Talent Week

One of the... advantages... of working for a large corporate is that occasionally you have the chance to pitch in with one of the corporate initiatives. The one in question today is Impact On Society (IOS), where the company get to feel good about themselves by "giving something back" to the local community.

This year, that takes the shape of contributing to Business in the Community's Talent Week initiative. For several weeks, young people up and down the country have been logging on to a website to create their "talent bricks" - a brick-shaped doodle containing art of their choice, and a statement about what they think is their best talent and what they'd like to do with it when they leave school. Some of us had already spent a day in a local school talking to the kids and helping them with that part and now, in Talent Week itself, a selection of those bricks have been stuck up on a wall in the Arndale Centre, and there's a week-long programme of activities, demonstrations and stalls designed to connect the kids with the world of work.

And I got to spend the day on the Fujitsu stand.

We had a few banners, some information about the skills we use (obviously there's more to the company than just IT - like many companies we need managers, finance people, graphic designers, good communicators, sales and marketing, etc), and a taped-off rectangle of floor where we were going to play games.

Land the plane
A bunch of blindfolded passersby (the aeroplanes), instructed using only the words Forward, Back, Left, Right and Stop, by a smaller bunch of passersby (the air traffic controllers) in an effort to get them from one side of the rectangle to the other while avoiding the groups of cones (representing storms, pylons, etc) that we distributed around the play area once the blindfolds were on.

Clearly this game is all about communication skills, and realising that some people will interpret instructions differently from how you intended them. And... it's a lot of fun.

Rafting game
Small group (say 3-7) of people, same number of floor tiles, move from one side of the rectangle to the other stepping only on the floor tiles. The tiles can have a maximum of two feet and one hand on them at any one time. Any more and the tile is removed (it has "sunk"). Any tile left unoccupied for more than 5 seconds is removed (it has "floated away").

Again this is about communication, but also about teamwork and problem solving. The only way x people can stand on x-1 tiles (so that the one at the back can be passed to the person at the front) is by sharing tiles and/or standing on one leg, so you're going to end up hanging on to a total stranger. And... it's a lot of fun.

Lego building
Two boxes containing the same assortment (number and colour) of Lego bricks (well, Duplo if we're being entirely accurate). Only one box has instructions to build a tower. Three players. Player A builds the tower using the instructions. Player B watches, and relays the method to Player C (who cannot see Player A) so that s/he can build the same tower from the bricks in the second box. There is only one right way of building it, proven by being able to lift it up at the end when holding only the top layer of bricks.

This might have been a lot of fun, but no-one wanted to play it (although we did have a go between ourselves at lunch time).

So, you know, this isn't the kind of thing we do for a day job, and that was obvious from the design of our stand. BitC had done their bit by including something like "be Top Gun, learn how to land a plane" on the section of their banners devoted to Monday, but whoever designed our stand had somehow forgotten to include this important piece of information. There was absolutely nothing on any of our banners or posters that talked about landing a plane. We had "skills" and a list of customers, and the company logo. And a rectangle made of red and blue plastic tape. And... er... that's it.

If it hadn't been for the good offices of the compère, (the excellent Terence from BBC Your Game), I don't think we'd have had a single player all day. As it was, we handed out almost 100 raffle tickets during the day (play a game, get a ticket, win a laptop bag), and we got to see several demos by local cheerleaders, Olly the ball kid (Youngest Freestyle football World Champion - see him on YouTube - who knew keepy-uppy could be a life choice?) and a couple of boxing coaches who teach non-contact boxing as a keep fit regime. And we drank a lot of Starbucks.

Did we feel good about ourselves at the end of the day. You bet. Although my legs were aching a bit. And I could have done without the strange conversation with the gentleman who claimed to be "Amber Level."