No Paper, No Generic Route: Building a City Challenge Around Your Group
A city challenge built on an app can be a fun route through Lisbon or Porto with a series of questions waiting at each stop. It can also be something else entirely – an experience built specifically around the people taking part.
Put a group of people in a city, give them a phone, and you have the basic ingredients. The interesting part is what happens when the challenge itself is built around the people taking part.
We create live, app-based city challenges that turn a real city into a customised playing field. The technology is deliberately straightforward. It shows each team where they are, guides them towards real points of interest, and delivers challenges along the way.
A team of experienced facilitators is also there throughout the challenge to guide, and engage with your team, adding a human element to the experience that technology alone cannot provide.
The technology stays largely the same.
The experience does not.
Same city, completely different challenge
Imagine a sales team exploring Lisbon or Porto. Instead of simply answering questions about the buildings around them, they might be asked to pitch an idea to a real merchant, create a short sales film, or make a case for an imaginary product. The skills are familiar, but the setting changes everything. Colleagues become the audience, the city becomes the backdrop and suddenly a familiar business skill becomes part of a shared experience.
For a group of doctors, the challenge might take a completely different direction.
We recently created one around Porto’s 1899 bubonic plague outbreak and the quarantine that sealed the city off for four months. The participants followed the evidence through the city, standing close to the places connected with the outbreak, and worked through the problem faced by the city’s chief health officer.
For another group, Porto’s intellectual and artistic history became the starting point. The challenge led participants through the people and places behind the city’s printers, stonemasons, university, merchants and creative thinkers.
The city was the same.
The technology was the same.
The challenges were not.
That is the point.
The city is part of the challenge
A generic question about Portuguese history could be asked in any meeting room in the world.
A challenge that asks participants to stand on the street where something actually happened is different.
Location gives information a physical dimension. A historical fact becomes connected to a place. A person who might otherwise exist only as a name in a text suddenly becomes someone who could have stood in the same square, walked the same street or worked in the same building.
This is why we often build historical characters into the challenges. A health officer. A stonemason. A boat rigger. Not simply as narrators of information, but as people whose lives are connected to the places participants are discovering.
The city becomes more than scenery. It becomes part of the story.
Designed around the people, not the other way around
There is also a practical reason for building each challenge from scratch.
A group of salespeople does not necessarily need the same experience as a group of doctors. A leadership team may have completely different objectives from an international group visiting Portugal for an incentive.
The challenge can reflect that.
It can encourage communication, problem-solving, creativity, observation, collaboration or simply curiosity. It can introduce people to a city, reinforce something discussed during a meeting, or give colleagues an opportunity to discover abilities and personalities they rarely see in the office.
The route can change.
The challenges can change.
The story can change.
Even the way teams interact with one another can change.
The technology simply provides the framework that holds it all together.
Knowledge gained without feeling like it’s learning
Perhaps the most useful thing about this approach is that learning does not have to feel like an educational exercise.
People can learn about a city’s history while trying to solve a mystery. They can practise communication while competing against colleagues. They can discover the architecture, culture and characters of a city while trying to complete a challenge before another team does. They can use the city to problem-solve a company issue, this year’s corporate objective, a team member’s undiscovered talent, or to practise a pitch. With the city as the theme, the method as the storytelling, and your objectives as the intent, a city challenge can become a silent trainer that nobody suspects.
There is still competition, there is still plenty of fun, and there is still the satisfaction of finding the answer or completing the task.
But underneath it is something more substantial.
The participants are engaging with the place they are visiting rather than simply passing through it.
And that is where the technology becomes almost invisible.
No paper maps. No printed clue sheets. No fixed route that has to work for every group.
Just a city, a group of people and a challenge designed specifically for them.
The app delivers it.
The city brings it to life.
Go Discover Portugal designs live, app-based city challenges and team-building experiences across Portugal, built around what each group is there to achieve.