before we move on, who sees this differently?” – a behaviour that emerged     in the simulation debrief and migrated straight into real life.
• Leaders became more conscious of when they     were grabbing the steering wheel versus enabling the team to own     the work. A few have since asked their teams to call out “VR moment” when     old habits creep back in.

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We also built a shared language around teamship. Instead of “you need to lead better”, our conversations shifted to “what does this team need from us collectively right now?” That’s a subtle but profound move from individual heroics to systemic responsibility.

One unexpected by product:the immersive data gave us a behavioural mirror. It’s one thing to say “we need to collaborate more”; it’s another to see patterns of interruption, information hoarding, or avoidance laid out neutrally, without blame. That depersonalised, evidence-based view made it safe to talk about real change.

Why this worked when other things didn’t

Looking back, the ROI for us didn’t just come from novelty; it came from the combination of three elements:

1. Embodied experience
       Leaders weren’t told what good teamship looks like; they felt the  cost of poor collaboration and the lift when the system finally clicked  into place.
2. Academic rigour in disguise
       Behind the scenes, you can feel the influence of established research:  experiential learning theory, team effectiveness literature, and behavioural     economics. That rigour is what makes the scenarios so uncannily “real” in     how teams behave.
3. Direct transfer back to the day job
       The debrief didn’t end with “Wasn’t that interesting?” It ended with commitments: “Here is one micro‑behaviour I will change in our next real meeting.” And people did.

Would I do it again?

Yes – and we are.

We now use the Jenson8experience as a catalyst at the start of major change programmes and leadership cohorts. It compresses six months of polite observation into a single, intense session where you truly see your team's strengths, blindspots, and all – and then you have a structured, research-informed way to do something about it.

If you strip away the headsets and the sci-fi wrapper, what you’re left with is this: a highly controlled, evidence-based laboratory for team behaviour that’s engaging enough to disarm senior leaders and rigorous enough to satisfy your inner academic.

In other words, exactly what I’d been looking for and hadn’t quite believed existed.

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