Tollé's Team Building at Kamp Lintfort

I was going to meet the team! That and the address of the hotel was all I really knew. Sandra and Leif Tolle had been involved in a whirlwind of activity in the past months. The new Düsseldorf office was now up and running. This was going to be the opportunity for colleagues from Verden, Düsseldorf and of course Cambridge to get to know each other.

Driving my Mother's old but trusty Audi, I found the Wellings Parkhotel in the ancient town of Kamp Lintfort, Germany. It was good to meet up again with Sandra & Leif.

View over the small lake of the Wellings Parkhotel

They had to disappear briefly for a catch-up from a prior meeting and this was a great opportunity to resume my friendship with their daughter by trying out the Hotel's range of small exercise toys. Scattered throughout the corridor outside the seminar room were devices to test your balance. It was almost with regret that we parted so the actual team building could go ahead with the adults.

Eric Borges was tasked with bringing this geographically-, personality- and skill-diverse collection of individuals together. We were 12 in all: Architects, project managers, designers, external contractors and office support. I was very familiar with the concept of such events from my Dale Carnegie days. You can always learn something new, tackle challenges and, above all, have fun together. Two of  Eric's exercises are embedded in my mind as achieving these goals.

"Blind Scribe" is my name for the first exercise. Each team of six was tasked with using 6 ropes to write the five letter word 'More' as accurately as possible, whilst blindfolded. We did have a trial period of 20 minutes with one rope to come up with a strategy.

The opposition debates whether the letter "L" is in the word "More" during their planning exercise

Now, I do not want to give our secrets away, suffice it to say that our team (Angelika, Anton, Laura, Leif, Ralph and myself) clearly had the better solution. Our rapid-fire brainstorming and trialing resulted in a strategy where Anton and I developed an intimate knowledge of our other team members legs and feet by touch. Fired on by shouts of encouragement and great hilarity all round, we clearly achieved a very legible written out 'More'.

What "more" can you say? Exactly as we had intended of course, despite Eric's reservations!

"Parallel Construction" was our last exercise. Given identical materials, our two teams had to build vehicles as similar as possible. Only one communicator from each team was allowed exchange information verbally with the other - and without seeing each other's work. In the end we had to admit: Though we had originated the idea of a flood navigating raft, with great stability and integrity, the vehicle created by Holger, Wolfgang, Markus, Eva, Marius & Sandra, had more style.

our Mark I

The design improved Mark II

Most importantly; we now could put names to faces; we had shared laughter and competition; we had broken down barriers to future communication. Note that all the German participants had given up a Friday before a long holiday weekend for this full day activity - not something everyone is willing to do.

Thanks to Leif & Sandra for organising this event. I think the farewell photo says it all!

I travelled to Germany by train this time, instead of flying. The journey is described in conversations and pictures here:
http://miltoncontact.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/a-trans-national-train-journey-in.html