Picture this… our entire team are stood in the middle of a field in Bristol. We’re holding up a single bamboo stick on the tops of our fingers and chanting, “down, down, down!”
The instructions we had were: to lower the stick to the ground, and everyone must be touching the stick the whole way down.
Sounds easy, right?
Wrong. The stick just kept on rising, slowly, irritatingly, almost irrationally. At least one of us were checking the sky for hidden wires!
This was at our recent team retreat, and somehow it’s become the moment most of us are still talking about.
Two days together in Bristol
This April we gathered everyone together for two days in Bristol. It sits roughly in the middle of a team that stretches from Suffolk to Manchester, Teesside to Devon. And it’s also home to a fair number of our clients across regulated and professional services, which felt like the right place to gather.
Day one was at our Bristol office in The Generator Building, doubling as a chance to do the kind of loose, in-person collaboration that always feels slightly compressed over Slack or video calls.
Tangents were encouraged. And a handful of things that had been quietly sitting in backlogs for weeks moved on by the end of the afternoon.
Then we headed out for dinner, which is almost half the point of any team gathering. You learn more about how people think over a plate of food than over any meeting agenda.
Day two: barrels, foam arrows, and a Flintstones car
Day two was in the great outdoors with Adventure Bristol at Ashton Court Estate. The weather was, much to our surprise, absolutely glorious.
We had red kites circling overhead. A small group of deer wandering around the estate, entirely unbothered by the noise we were making. The morning was the bamboo stick, alongside a few other challenges that asked more of us mentally and physically than I’d anticipated on a Tuesday.
We built a Flintstones-style car out of barrels, logs and rope; which was structurally questionable, but went along and even carried our UX team from one side of the field to the other.
We played soft-play archery, which was probably my personal highlight. Who wouldn’t love two teams firing foam arrows at each other? There were official targets we were meant to be hitting, but of course none of us really aimed at the targets with a chance to take out our team mates.
In the afternoon we headed into the woods, gathered round a campfire and Scott took us through our refreshed company values. A renewed look at values that have already stood the test of time for us, but needed tweaking for a more personal, accountable and forward-thinking approach:
- I own it. I take full responsibility and accountability, regardless of circumstance.
- I drive things forward. I keep momentum and push my areas of ownership through to completion.
- I create value. I focus my efforts on what truly matters to my team, my colleagues, or my clients.
- I make things better for others. I do the right thing for the situation.
A handful of awards followed, recognising people who’ve quietly been living these values in the way they show up to work. There was something about hearing all of this round a fire, in the woods, after a morning of failing to lower a bamboo stick, that made the words land differently than they would have on a video call.
The day finished up in the trees, on a high ropes course with zip wires and a few crossings trickier than they looked from the ground. Some of us discovered hidden depths of bravery. Others took a beating from a pile of bark on the ground.
What I hadn’t really braced for is that some of us were meeting in person for the first time, despite working together for ages. Voices on calls become faces, faces become people, and people become the kind of colleagues you’d happily spend a day in the woods with.
And as for the bamboo stick?
We never solved it on the day. Turns out it’s a real, named phenomenon (the helium stick). How it works is that everyone unconsciously applies a tiny upward force to keep their finger touching the stick. Nobody can apply less than zero.
The collective force ends up greater than gravity, so the stick rises.
Which, when you think about it, is a fairly decent metaphor for a team. Without really knowing it, we collectively lift things a little higher than any of us would do alone.
