My small team of Finance, HR and IT senior managers had been working flat out for a long time and we were facing even more pressure in the future. We needed a chance to relax and hopefully find a way to improve our joint working and find more creative solutions to our problems.

The way forward was to bring this slightly skeptical but willing-to-try-almost-anything-once group of hardened professionals to an Art2Motivate workshop. The challenge was by the end of the afternoon to work together in producing a single painting. None of us thought we had an ounce of artistic ability, but playing with paint and learning how to use it as we went along, we relaxed into it and found we were actually enjoying what we were doing.

We also discovered we were learning how we could work better together by using our combined talents all the way through a project, rather than just at the initiation stage as we had tended to do in the past; and all this through 90% playing with paint and 10% talking about it.

This was a really enjoyable day out expertly led by two of the friendliest facilitators in the business. The end result was a happy, relaxed group of people who now knew how to make things work better back in the office. Equally important was the large colourful canvas proudly displayed on the office wall, acting as a constant reminder of the lessons we had learned.

Barry Simpson, Independent Police Complaints Commission