Shared Services Forum UK brought their senior community together at Chester Zoo for a Safari Summer Social. The brief was a workshop on resilience for a room of senior shared services leaders. Working closely with Director of Operations Lynsey Oakes, I designed a bespoke session and a custom card deck built around ten animals from the zoo, each with its own resilience strategy. The room left with a shared language for resilience they could use the next morning with their teams.
Lynsey invited me to run a session at the Safari Summer Social, a leaders' event held at Chester Zoo on 18 June 2026. The theme for the day was strengthening team and individual performance, and my slot was a workshop on resilience for a room of senior shared services professionals from organisations including Mitie, BAE Systems and Odeon Cinemas.
From the first conversation, Lynsey was clear about what her community was carrying. Shared services functions live under sustained pressure: repeated savings rounds, systems implementations that go wrong, outsourcing reviews, and the constant work of proving the value of a function that is easy to overlook. The brief was to give these leaders something more useful than a talk about bouncing back. Lynsey wanted a session that named the real pressures honestly and sent people back to their teams with a way of thinking they could actually use.
The design started with the audience. Based on my conversations with Lynsey, I built the session around one reframe: the standard "bounce back" model is too thin. It assumes the state you are returning to was worth returning to, it treats a single response as right for every situation, and it loads the whole burden onto the individual. Resilience works better as a repertoire of strategies, and the skill is choosing the one the moment in front of you calls for.
To make that memorable, I designed a bespoke card deck built around ten animals that live at Chester Zoo, each carrying a different resilience strategy. The Jaguar for tenacious resilience, the Asiatic Lion for the long recovery, the Aardvark for the unseen, foundational work, the Humboldt Penguin for sharing the load, the Desert Locust for changing form under pressure, and five more. Each card names what the strategy looks like in a leader, the risk when it is overused, and a question to take away. The cards were designed to be kept as a personal reference, something a leader could pull out when a conversation gets hard.
The session ran as a single arc. I opened with one question to the room: in one word, what does resilience mean to you? Every word went on the flip chart, untouched, ready to return to at the close. From there into the reframe, then the ten archetypes, then table discussions on which archetype each leader reaches for instinctively and which their organisation tends to reward.
The middle of the session explored some scenarios with pressures familiar to the audience. Each table worked out which archetype the situation called for and what that would look like in practice. A personal audit followed, then a return to the opening word cloud to see what had shifted, and a close where each person named one commitment.
The session went down a storm. People identified with different archetypes and started working out how to apply them to the specific challenges in front of them.
What pleased me most was watching senior leaders give themselves permission to drop the performance of resilience and be honest about the pressure they were carrying. Lynsey's reflection afterwards captured it. The workshop surfaced the pain points her members live with every day and gave them the belief that it is okay when things are not going to plan, because they can adapt and find a form of resilience to see it through. Every participant left with their own set of archetype cards to keep.
The thing I am carrying forward from this one is how much the bespoke deck did for the room. Building the archetypes around animals the audience could walk out and see that afternoon gave the ideas an anchor, and the physical cards meant the thinking did not evaporate when the session closed. People took something concrete back to their desks.
The other lesson is about register. With a senior audience under real pressure, telling them to be more resilient would have fallen flat. What they responded to was a richer language and the permission to choose their approach. Naming the challenges faced in their own world was what earned the room's trust and made the reframe land.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
