Laughter and wonderment, peering around the room in the half darkness, crawling under the table to follow the path to “the inferno”. Not in my wildest dreams did I think that this would be part of my work at Project Red Stripe. But it happened during one of our team-building exercises, for which Mike had asked us to make and present a map showing “where we’ve been last week”. Later, he added that we will get to vote to pick the best map — apparently to motivate us and to simulate decision making.

Three of our team (Mike, Stew and Steve) produced variations on the more traditional geographic solution, tracing on paper or digitally where we had been in London, for instance during our pub crawl. Steve showed to full effect the use of (this nifty piece of software which lets you surf high-resolution satellite images). He took us on a digital flight around the earth, for instance showing us Canada, where he was born, and his home in Beijing.

The others interpreted the task at hand more metaphorically. Ludwig provided a rather cerebral response. Using a mind-mapping program called The Brain, he showed the links between the various ideas and concepts discussed over the past week. Ludwig would like to use the software to keep track of our future discussions, thus developing the Red Stripe brain.

Mine was a more feely-touchy map (maybe it was the ‘F’ in my MBTI profile coming out). It detailed the emotional highs and lows over the past week, the trepidation, the excitement, the doubt and the effort. I see it as the landscape of the project thus far, which we have probably all traversed.

And finally, it was Tom who had us crawling under the table, stepping over a river of water glasses perilously balanced on the spiral staircase in our office, and marveling at his post-it note mobiles. Tom’s map was a 3D experience of our ideas, people, emotions and experiences so far.

So it was a very illustrative and fascinating exercise, demonstrating how differently people can both view the world and portray it. I hope we’ll be as creative when it comes to developing the real thing. By the way, the winner of our map competition was Steven.

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