80 years. 90 employees. The whole world around one table.
Client PROVA
Event type Company anniversary
Participants 90
Date 26/03/2026
For Prova’s 80th anniversary, 90 employees from around the world came together in Bordeaux. Three days to share a story, build the future together and prove that a company culture can cross borders.
The challenge
Bring together 90 international employees to celebrate 80 years of shared history and leave with a common vision for the next 10 years.
Eighty years of a company is a story written across several continents, in several languages, over several generations. Prova wanted a defining moment: not a celebration looking back at the past, but a gathering resolutely focused on the future. With its international teams, co-created with its events business unit, in the heart of Bordeaux.
Our mission
Design three full days alternating strategic work and celebration, hands-on workshops and memorable evenings, and create the mechanics that let 90 people from around the world leave feeling part of something bigger than themselves.
When employees from four continents share the same boat on the Garonne, dressed in the colours of their own cultures,
What did we build? Our 9 Culture Makers Moments
4-star Hôtel Renaissance: 2 nights in the heart of Bordeaux
The setting that brings people together. 90 employees from around the world in the same hotel, in the heart of Bordeaux, so the stay feels like a community rather than a group of individual travellers. The Hôtel Renaissance as a shared base camp, where conversations start in the corridors and end at the bar after midnight.
The plenary: history, values & ambitions
The defining moment of the gathering. A plenary designed to tell the story of Prova’s 80 years without slides: with words that move, short sketches, striking images, and a vision of the future that makes people want to be part of it. The moment when 90 people from everywhere understand why they are here, together, today.
The graphic facilitator: the plenary drawn in real time
While the talks and workshops unfold, a graphic facilitator captures the big ideas live on a giant canvas, turning words into pictures and concepts into living illustrations. By the end of the plenary, a unique mural exists: the collective visual memory of 80 years and the ambitions ahead. A document nobody wrote alone, and that belongs to everyone.
An inspiring keynote: Domitille Kieger
cA world champion skydiver and speaker who talks about freedom and daring. She draws parallels with the business world and highlights the importance of ‘DARING’ to drive a business forward
4 themed workshops: innovation, globalisation, AI & management
The strategic heart of the stay. Four workshops led by Prova’s managers, coached by our trainer to structure every talk, every pitch, every deliverable. Innovation, globalisation, artificial intelligence: the topics shaping the next 80 years, worked through collectively, with the rigour of a TEDx format and the freedom of genuine co-creation. The managers don’t present: they lead, they facilitate, they bring people along.
Treasure hunt through the streets of Bordeaux
The city as a shared playground. A bespoke route designed to show Bordeaux in a different light: its neighbourhoods, its history, its unexpected corners, while mixing employees who don’t know each other yet. International teams finding their way together through a foreign city: the perfect format to build camaraderie where there had only been professional politeness.
20 video interviews: company culture in 20 faces
Twenty employees filmed sharing what Prova means to them, in their own language, in their own words, from their own reality. The collective portrait of a company seen from the inside, from 20 different angles. A human document that becomes the living archive of 80 years and the most powerful internal communication tool there is.
Discovering the Darwin workshops: coffee, chocolate, wine & beer
Immersion in Bordeaux’s socially committed ecosystem. The workshops at Cité Darwin: speciality coffee, artisan chocolate, natural wine, local beers, to show international employees the most vibrant and authentic side of Bordeaux. Darwin as a metaphor: a company can be high-performing AND committed, local AND open to the world.
2 evenings including the gala: a cruise themed around the cultures of the world
Two evenings built as two distinct acts. And as the grand finale: a gala evening aboard a boat sailing up the Garonne, themed around the cultures of the world, with every employee invited to embody their own. Prova’s diversity celebrated on the water, with Bordeaux as the backdrop. The moment company culture stops being a value on a wall and becomes a party people live.
Behind the scenes
Co-creation with the events business unit as a method
Designing this event in co-creation with Prova’s events business unit means making sure every decision is aligned with the company’s reality, its teams, its challenges, its culture. It’s not about delivering a turnkey programme: it’s about building together something that truly belongs to Prova. The result is always better when the client is a partner, not a spectator.
The graphic facilitator as collective memory
Bringing in a graphic facilitator during the plenary says something about how we think about passing ideas on. Big ideas don’t vanish when the microphone is switched off; they’re there, drawn, visible, shared. The final mural went home with Prova as a reference document: the vision for the next 80 years, captured live, by the hand of someone who listened to every word.
The treasure hunt as soft diplomacy
90 employees from around the world don’t naturally talk to each other; languages, cultures and hierarchies create invisible distances. A treasure hunt through the streets of Bordeaux puts them in a position to cooperate, laugh together, get lost and find each other again. In two hours in the city, bonds form that a week of meetings would never have produced.
Coaching managers to lead the workshops
Training managers in public speaking and workshop facilitation on subjects as complex as AI or globalisation is invisible preparation work that determines the quality of everything else. Our trainer worked in advance with each facilitator: content structure, facilitator stance, timekeeping, deliverable format. The workshops weren’t presented, they were lived.
The cultural cruise as a full-scale production
Staging a gala evening on a boat on the Garonne, themed around the cultures of the world, with 90 international employees: that means nautical logistics, floating scenography, coordinating suppliers in a confined space, and the careful handling of a highly symbolic moment. The boat doesn’t just sail: it carries something.
An international company bringing its teams together from around the world has only one real question to answer:
You have teams scattered across the globe and a defining moment to create.
We know how to make sure they all leave with the same conviction.
