Death by flipchart

Today was a milestone in my renewed career in the corporate world. Good to know that I've still got the ability to beat my colleagues to submission with my flipchart routines.

There were 50 communications staff from around the organisation together to get a collective sense of purpose and start to bond rather than spit furiously at each other over the respective merits of writing in civil servant language. It was really fun, yes I do mean it!

To be fair, my colleagues were willing victims to the group activities and through themselves into them with complete gusto. Admittedly they were pretty hyperactive from the sugar in the mega muffins served with their morning coffee but still it was an impressive performance to have nailed a new mission statement, statement of outcomes and strategic framework for communications in the space of the day.

This hard work was topped off by two interjections - one from our chief executive who did a shirt sleeves performance with a white board agenda (he likes to rub out what he's written so flipcharts are no good for him!) and my boss, Deputy Chief Executive who spoke from the podium and completely without any briefing or prompting for me has set out a few ideas that have already become know as H's principles.

I can't quite work out whether the response from my folks has been so positive because they are so highly motivated or starved of management attention that a few muffins, some white board pen sniffing and the opportunity to play out the usual games with a few rules for decorum has been a release value to their simmering creativity not normally visible.

By comparisons of some of my team building exploits in Oxford this is pretty tame stuff. Whatever the reason, they seemed to like what we did and now enthusiastically begging for another day out of the office to play again! Oh how much they might live to regret that request.