Lost, confused or hungover?

Around 130 TSC colleagues from five locations met in Cologne this September for the company’s second Summer Party. Leonie, Robyn, Miguel and Marilyn organized it alongside their day jobs. We wanted to know what that actually involves.

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A company full of storytellers tends to know exactly where to point the spotlight. Usually it lands on whoever presents the big idea, or on the team that has just won the pitch, and fair enough.
This piece points to somewhere else for once: at the people who make sure there is a stage in the first place, that the lights come on and that everyone knows where they’re sleeping tonight.

If you were in Cologne, you’ve seen their names, even if you never scrolled that far. They sat on the last page of the invitation, under a question most of us assumed we wouldn’t need: Lost, confused or hungover? Leonie, a project manager in Munich. Robyn, who runs our Munich office. Miguel, studio manager in Berlin. And Marilyn, who runs the office in Amsterdam.

Around 130 of us made the trip, from Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, Zwaag and Charlotte, North Carolina. There were dragon boats on a lake, a film studio, a great deal of dancing and a late-night version of Robbie Williams’ “Angels” that will not be released commercially. What interested us more, though, was everything that had to happen before any of it, and why a company like ours should keep doing this.

MONTHS OF WHISPERING
Long before anyone packed a bag, the Summer Party was already well underway, just very quietly. It lived in calls with deliberately boring titles, in meetings that never made it into a shared calendar and in group chats that went suspiciously silent whenever someone walked past a screen.

Since the whole thing runs on surprise, only a few people were let in on the plan, each chosen with care and trusted not to give anything away over lunch. Everyone else got a packing list and a single hint, water is involved, which in our company of professional guessers is a fairly brave thing to leave hanging.

Then come the questions nobody else ever sees. Who shares a room with whom, ideally without causing a diplomatic incident? Who eats what, and who definitely doesn’t? How do you get people from five locations on two continents into the same city on the same morning, given that Deutsche Bahn has plans of its own? What’s the backup for a lake in September? And how do you put together a program that feels like nobody’s old company and everybody’s new one?

All of this happened next to the day job, squeezed in between client calls, after the office had emptied out or in that odd half hour before a deadline. Each of the four took on a different piece, largely because each of them knows their own location, and its people, better than anyone else could.

RUNNING A FLEA CIRCUS
On site, the job changes completely. The planning is done, and what’s left is keeping 130 adults moving in roughly the same direction, which turns out to have less in common with event management than with running a flea circus.

Everyone must make it to the meet and greet, onto the shuttle and into a boat, because on the water there are no spectators. Everyone must eat, everyone should ideally dance, and at the end of the night everyone must catch one of two shuttles back, the times of which half of them have already forgotten. Meanwhile, a hotel full of guests shares a single elevator that works when it’s in the mood, and the Berlin team finds out on the way home that the quickest route back to the capital runs through Hamm.

For those 48 hours, the four were the travel desk, the help desk and the lost and found rolled into one: the people you call when your room key stops working, your train changes its mind, or you’ve misplaced a colleague, a jacket or your dignity.

The reward for all that herding is getting to watch it work. Colleagues who had only ever met as Teams tiles hugging in the hotel lobby. The Charlotte team, jet-lagged and still the liveliest people in the room. Eight crews kneeling over cardboard and paint on the shore of the Bleibtreusee, building dragon heads for their boats, then discovering within about 30 seconds that a dragon boat only moves when everyone pulls at once. A room cheering and groaning in equal measure as the Netherlands and Germany drew 1:1 on a screen next to the dance floor.

The next morning brought House of Bates, a Cologne studio packed with more than 20 sets and scenarios, from a bedroom to a poker table to a boxing ring, where every team had two hours to shoot a film. Roles were handed out in seconds. People who would never have cast themselves became directors, prop masters and leading actors, the poker faces held up better than the poker hands, and a fair few grown professionals got to be Muhammad Ali for a round.

Then there are the moments nobody planned at all. Two people from different locations discovering they share exactly the same irritation with cyclists on Lanzarote. A late plate of couscous that turned into a heated debate about whether AI is about to replace Google. The delivery crews from Charlotte and from Zwaag, way up in the north of the Netherlands, somewhere near the Shire, being adopted by people who had only known them from meeting invites. And right at the end, a few dozen people with their arms around each other, singing Robbie Williams’ “Angels” with more conviction than accuracy.

WHY A COMPANY OF STORYTELLERS NEEDS THIS
We’d go as far as to say that a summer party isn’t really a perk. For a company like ours, it belongs somewhere between decent Wi-Fi and a working coffee machine, on the list of basic infrastructure.

TSC grew out of four companies with long histories of their own, flora&faunavisions, Purple, planworx and ProSystems. Paperwork can merge a company in an afternoon, but people take rather longer, and most of us still know each other mainly as a square on a screen or a name in a channel.

We spend our working lives designing places, staging moments and building worlds that travel, all so that other people can feel something together. It would be strange not to apply the same thinking to ourselves. Once you’ve built a cardboard dragon with someone, your next Teams call with them feels noticeably different, and once you’ve watched a colleague go full Muhammad Ali, you trust them a little more with the next brief. Laughing together makes people more open with each other, and openness is where good ideas come from, which in our line of work is more or less the whole point.

Every pitch we win starts with someone willing to say something half-finished out loud, and that takes trust and a little courage. Both tend to grow fastest where there’s no agenda, whether that’s a lake, a dance floor or a film set with a fake bedroom. It shows from the outside, too. A team that actually knows each other hands work over more generously, collaborates more easily and walks into a client meeting as one company rather than four.

It doesn’t have to be 130 people and a lake every time. A team dinner, a studio breakfast or an evening in a smaller group can do much of the same work. What matters is keeping at it, deliberately and regularly, because this kind of closeness rarely happens by accident. Someone has to plan it.

NO MACHINE RUNS WITHOUT THEM
More often than not, that someone is one of the names on the last page. A company like ours is a big and rather beautiful machine, full of people who are extraordinary at what they do, from designers and developers to producers, technicians and strategists. Talent alone, though, doesn’t book the train, track down the missing badge, settle everyone’s nerves before a client visit or know which meeting room has the projector that actually works.

Leonie, Robyn, Miguel and Marilyn keep that side of things running every day, each in their own role, long before and long after any summer party. The event simply made their work visible for once. Without people like them, it wouldn’t only be the party that fell apart, but the Monday after it too, in every studio and every office.

And they don’t just run the thing from the sidelines. When the boats go out, they’re in them.

ROUND THREE, OBVIOUSLY
Last year’s edition in Hamburg was the first, a trial run, an experiment even, to see whether this could work at all. In Cologne you could feel the difference. The hugs went on a little longer, the hellos came a little quicker, and there was noticeably less “nice to meet you” and a lot more “there you are”.

Will there be a round three? Of course there will. The only open questions are where, when, what, with whom and in which shoes, and on all of those the four are keeping their lips firmly sealed. Somewhere out there, a call with a deliberately boring title is probably already in the diary. Dragon boats, at least, are now off the list. If the last two years have shown anything, it’s that this crowd travels well. Reroute it, drop it in a lake, give it one elevator between 130 people, and it still turns up smiling.

The invitation ended with a tip: Charge your phone. The photos are the only report we get. The photos turned out beautifully. This, though, is the other report, the one about the people who made them possible.

So here’s to the last page. Leonie, Robyn, Miguel and Marilyn, thank you for making it look easy.