Glitter-pots, magazines and a rainbow of felt-tip pens covered the boardroom table. Twenty professionals loitered at its edges.
They had come from management consultancy, accountancy, international development, economics, politics, law, NGOs and media. Many had come from afar to be here: France, the US, Moldova, Holland.
And now, each armed with a piece of A3 paper and a Pritt-Stick, their morning’s work was to represent themselves and their values in multi-coloured collage.
The On Purpose adventure had begun.
That was back in April 2015. We were in the midst of our three-day induction to the programme: a smorgasbord of learning and doing that spanned the history of social enterprise, McKinsey-style problem-solving, financial modelling, story-telling, generating mini business plans for transforming ways of working, and the aforementioned poster-making, to name but a few.
It’s fair to say those three days were pretty representative of our year on the programme. It has been a journey that has taken us from learning MBA-style growth strategies one week, to exploring social impact through computer games the next, to expressing our sense of creative leadership through performance poetry.
We have learnt more about the challenges and joys and opportunities of the social-impact sector. The diversity of projects we’ve worked on in our placements has built our collective learning and allowed us to cross-pollinate expertise and ideas.
Each of us has been stretched in different ways. We’ve had world-class coaches and mentors to support us throughout the year.
And we’ve had each other.
This experience has been by turns educational, developmental, stimulating, demanding, fun, reflective, impactful, creative, strategic, analytical, professional and personal.
We have refined our ideas of how we want to live and work with purpose.
The changes we have seen in each other tell us something of the growth in ourselves.
We are no longer shy about voicing opinions on unfamiliar challenges. We have each developed into more confident, more articulate and more purposeful people. We are no longer surrounded by strangers.
This is the result of a year spent challenging each other and ourselves to achieve things we believe in. And it is thanks to support from a community of fellows, trainers, mentors, coaches and the core team.
As we make our separate ways in the world post-On Purpose, it’s good to know that we now have all these others on our side.
