What Singapore Polytechnic EDGE Needed

Singapore Polytechnic's EDGE programme develops students who are expected to lead, collaborate, and represent their peers across the polytechnic community. These are not students who lack ambition or initiative. What many of them lacked was a framework for understanding why their instincts in group situations sometimes produced friction rather than momentum, and why the communication approaches that felt natural to them did not always land the way they intended.

The brief from Ms Catherine Ang was built around three clear outcomes: to develop students' understanding of different communication styles through the DISC profiling framework; to equip them to become more effective leaders and collaborative team players with practical tools for working across different personality types; and to build each student's self-awareness so they could manage their own responses more thoughtfully in group situations. Leaven Academy was engaged to design and deliver a programme that would translate those outcomes from theory into lived experience.

How We Designed It

The Singapore Polytechnic DISCover Your Communication EDGE Workshop was designed using Leaven Academy's Experiential Learning Model and the MASK framework, building from Mindsets and Attitudes through to Skills and Knowledge. Every element was grounded in the same principle: that transformation happens through doing, not just hearing.

The session opened with an optical illusions exercise designed to do one thing quickly: show that two people can look at the same image and perceive it in completely different ways. Participants were shown images that presented identical visual information, yet the colours and details people reported seeing varied across the room. No one was wrong. They were simply wired differently. The exercise took less than ten minutes, and it set up every conversation that followed.

From there, the session moved into the Escape Box, a team challenge in which groups worked with case files and physical clues to solve a mystery together. Time was taken upfront to brief participants on how the activity worked, after which groups had approximately thirty minutes to complete the challenge. The Escape Box was the personality exercise, not the communication exercise. Structured to require coordination, decision-making, and leadership under mild pressure, it surfaced how each student naturally approached a group problem — who drove forward, who analysed, who held the group together, and who needed the full picture before acting. Participants did not yet have names for those tendencies. The activity simply let them emerge.

The naming happened next. A Gallery Walk through DISC personality trait printouts gave the room a shared vocabulary. Individual DISC assessments followed, with each participant receiving a personalised, laminated, colour-coded report. The facilitator walked through all four DISC dimensions in depth — Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance — and students read their own profiles alongside the debrief. By the time this phase closed, participants understood not only their own type but those of the people they had just worked alongside.

The Impossible Tower of Cups arrived last, and this is where the communication work was explicitly layered in. Groups returned to a physical challenge — stacking cups using only rubber bands and strings, without touching them directly — but this time they brought something they had not had during the Escape Box: knowledge of each other. With their DISC profiles in hand, students were asked to communicate in a way that worked for each specific person in their group. The Tower of Cups was the application exercise, the moment where DISC moved from something students understood to something they actually used.

The Moment That Mattered Most

It happened during the Impossible Tower of Cups, and it was not loud or dramatic. It was a shift.

Students had their DISC reports. They knew, in theory, that the person next to them processed information differently, responded to direction differently, and was motivated by different things. What they had not yet tested was whether acting on that knowledge would actually change anything.

The Tower of Cups answered that question. As groups began working through the challenge, something changed in how they communicated. Students began adapting — speaking to each person in a way that leaned into how that person was wired, rather than simply repeating what had not worked the first time. Participants who had been overlooked during the Escape Box, because the group had not yet understood how they needed to receive information, were now being spoken to in a way that made sense to them. And they responded. The task moved.

The participants realised in that moment that they were each uniquely different, and that when they brought those differences together with intentionality — communicating with the knowledge of what each person needed to hear and how they needed to hear it — they became genuinely more effective as a group. That is the outcome this programme is designed to produce.