We Are Family

Do you know that game, where you sit in a circle and one person whispers a message into his neighbor’s ear, then he whispers the message into his neighbor’s ear, and then he whispers the message into his neighbor’s ear – until the message reaches the original sender?

Do you know that game where you sit in a circle and one person whispers a message into his neighbor’s ear, then he whispers the message into his neighbor’s ear, and then he whispers the message into his neighbor’s ear – until the message reaches the original sender? (We called it Telephone.) The point is, after going through five, ten, or however many people, the message has always changed and has almost always become entirely incomprehensible.

Working in an organization such as DDD, with more than 500 people located on three different continents and in a handful of different time zones, sometimes feels like an overambitious version of Telephone. How do you stay in touch and work together effectively? How do you stay close when you’re far apart?

At DDD, one of the ways we bring our organization together is by, literally, bringing people together. Every year, DDD managers from each office, including operations managers, cashiers, software developers, and many others, participate in DDD’s annual management retreat. This year, 63 of us headed to the beach in Kompong Som in Cambodia.

The retreat is an opportunity for everyone to share knowledge, present new initiatives and communicate with their colleagues face to face. This year, the opportunity to explore new ideas especially presented itself during an Open Space session, in which our managers brought more than a dozen new ideas to the table and discussed them in depth. One example was the issue of how to improve our understanding of the work that is done in other departments than our own. Could we send our project managers from Cambodia to New York for training with the sales team? Could the team leaders in the operations department intern as project managers in the meantime to gain more exposure to that side of the process? Many of the ideas originating from the Open Space session influenced the organization’s business plan for next year.

In the evenings before dinner, we played soccer on the beach or swam in the ocean. When we sat down for dinner, we sat around the tables, not whispering, but talking to each other, exchanging experiences, and discussing the events of the day – much like a family would. On those nights, DDD does feel like a family, and those moments help us stay close until the next retreat.

The participants at DDD's 2010 Management Retreat