Mick Moignard's Blog

I've just finished UEP's internal Living the Brand course, and I find the feeling of anticlimax to e really quite strong.  I've spent a week with 13 colleagues, learning, doing course exercises and case studies, eating, drinking, laughing with them for at least 17 hours a day.   As I walked away for the last time, the feeling of finality and almost loneliness was really quite marked - as was the quiet.  We've either been listening or speaking all the time, working together or chatting in the bar so walking across the carpark and driving home on my own, with nobody talking to me was quite strange.  On the few moments that you had to yourself on the course - getting up and going to bed, there was still the fact that there was course work to do and the final day's case study presentation to make.   That, after saying au revoir to a great bunch of colleagues is all very different when it's such a person-oriented avent - not something you get at the end of a technical course - but it's the same feeling that I get at the end of Lotusphere - which is so much a people and community event.

Jackie, our course leader,  did an excellent closure activity - which was both fun and a bit poignant as well as a great way to illustrate that closing a course and closure of a consulting assignments are both things that need to be done well and which need to generate a sense of finality.  We all "left behind our footprint", by each hanging up a paper footprint on the wall of the room, and then going round everyone else's, leaving comments about each person, so that each of us took away a set of memories of the course and the people on it.  Thanks, Jackie!