We changed our phone greeting, and our email auto-responders are on! We're all off in The Woods of West Virginia for our annual staff retreat. Some of our non-Ditto colleagues and clients have been making jabs about trust falls and such, but that's only 'cause they're jealous and probably don't get a staff retreat of their own. Right?
We have a ton of inward-facing work ahead of us over the next two and a half days, but it should also be a blast. There's a lot remarkable about this. First, with all of the crazy travel schedules going on and two different offices, it's rare that we're all ever in the same place at once. Second, this is also the last drop of internet we'll see until we return and plug back in later in the weekend. For an organization and group of people parading around telling people that "we live online," going offline for this long is a pretty big deal.
I'm most looking forward to the fact that we have two amazing facilitators to lead us through this experience -- our friend (and often mentor) Leda Dederich, and her very impressive colleague, Jeff Balin. I can already tell that beyond whatever happens here, we're about to learn a great deal from Leda and Jeff, through their modeling, about how to be more effective leaders and facilitators.
Leda turned to a very bloodshot me last night when she landed and asked if I was ready to "go through the wormhole." I looked back at her blankly, sadly revealing my apparent lack of inner geekdom. As much as I had been feigning geek for these past few years, I guess you just can't put the Star Wars into a kid who never had it.
Anyway, now you know where we all are and what we're doing. We're going through the wormhole here in beautiful West Virginia-- leaving our to-do lists behind for a few days and figuring how out to, well, be a stronger team and do an even better job of what we do for the clients and communities that we serve.
We'll have photos up soon, of course, but in the meantime, check out our previous retreat photos!
