Jane reports on Result CIC’s Directors’ annual 'blue sky thinking' awayday – this year to Ramsbottom!

What does the word ‘awayday’ conjure up for you? I recall a fairly grim ‘team-building’ event which involved constructing a sci-fi-type machine as a group (I would never be an engineer!) and running across muddy fields as part of a ‘treasure’ hunt. Shudder! A happier memory is of a DIY awayday when an innovative team blagged a room free of charge, ran our own activities and cooked our own lunch, supervised by a team member who was an ex-chef. For about 14 of us it cost £35.20 – for the lunch ingredients. There was an improvisation exercise in the afternoon where I remember playing a robot with a colander on my head.. happy days!

In 2020 going ‘away’ has changed as a concept. Yet getting distance from our everyday lives is vital for our well-being and creative processes. At Result CIC we decided we need some distance from our home-based offices to talk about the big issues and to look beyond the immediate horizon of day-to-day work. We decided to return to Ramsbottom, a quiet and fairly isolated social enterprise pub with large ‘incredible edible’ garden, the Eagle and Child (highly recommended if you are up North). There we could sit socially distanced outdoors – and think clearly. This was the first time for several months that we had worked face-to-face with my lipspeakers and it was so heartening to do this.

We looked at a few big questions that every organisation needs to consider on a regular basis. They may seem obvious, but often we don’t make time to check the fundamentals, and asking these questions can produce interesting results:

• What do we want?
• What do they (our clients) want?
• What’s new?
• What have we learned?
• What don’t we want?

We agreed that the Covid-19 crisis had meant two main things happened:

• We had needed to trust each other even more than ever as we rapidly adjusted to a very new way of working - on screens. This had been highly beneficial for working together even more effectively. Trust is at the heart of how we work.
• We needed to learn quickly and put what we learned into practice, so we got better at online work in a fairly short time. (See our page about a new service we are offering in this area).

During the rest of the discussion we shared useful ideas about:

• New international work online: it turns out we have some great contacts across the globe!
• Developing new strands of work such as with intersectional groups.
• How our Inclusion Fund can be used to benefit people who really need it in future.
• A potential Result CIC book.

2020 has been the strangest year and so sad and stressful for many of us. We hope that Result CIC can continue to support and benefit people who have often had the hardest time during this crisis. If this sounds like you, or your organisation, please get in touch.

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