Most corporate activities are built to be completed. There's a right order, a set of steps, and a facilitator keeping everyone on the rails. You can tell, because nobody argues. There's nothing to argue about.
We make the other kind. Your team gets a case, an evidence pack and a set of people who are lying to them, and that's it. Nobody tells them where to start, who to question or what matters. They work it out, and when they disagree about it, that disagreement is the point.
This is detective work rather than a puzzle. A puzzle has one route through it. An investigation has as many routes as your team can think of, and the interesting part is which one they choose.
What our teams actually do
Every one of our experiences follows the same shape.
- A crime, and evidence that doesn't line up. Photographs, floor plans, financial records, statements from people with reasons to shade the truth.
- Suspects who can be questioned directly, live, and who deflect and evade exactly as real people do.
- Decisions with a cost. Limited questions, clues that cut into your score, warrants that need justifying. Everything your team does uses something up.
- A conclusion they have to commit to and defend, with the reasoning behind it.
What we don't do is ask anybody to perform. Nobody dresses up, reads from a script or acts out a character. The suspects are handled for them, by professional actors or by our AI. Your team investigates, and that's all they have to do. If that's the sticking point for your team, we've written about what happens when nobody wants to act.
Why the autonomy matters
Watch a team start one of these and the first thing that happens, usually inside a minute, is that they organise themselves. Someone takes the evidence. Someone starts building a timeline. Someone appoints themselves interrogator, and someone else quietly becomes the one everybody checks their theories with.
Nobody assigns those roles. They emerge, because there's real work to do and people gravitate to the part they're good at. That's the bit managers tell us they take away from it: not a debrief slide about collaboration, but two hours of watching how their team behaves when nobody is directing them.
It's also why the quiet ones do well at this. Somebody who says very little in a workshop will often be the person who spots the contradiction everyone else read straight past.
Our formats
Murder mystery is where we started and it's still the one most teams book. A body, a handful of suspects, and a case built to make the obvious answer the wrong one.
But murder is a setting, not the point. The thing we actually build is the investigation: evidence that contradicts itself, people who won't tell you everything, and a team that has to decide what's true. That applies to a theft, a fraud, a disappearance or a cold case just as well as it does to a body in a locked office, and it's the direction we're taking new cases.
If you're after something specific for your team, ask. We build custom cases, and we've written them around company anniversaries, product launches and in-jokes that only the people in the room would get.
How it runs
Everything runs live over Zoom or Teams, facilitated by us start to finish. Up to 30 people per session, up to 3 hours, and larger groups split across separate sessions on the same day or different days. If your team is spread around the country, we break down how a virtual investigation actually runs.
Your team clicks a link and they're in. There's nothing to install and nothing for you to organise on the day.
The full pricing and what's included is set out on our murder mystery page.