Deloitte Content Optimisation Training – Room Evolution

There’s one thing you realise when you start working with Deloitte – they’re big. They have a lot of people, a lot of buildings, a lot of meeting rooms, so logistics can be quite a feat.

My style of training tends to be interactive, with a lot of group participation, so I suggested a room where we could spread out. It’s still a bit of a lottery booking rooms at Deloitte, however, and so despite very best intentions this was the one we got for the first afternoon’s training:

The photo doesn’t quite do it justice, but trust me – that’s a very long table. The northern end had snow on. You needed a passport to get from one side to the other. I’ve also never given training with ten people patched in through a conference phone before. Our “hands on” interactive training suddenly became a lot more formal. I’m not sure if the people of the phone could hear all my jokes. That might not necessarily have been a bad thing though.

Next training session, new room:

No tables this time, which was a triumph! Initially, all the chairs were facing the screen, but rolling up my sleeves I pushed them into this colosseum-style in-the-round shape. The training attendees were surprised when they arrived, maybe because they thought they might have to duke it out with each other, gladiator-style. Or maybe because they hadn’t been forced to sit in a circle like this since primary school. Nonetheless, the session was much more energised and interactive.

Training session three: disaster. When we arrived at the room, we realised it had an even longer table. It was so long, The Guinness Book of Records wanted to measure it, but ran out of measuring tape (the training is much better than these jokes – honest).

Fortunately, when I threw myself at the mercy of the meeting room co-ordinator people, they sent up two nice chaps to untether the individual table sections and move them to the back of the room (I wasn’t allowed to do it because of “health and safety” – or maybe because I was weeping):

It took some time, but it was worth it. Disaster averted, the training proceeded without another hitch.

(Thanks to Mark, Froukje and all the attendees from Deloitte!)