Rounders in the park

Yesterday evening a group of us assembled on the Meadows and proceeded to play rounders for 90 minutes. We were a mixture of people from Applications Division and from the University Web Site team, all involved to some extent in our investigation of the Drupal CMS. As we work in different buildings, some 15 minutes walk apart, we rarely all congregate and our project manager decided that a social event was in order. As we all turned down his offer of golf, rounders was the preferred option.

I've been to many team social events in my life but I don't think I've played rounders since I was at school. It was fun. After 90 minutes, several of us were beginning to ache and we gladly retired to a nearby restaurant. My legs still ache today.

What does this achieve, from a work point of view? Well, at the most basic, it help to puts faces to names. More than that, it helps us to work together, because we've played together. We learnt a bit about each other, which makes it easier to start conversations. And it will help us handle disagreements, because we will know that we have things in common beyond the issue at hand.

I'd be interested to hear of other activities that people have tried for team social events.

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Distributed Thinking

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