We Built a Yurt Yesterday

Yes, we really did. We meaning Mat and Magda, two good friends. It looks pretty impressive too, especially when you take a photograph of it from 3 cms away. The thing measures about 12 cms high and has a similar radius and yet it took three relatively intelligent adults about 2 hours to construct. The outside looks fairly simple, but the inside was a beast to put together, with about one hundred intertwining parts.

The instructions said in broken English (and fluent Kyrgyzstani) that this was an exercise for 'all the family,' since it was impossible to put together by one person. Many pairs of hands were needed to hold the bits and clamp them together at the same time. Several glasses of white also helped (that was not in the instructions).

We made lots of mistakes, of course, as we tried to cut corners and got a bit cocky. Never a good idea to get cocky with a yurt. It tends to get its own back thirty minutes alter... and you have to start again. Mat was great at reading the instructions, Magda added that creative leap when things looked bleak and the instructions lacking, while I pondered the meaning of it all. A good team.

And when it was complete, we had a real sense of achievement - our own mini-yurt. Then came the photo session in the garden to make the beast look big and real.

It got me thinking - here was an exercise which explicitly said that a team was needed to make it work. It required lots of serious thinking, application of logic, mathematics, geometry, engineering, Pythagoras, Euclid, Nietzsche, Einstein and bags of patience, of course. We got there in the end and celebrated by sinking several glasses of beer afterwards, sitting in the garden.

The perfect Sunday in many ways. Magda then left for a fish supper back at her place, while Mat and I celebrated with dinner out a pub down the road.

I was going to draw lots of marvellous links with marketing and sales teams, but I'm sure you can make that jump for yourselves. I would like to add that it was good to do something without the use of an i-pad. Simple paper instructions, lots of head scratching and some laughs along the way. What could be better than that?