How we designed an immersive leadership simulation for 400+ Publicis executives - with WhatsApp voice notes, fictional C-suites, and an 89% recommendation rate.
Challenge: Give senior leaders who already know influence matters somewhere to actually practice it under pressure
What we built: A two-hour immersive simulation - Adaptive Leadership skills, voice-note drills with live AI-coach feedback, and Horizon: a built-from-scratch fictional brand in crisis
Scale: Three cohorts, 400+ executives across Publicis's global network
Result: Highest-rated sessions in the program - and participants asking when they could practice again
Forty-five minutes in, the CEO's WhatsApp voice note arrived. No warning. The room went quiet.
This wasn't a case study anymore. One hundred and fifty senior leaders from Publicis Groupe's global network - people who spend their days navigating cross-agency dynamics, competing KPIs, and regional friction - suddenly had ninety seconds to respond. The pressure felt real because, in every way that mattered, it was.
Le Grand Studio has developed over 1,500 senior leaders across Publicis's network. But this cohort needed something different. These weren't people who needed to be told that influence matters - they live it daily. What they lacked was somewhere to practice it: somewhere to stumble, recover, and refine. The brief was clear - a two-hour session that would feel nothing like training.
Working alongside Le Grand's leadership team, we designed an immersive simulation that dropped participants into the exact pressure they navigate daily - but with space to think it through.
A mindset for leading when there's no clear answer, no fixed map, and no easy consensus - less about control, more about mobilizing people to solve hard problems together. We grounded it in case studies as far apart as Cirque du Soleil, big-wave surfer Garrett McNamara, Microsoft, and Bjarke Ingels Group.
Before the simulation, participants chose their own challenge - two paths, Sense-Respond-Adapt for when systems shift, or Adaptive Leadership for when people pull in different directions. A voice note dropped them into a real scenario (a campaign falling apart, a colleague quietly undermining the work), and they had to respond out loud, solo, via VideoAsk - no hiding behind text, no time to overthink. Two rounds, a quick debrief, real-time feedback from our AI coach. The question underneath it all: what did you notice about how you lead under pressure?
Then came Horizon - a fictional EV challenger brand with a launch crisis that felt uncomfortably familiar. We built it from scratch: a complete brand ecosystem with product specs, market positioning, a competitive landscape, and a C-suite with distinct personalities and hidden agendas, surfaced through Slack messages, voice notes, and a magazine profile.
In Sprint 1, teams built their approach - influence strategy, pitch team, resource allocation. In Sprint 2, a pre-mortem: four challenges designed to surface everything that could go wrong before it does, each mapped to a named Adaptive Leadership framework (the Holding Environment; Individual Brilliance vs. Collective Coherence; Dance Floor to Balcony; Competing Commitments).
WhatsApp voice notes revealed internal tensions in real time; external pressures arrived mid-challenge with no pause button. One of the Publicis L&D team called it "Inception-style."
Across three cohorts reaching 400+ executives globally, the response was consistent: this felt different - and it became the highest-rated set of sessions in the program, with an 89% recommendation rating.
The word participants kept using was transformative - not in the corporate-speak sense, in the "I forgot this wasn't real" sense. But the number that mattered most came from the follow-up conversations. People weren't asking what they'd learned. They were asking when they could practice again.
"To work through situations like this in a controlled space - where failure is actually ok - was worth its weight in gold."
Global Account Director, Publicis Groupe
Leaders who know the theory and need somewhere to practice under real pressure? Book a demo →
