So, how’ve you been?

So…long time no speak. We’ve been quiet but plodding along.

A few bits of news:

We’ve launched  a new version of our best selling Property Trading Game – a collaborative version. Our original version set teams up to compete and the heat of competition and getting compelled in the game helped them forget to pretend and just be themselves – all good stuff. The collaborative version twists this and rather than compete they have to work together with other teams to win the game, “Easy” or is it? In our product trials what we found was the behaviour and the processes of collaborating with other teams tested the participants as much if not more than competing. We’ll be giving it a run out in our summer demos…

We’re holding our now annual summer demos in June and July. For anyone who may be interested – HR, L&D, OD, Consulting types, to come along and try one of our games for themselves – try before you (hopefully) buy! You can find more information here: Open Events. The dates are June 22nd for Property Trading Game – Collaborative and July 6th for The Game is Afoot (Moriarty is already planning more dastardly challenges!)

Speaking of L&D types, we are getting amongst them and have confirmed we will be exhibiting at the CIPD L&D show in May. This annual event fills London’s Olympia with post it note brandishing, flip chart ready L&D professionals all thirsty for inspiration or at least some free swag. We’ll be storming it from stand 866 (lucky for some?) and if you’re planning to be there we’ll happily ply you with Quality Street. It’s being held on May 10th and 11th and you can sign up for free admission here

And finally, with a little glow of pride, we wanted to congratulate the team at Crossrail for getting a silver in ‘Best Leadership Development Programme’ at the Training Journal Awards in November. We are proud to say that every programme they ran had at least one of our games as part of it and the feedback from participants made it clear that they appreciated a different way of getting to know their fellow participants even if they did think the person ‘playing’ Moriarty was evil!!!

Anyway, enough about us…how’ve you been?

 

 

Fun in the sun?

So we can guarantee fun…but being it’s the UK even in July we’d be crazy to guarantee sun!

We are holding one of our open events in London in July (late enough in the year to improve the odds of sun but before the kids break up from school) to give any who’s interested a chance to come and try one of our games.

Having run our Property Trading Game for the last few years it’s the chance of “The Game is Afoot” to get an open outing this year so if you fancy your chances against Moriarty then it’s time to step up! It’s an afternoon out of the office and we promise we’ll only try and sell you something at the end…

What’s in it for you? Obviously a blast playing one of our games but more importantly some time spent away from your desk with like minded people having a chance to reflect on your own development and how you perform in a team. We’ll even throw in a few beers and a pizza at the end.

So the details are:

7th July, London, The Game is Afoot             BOOK HERE

All we ask is to take part you are someone who could potentially utilise our products in your work and that when you’ve had a great time, you tell people. Easy really!

Here we go again!

HERE WE GO AGAIN!

One of our many learnings in carrying our kit bag has been, like Dr. Pepper, when it comes to team games, you gotta try ’em to love ’em!

With this in mind (and having had some great fun in the past) we are running two open events in the coming months. Worry not – we are waiting until after Easter to give the weather a chance to improve but the plans are set.

What’s in it for you? Obviously a blast of a day playing one of our games but more importantly a day spent away from your desk with like minded people having a chance to reflect on your own development and how you perform in a team. We’ll even throw in a few beers and a pizza at the end of the day.

So the details are:

30th April, London, The Property Trading Game            BOOK HERE

14th May, London, The Game is Afoot             BOOK HERE

All we ask is to take part you are someone who could potentially utilise our products in your work and that when you’ve had a great time, you tell people. Easy really!

The Class of ’99

Do you remember those now immortal words “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Class of ’99…wear sunscreen”. It is, of course, the opening of Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Sunscreen’ which burst to prominence in the summer of 1999 and for us (and let’s face it probably for you) always prompts some reflection and agreement (especially the thing about the knees)

So last Friday the world is spinning as normal and a distinct yearning for red wine and the absence of an alarm clock was inevitably growing when the fabulous Lily Haines-Gadd of Triz sent a Tweet which linked to an article entitled “The Unofficial Goldman Sachs Guide To Being A Man” on Business Insider. You can find the link here

Having read it through a few times with some leading to giggles and some to reminiscence on some poor and some excellent adventures the one mark it left was almost being the Sunscreen of it’s time. In ’99 we were all dopey, overdrawn and full of ignorance and potential. Now these 14 years we are dopey, more overdrawn and full of cynicism.

The two that really stuck:

  • Ignore the boos, they’re usually from the cheap seats
  • When in doubt, always kiss the girl

A busy summer…

Autumn seems to have arrived with some force and it’s prompted reflection on what’s been a very busy summer for us.

It’s mostly been about our Property Trading Game which we’ve run six times with the teams from Crossrail – everyone from Senior Managers to the Apprentices (that said it does help one of our partners is in the OD team!), once with the global marketing team from Dollar Financial (thanks to VP Digital Marketing David Henry for that one) and finally our ‘there is such a thing as a free lunch’ open day – where 15 brave volunteers came and played on what must have been one of the hottest days of the summer.

A good time was had by all it seemed and apart from some tired feet there’s been some superb reflection and discussion in the post-game sessions we’ve been part of.

So apart from a little light trumpet blowing that’s it apart from sharing two of our favourite pictures from our busy summer. The first from the Open Day where the team chose the ‘Ascent of Man’ for their inventive team picture

image(1)

 

And the second from early September where one of the teams from Dollar Financial invented a new performance art – tube ballet, which they demonstrated to a packed rush hour metropolitan line tube. Our only challenge after that event is the lady from Finland who wants to play the game with her team – may have to be our portable version ‘Bid the Grid’!

image

 

Hope you all had a good summer and remember to give us a shout if you have a team build at risk of being boring!

Do physicians ever heal themselves?

If you were look for a stalwart of the modern organisational landscape you’d be hard pressed not to consider the away day. Generally a chance for a team to pause the day job and spend some time focussing on themselves hopefully in the name of improved performance  (we guess!?). They range from a few hours in a meeting room to the most profligate we ever heard where 15 people flew business class to the US for two days spent in a hotel to then all fly back again!!

As HR people we often get involved with supporting and running other people’s away days but here at Kit Bag we are interested to learn more about the HR team itself and what (if anything) happens on an HR team away day. With that in mind we have prepared a little Survey Monkey aimed at those working for in-house HR teams (sorry consultants we’ll come to you later) to see if HR people take the time to develop their own teams and performance as much as they do for the rest of the organisation.

Therefore if you fit that basic criteria, would you mind awfully filling out the survey linked below  – it’s only 10 questions and they’re all quantitative so should take you no time at all…

Kit Bag HR Away Days survey

Oh and while we have your attention – we are running another Demo Day where for the grand sum of £0 you can come and play one of our games with a bunch of other HR types and get beer and a pizza thrown in at the end. You can find more details here – it’s July 18th and we’d love to see you (and your colleagues)

The apologies end here…

Modest, humble, unabashed, self-effacing, reserved, unassured – however you want to term it, we believe we’ve been a bit <insert one of those words here>

When we started Kit Bag in 2011 there was definitely a gap in the market. There are lots of games and simulations out there and to us they appeared either trite and formulaic or exceeding expensive (and not reassuringly so). So we pulled our products together and set this site up and quietly started to do some business whilst in the tone of this site almost apologising for doing so.

Nearly 2 years later we’re still here. We’ve not made squillions but we have delivered some quality products to some great clients and in doing so supported them to do some great work. We’ve been joined by some partners who’ve all added to the dynamic and we’ve added some products and removed some products from the Kit Bag.

But now, in February 2013 the apologies end. We have a mission and it is: ‘to rid the workplace of mediocre team builds…one game and simulation at a time’.

This post is blatantly marketing – we are upping the ante and if you don’t want to play that’s OK – mediocrity works for some…

The most interesting bag lady…ever!

It was the dim and distant past (OK a few years ago) and as part of a leadership development programme we (two of our brave band) was scrabbling around for something to provide stimulation for a workshop on ‘Commercial Awareness’. Please bear in mind these were the dark days before Kit Bag had embarked on it’s mission to rid the world of mediocre team building and what we could find was either a) BORING or b) extortionate in price.

Later that same evening whilst indulging in some Twitter banter we struck up conversation with a lady called Calypso or Clippy to her friends (and fans) who runs a small business designing and manufacturing several ranges of bags that apart from fulfilling the core purpose of carrying stuff also allow the owner to customise them with pictures of their own. They look something like this…

firebox-clippy-bags-small-tote-bag-

A few e-mails, a phone chat and a rather boozy lunch later and we had the most fun concept – a workshop with Clippykit as the subject but the best bit was that Clippy herself would join the day, providing real life insight, answering questions and becoming part of the learning. Since that first day we’ve run it a few times for various groups and the combination of the story, Clippy and the opportunities for the group to explore her business always works really well.

We’ve teamed up Clippy to offer this as a product in the kit bag and you can find more details about it here or buy one of her bags here (they make awesome gifts – we can attest to that!)

From the best to the worst…

So late last Spring we tweeted an open invite for guests to contribute to a series of blog posts. The only parameter was they had to come under the title “The Best Learning Experience I ever had”. We had some fabulous contributions and you can find a link to some of them here and from there the breadcrumbs to the rest should be easy!!

In conversation with one of our partners, Doug Shaw, yesterday we happened upon the idea of another series with the opposite title “The Worst Learning Experience I ever had”. In Doug’s words “the worst ones always give the best learning”. So form an orderly queue Ladies & Gents and comment or DM us on Twitter if you’d like to be included.

Some thoughts to start the school year

We came across this through a Facebook friend, the inimitable Ms. Ailsa Suttie. It was originally created to the comedian George Carlin but from a bit of t’interweb hunting it now appears it was written by a Minister from Washington state by the name of Dr. Moorehead. Whoever wrote it, we thought there were some good thoughts for reflection before we all (those of us who didn’t go back to school last week) jump back into the fray.

Happy New Year all….

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgement, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space.

We’ve done larger things, but not better things. We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice.

We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less.

We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes.

These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill.

It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete.

Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever. Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your
side.

Remember to give a warm hug to the one next to you because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn’t cost a cent. Remember, to say, “I love you” to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you. Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again. Give time to love, give time to speak and give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind