Oliveyoung Developers' Magic Class: Completing the 2026 Vision Through Collaboration

Olive Young's technology organization faced a major challenge amid rapid growth. As the organization grew beyond several hundred people, the psychological distance between leadership and members widened, and one-way communication of strategy and execution plans failed to create genuine empathy and change.

In November 2025, the Workshop TF confronted this problem head-on: "How can we convey that collaboration matters through experience rather than words?" A typical hackathon focuses on code output, simple games don't connect to organizational strategy, and presentation-style sharing only conveys information. What was needed was something that could immerse hundreds of people at once.

The Birth of the 'Code Academia' Worldview

The solution was a wizard worldview. It projected the actual path Olive Young's technology organization had walked onto a fantasy setting. The 2021 transition from an external outsourcing structure to technology internalization, the building of a domain-centered organization, and the technical debt and inter-organizational silos that still remain — all of this was reborn as a magical world.

The 6 units/teams became 6 magic guilds, the massive legacy system was represented as a nightmarish entity called 'Bugmort', and inter-organizational disconnection was expressed as the 'Curse of Sealing.' The core of the worldview was the temporary removal of hierarchy. The moment leaders and members became guild members of the same magical world, the usual top-down structure was momentarily flattened.

The 'Guild Placement Exam' conducted before the workshop had AI analyze each participant's collaboration tendencies based on the Big Five personality model and assign them to the best-fitting guild. This process itself built anticipation, and curiosity about "Which guild am I in?" spread across Slack.

Morning: Strategy Presentation and Live Talk

On the morning of November 27, when the opening video played, the audience fell silent for a moment. It was a cinema-quality video that the Workshop TF members had produced themselves using Midjourney. The applause and admiration that burst out after the video ended foreshadowed how polished the event would be.

The CTO appeared as the Archmage, looking back on 2025 and presenting the vision and strategy for 2026. In the live talk that followed, leaders took the stage representing each guild, their long capes flowing and wizard staffs in hand. The sight of leaders who usually felt distant burst everyone into laughter. In that moment, the heaviness that could have made the strategy session stiff was lifted all at once.

Afternoon: 'THE:CODE' — Experiencing Collaboration

After lunch, the real training began. Guilds accumulated points through various quiz missions related to observation, innovation, communication, execution, decision-making, and teamwork.

The highlight of the afternoon was an immersive big game called 'THE:CODE'. The premise was this: the network system of Code Academia had been infected by a virus, and a code of over 100 digits had to be found and restored. Each team had to solve its own cipher.

At first, everyone thought it was a competition. Some people secured their own team's answer first, while others sat back and watched the progress of other teams. But the game had an intentional trap hidden in it: the mission was structured so that it could not be completed with just one team's answer alone.

As time passed, someone realized: "This wasn't made to be solved alone." The moment of this realization changed the air in the venue. Only then did people start actively helping other teams. There was a mix of reactions — surprise, a sense of being let down, and admiration — at the twist that the game they thought was a competition was actually a cooperation game.

THE:CODE was not about teaching collaboration — it was a mirror that made the organization's collaboration patterns visible in an ambiguous situation. Rather than the message that "collaboration matters," the value of making people physically realize the reality that "we cannot complete this alone" was far greater.

Finale: Band Performance and a Moment of Emotion

As evening came, band instruments were set up on stage. It was a band called 'Hello World,' formed by 6 Olive Young developers themselves. They performed DAY6's "Welcome to the Show" and "So That It Can Become a Page."

As everyday moments of colleagues and messages of encouragement flowed across the screen along with the music, people in the audience began to shed tears. Even the CTO, who usually restrains their emotions, said, "Today, my emotions overflowed."

Changes After the Workshop

After the event ended and everyone returned to the company, a pattern different from usual emerged in-house. When passing colleagues met at the workshop in the canteen or hallways, people began greeting them warmly, and conversations like "We were in the same guild — what project are you working on now?" started to flow more actively. The connections between members, which tend to weaken as an organization grows, began to strengthen again.

Survey responses pointed to the clarity of the worldview, understanding of organizational direction, and a sense of connection with colleagues as the main outcomes. Realizations such as "My field of view had until now been limited only within my team and unit" were shared, and there was feedback like "The message that we ultimately have to work together was conveyed well."

Design Philosophy

The worldview was not simply for fun or immersion. When conveying a vision in an organization of several hundred people, the biggest barrier is not comprehension but hierarchy. When leaders speak, members listen; questions become formal; and acceptance happens before empathy.

The moment hierarchy was temporarily lifted through the wizard worldview, vision and strategy were received not as "one-way directives" but as "shared goals of the same world." What would normally have ended as a formality could be turned into an intimate and honest conversation.

In the end, what this workshop left behind was not just the vision and strategy themselves. It became a day when people remembered, not with their heads but with their bodies, the fact that we are gathered here to build one service and customer experience together.