OCBC Cyclone Alley: Not another sustainability briefing. A way to act on one.
The Brief
OCBC’s sustainability strategy runs on five pillars. Two carry the weight: building a sustainable future and acting with integrity. The first is about capability. How relationship managers raise ESG with clients, new and existing, and how OCBC positions itself as the bank that steps in with real solutions. The second is about rigour. How the organisation measures ESG, and what data it actually needs to do that credibly.
Their people could recite the pillars already. Awareness wasn’t the gap. Knowing what to do with a client in front of them was.
The Scenario
We built the session around Cyclone Alley, our sustainable adventure learning simulation anchored in Axe’s real expedition: a sustainable boat, a row across the Bay of Bengal, and a partnership with Nanyang Technological University to develop a 20kg micro water sampler capable of monitoring the health of one of the largest bays on earth.
The NTU water-sampling scenario puts participants in the same position their clients face daily. Limited data. Real constraints. A decision that has to hold up once someone asks a hard question about it. Teams have to work out what data they actually need to measure impact, and what’s good enough to act on versus what’s just noise slowing them down.
That’s the same ground OCBC’s two priority pillars sit on. A relationship manager needs those questions answered before they sit down with a client. The bank needs them answered before it can measure its own ESG exposure with any confidence. Building the boat and collecting the samples forces a team to define what “sustainable” means in practice, then defend that definition once conditions change and the easy answer stops holding up.
Participants leave with something more specific than a belief that sustainability matters. They leave with a working model for the conversation: how to ask the right questions, gather the right evidence, and give a client an answer they’d stand behind.
What It Built
We’ve now delivered the programme more than ten times across OCBC, spanning in-person and virtual formats and reaching teams well beyond the original pilot group. Facilitation paired the expedition footage with tailored insightful-thinking questions mapped directly to OCBC’s five pillars, and each session closed with a tailored momentum video to keep the discussion alive after the room emptied.
The result wasn’t a workshop that faded by Friday. It became a shared reference point across the bank, a common language for what “acting with integrity” looks like when the data is incomplete, and what “building a sustainable future” looks like when a client asks a question nobody briefed you on.