Last weekend the Bold Team escaped the big city and went on a work retreat for 4 days in North Yorkshire at Middleton Lodge.

The Bold retreat was an opportunity for the whole team to spend some time together outside of the office, re-connect and affirm values and set goals for the future of Bold.

We spent the 4 days focusing on how to move Bold forward and make it more incredible for both us and you.

A ton of post-it notes were used and many positive discussions were had.

We all arranged our own session to run that would benefit Bold in some way.

The activities varied including one where you had to do a drawing of how you visualized Bold, and it’s future, which had some great results, and another one based on getting to know each other better. We also had the smarter/riskier scale, where you had to place different projects on the scale in terms of whether they were safe jobs, or risky, and why this was a positive or negative thing for Bold Creative.

I think one of the groups most entertaining tasks were the energizer tasks, with names like he-hi-ho, and pit pat poom.

These encouraged the group to focus and to work together and listen, these saw us all getting quite confused at times, but they brought energy levels up and really made us laugh.

Alongside the brainstorming sessions and tasks, we stuck the main problems we had recognized within the company on various doors around the house so that people could add to this at any time, like how to create a good meeting space with no money!? Less meetings was probably the most humorous response!

Alongside the team building and goals setting, we did play a bit as well! The snow fell on Saturday night, which provoked a healthy snowball fight!

On Monday the bold team spent the afternoon out in the snowy countryside learning how to clay-pigeon shoot!! We had a competition, and it seems a lot of the Bold team members have serious shooting skills!!

In the evenings the Bold team took turns to cook for one another! We made stew, paella, lasagne, along with starters and pre-dinner drinks.

And on Monday night when the Freelancers joined the Core team, we had a proper dinner around the table in the fancy dining room!

Though it was a little later than planned, the whole evening was lovely, and we got an opportunity to keep talking about Bold and values, as well as just generally getting to know each other more!

The kitchen was the hub of the house, a lot of key discussions went on there, alongside a lot of eating, some dancing, and cookery classes!

The Bold Creative Apple and Blackberry pie-making was a kitchen highlight!

The retreat was a great experience for all of us, and really helped push Bold forward, and a lot of good ideas came out of it about how to do this!

The only mishap happened on the first night when we managed to fill the entire house with smoke,  resulting in some not so happy firemen – good start!!

The house was brilliant, and although I think we all felt sad to go back home to our poky southern establishments, at least we were full of Bold inspiration and focused on Bold values, and our own goals.

p.s I think we all miss Tabitha the house cat a bit