What Building a Treasure Hunt App Taught Me About Leading Teams

The interesting question wasn’t whether the app was better than the paper version. It was what happened when we had to decide, challenge by challenge, what should be automated, what should happen in real time, what should require people to work together, and what demanded to be kept human.

Those decisions were the foundation to building a better treasure hunt. They turned out to be decisions about leadership.

Technology is very good at making things faster, more consistent and easier to measure. But leadership isn’t simply about making everything more efficient. It’s about deciding where efficiency matters, where friction has a purpose, where people need to be brought together, and where the human element is the point.

Building the app gave me a practical way to think about those choices.

Friction: what should disappear?

One of the first questions was what the technology could take off people’s plates.

Information that once needed to be explained could sit directly in the experience. Photos could be submitted immediately. Scores could be recorded automatically rather than relying on someone to keep track of them.

The important decision wasn’t “Can we automate this?” It was “Does this moment benefit from a human being involved?”

That’s a useful question for leaders well beyond technology. We often hold onto processes because they give us visibility or a sense of control, but involvement isn’t the same as value. Sometimes the best thing a leader can do is remove themselves from a process and give people the information, tools and authority to move forward without them. The challenge is knowing the difference between useful involvement and unnecessary friction.

Feedback: what should become immediate?

Technology also changed the rhythm of the experience.

A live leaderboard meant teams could see where they stood. A quiz could tell them immediately whether they were right. Feedback that might previously have arrived at the end of an event could now influence what happened in the next five minutes.

That changes behaviour. Real-time feedback creates energy and competition, but it also puts greater responsibility on the person designing the system.

Take something as simple as an answer that’s close but not an exact match. If a team submits a response that isn’t word-for-word correct but clearly shows they understood the challenge, do you award the points? There isn’t a purely technical answer to that question. It’s a question about fairness, what counts, how much flexibility to allow, and what you’re actually trying to reward. Technology forces those assumptions into the open.

That’s true in leadership too. The measures we choose don’t simply tell people how they’re performing. They tell people what we value.

Collaboration: what should require people?

Perhaps the most important lesson was that the technology itself didn’t create collaboration. We did.

Every challenge was designed with participation in mind. Five people might need to physically arrange themselves to spell a word. A team might need to agree on how to pose for a photograph. Another challenge might require a group to create something together.

The app could time the challenge, record the result and award the points. But it couldn’t make the team collaborate. That was in the design of the task.

This is easy to overlook when we talk about technology and engagement. We often assume that giving people a collaboration tool will make them collaborate. It won’t. If we want deeper participation from a team, we need to design experiences and ways of working that actually require it.

The tool supports the behaviour. The design creates it.

What digital can’t replace

And then there were moments where we deliberately chose not to automate.

One example was a nighttime challenge built around local tradition, teams had to keep a candle burning while completing a task together, and a member of staff stood there with a real stopwatch to confirm the score by hand.

We could have digitised that process. We chose not to, because the person standing there wasn’t simply performing a function. Their presence was part of the experience.

That distinction matters. The question isn’t whether something can be automated, almost everything eventually can be. The better question is whether automating it makes the experience better. Sometimes it does. And sometimes the human being in the room is the thing that makes the moment memorable.

The leadership choice

Building the treasure hunt app didn’t convince me that digital is better than paper. Nor did it convince me that we should preserve human involvement wherever possible.

It made me much more interested in the decisions in between.

What should we remove? What should we make immediate? What should we deliberately make collaborative? And where does the human element add something technology cannot?

Those are technology questions on the surface. They’re leadership questions underneath.

Good leadership isn’t about maximising efficiency or maximising human involvement. It’s about knowing where each creates value. The same principle applies to how we design teams, meetings, customer experiences and organisations.