Octoberfest for teams

I do love the Facebook 'on this day' feature. Having been an early adopter of FB, the platform has a huge amount of my digital history (which is a separate issue to be discussed another day). However, being reminded of moments that mattered in my morning feed brings me a smile more often than not.

And according to FB, it seems that history does indeed have a habit of repeating itself.

All pictures and stories below came from my October Facebook timeline.

It was the Autumn of 2007.

Ten years ago to the day, I took my team to the local park in Nottingham City Centre to enjoy the late October sun (a rarity in the UK).

This was actually the team of creatives at my first design business (having previously built design teams in other firms I had worked at). A great bunch of raw talent. Some graduates, some experienced, one long time school friend, yet all would go on to create some amazing portfolio work together - such as the digital launch campaigns for the first Transformers and Ironman movies - a dream come true for 80's kids like us!

It was the Autumn of 2013

By now, having already made the switch from creative agency to strategic design consultancy (relocating the whole team to London in the process), we found ourselves holding client workshops in the October sun of Hyde Park - working on an innovative new digital payments platform. Not as cool as movie campaigns on the surface, but by this point we had already realised that the power of our team was in our people-centric ideology - and that could be put to use solving amazing new challenges that far exceeded the limits of digital marketing.

Above left-right: Naseem (Tech / Cricket), Duncan (Client Services / Bikes), Shean (UX / K-Pop), Natalie (Service Design / Phd), Sharma (UX / Musician)

As well as delivering projects, we actually found ourselves doing a lot of team-building as part of the service; setting up UX and Service Design capability at a number of the agencies we worked with in London. We started doing courses on the subject and found ourselves increasingly in the Middle East training new teams on our methods.

It was the Autumn of 2015

After the desert dust had settled on the acquisition of Seren, we found ourselves experiencing our first October heatwave in Dubai.

The team I now fondly refer to as 'the first four' had been on quite a journey together - from Nottingham to London to Dubai (via Saudi Arabia). However, having already made a major impact together through design, Shean and Mina clearly made an impact on each other too - as they married shortly after we moved here! No doubt they'll go on to form their own little team in future too :)

It was the Autumn of 2016.

A year after we had arrived in Dubai as sun-seeking Brits, our design team was fully embedded into EY and had doubled in size.

Since last October when we took the picture above for a bit of fun, we have added new talent and personalities from the Philippines, Lebanon, Russia and India to the team - so our culture is genuinely as diverse as the Emirate we call home. This is something I take great pride in, as it gives us a unique ability to have an empathetic view on the work we are doing with our local clients - and more importantly, their customers.

It is the Autumn of 2017

Under the towering figure of the man himself, Nelson Mandela square is as good a place as any to bask in the African sun whilst reflecting on working together to achieve human potential - something I have come to realise is the one thing I consistently believe and invest in more than anything else (both emotionally and financially).

Ten years to the day since I set up my first solo design team, I had the pleasure of introducing Clayton, Lisa and Karabo to EY South Africa - and therefore extending EY-Seren into another emerging market.

We now have a wonderfully talented team in Johannesburg who will no doubt infuse our flavour of customer-centric design and digital innovation into our clients across the region. Thanks goes to Ross, Pilar, Rod, Ali and Richard for their support in this latest wave of growth.

I'm very much looking forward to investing more time in building innovative design teams across Africa, India and the Middle East.

Here's to many more Octobers to come!