Sprend Meetup - our aims & games
Before the summer holidays, we held our first joint Sprend Meetup of this kind, taking as a guiding thought what Adrian Ruiz said: "There is a difference between a group of people accomplishing goals together. Teams are rare."
With the right plan and program, it wasn't difficult to get started. What initially moved us away from the usual, or from what we automatically expected, were team challenges. Tanja Evertsson is a person who leads a team of people very successfully, directly, but also with a lot of care. This time she had raw spaghetti, duct tape, and marshmallows in her hands. Something that the four developers in that same room were surely not expecting. She surprised us all. But just as she always manages to say the right thing at the right moment, she also turned this game or Spaghetti challenge into a real representation of the work process, achieving results and competition.
Divided into two teams, the task with a few rules was to build the highest tower possible. In this fun and tense process, you quickly realize that strategy in any task does not fall from the sky. As with all the efforts, your perfect plan, in theory, does not have to be equally perfect in practice. There are things we couldn't know in advance. But now we've learned. What we always consider most important at Sprend is how we treat each other along the way. Although one team lost, both gained a lot.
After this, we already achieved an open atmosphere and the strength to continue. By proposing new future ideas and adopting them, a picture of Sprend and the direction it could go in the future began to be created. We did not neglect our experiences in past jobs either, presenting them as instructive and with the aim of understanding each other. Open and regular communication is something that will save us from obstacles becoming problems, we concluded. Listening and hearing the other person can give us answers to questions that may arise in the future. In this way, possible solutions will not be so far away. As we always keep in mind the Sprend manifesto, which consists of tolerance, responsibility, fearlessness, pride, leadership, and respect.
When setting goals, we didn't skip "fika", a custom unknown to us in Croatia. Resetting with coffee and cakes, we managed to see even the future of Sprend in fifty years:
“More wanted than Normabel, Apaurin, Praxiten or Xanax.”
“The future is known, the past is unpredictable.”
The expectation from the beginning, that we would be successful in a busy day, turned into satisfaction. To be successful in business, you need to be successful in play too. The honest, benevolent and childlike one.