How one afternoon of purposeful play gave a 40-person public health division a glimpse of the culture they wanted back.
The division at play during their offsite retreat.
The CDC is responsible for protecting public health and safety, operating on the front lines of disease prevention and health education. We worked with a critical division of roughly 40 people during their offsite retreat.
A wave of newly implemented administrative processes had turned everyday tasks into frustrating hurdles, actively making their work harder. The team had also recently returned from a furlough and wanted to rebuild the culture they had lost.
The organization had tried traditional approaches to revive morale. They were looking for something new, something that could actually foster connection.
Once Upon a Roll was brought in during the division's offsite retreat to give the team a psychological break from the stress and an intentional space to rebuild their culture.
Instead of a heavy lecture or a dry corporate workbook, we broke the 40-person division into multiple gaming tables for intensive, hilarious rounds of Telestrations, a visual, cooperative game of telephone. Through rapid-fire rounds of sketching and guessing, the game asked people to communicate under constraints, yielding immediate insights for their day-to-day work.
The game is the warm-up. The debrief is where insights become day-to-day habits.
A message only becomes clear when the person receiving it understands it. Team members learned to check assumptions, clarify instructions, and communicate with greater intention.
When drawings changed dramatically as they moved across the table, players chose to laugh, adapt, and refocus instead of assigning blame. They practiced responding with curiosity and flexibility.
Even when one person misunderstood a prompt, the team rallied around them and kept moving forward. Shared support is how teams overcome setbacks together.
One player drew a station wagon and younger colleagues did not recognize the vehicle, sparking a powerful discussion about how different generations assign different meanings to the same words.
“This was excellent. Exactly what we needed.” CDC Participant
We didn't rewrite a complex organizational culture or erase years of systemic public health burnout in a single hour.
But we gave them a peek at what their culture can look like.
Around the game tables, the institutional hierarchy completely dissolved. Job titles, clearance levels, and senior rankings did not matter. The most senior leaders and the newest staff members played on equal footing, removing the usual barriers that stifle open communication.
By the end of the session, the room was filled with roaring laughter and organic conversation.
Colleagues who had spent months trading emails were able to drop their guards, laugh at absurd constraints, and see each other fully as people.
The session proved to the team that friction does not have to define their daily experience, and that leadership was willing to invest in their culture.
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