Montgomery School

The first week orientation at business school resembles the type of work that I imagine that people in lab coats do at Cern.  I’m not claiming there’s a link between particle acceleration and building a raft out of oil drums, my undergraduate degree in French doesnt give me such authority, but there is a rationale at work.

At Cern scientists are trying to understand the relationship between two objects without having to go through the lengthy and tedious process of re-creating the universe. That’s not a simple exercise and Switzerland simply doesnt have the space for it. So they have built an environment to do this on a much smaller scale. Scientists hurl objects into intense environments, wait to see the reaction and see what they can learn from it.

Business school orientation has similar traits. The school needs the group to pass the forming and storming stages as quickly as possible so that everyone can get on with performing. The process of building relationships and getting to know each other takes too long, and so the school creates a programme where we are hurled together in intense situations, there is a big bang, we work out a lot about each other’s past and suddenly our world for the next two years has been created.

This weekend you will learn to expect the unexpected and as a team, deliver results. These words came from Rob,  an ex-naval officer, who runs an exceptional leadership and team building training course on a naval base on the south coast and we were his “subjects” for the weekend.

He was a man of his word. Since day one the unexpected has been a fine companion through the first month of my EMBA at Cass. I didnt expect to feel 11-years-old again, walking through the gates to my first day at secondary school with that impending feeling of transition from a comfortable environment to suddenly being a very small fish in a very big pond. At the orientation lunch I was surrounded by some of the brightest business minds  from all over the world with a diversity that no prospectus can prepare you for.

In week one at business school you leave your comfort zone and embrace the unexpected. Wise advice indeed for the orientation weekend which kick starts our modular part-time course. Three days of team building exercises and events culminated in a final day of orientation which was spent in a metal box shaped like a submarine. We stood in rubber boots and attractive boiler suits chatting about how little sleep we had had and whose energy levels were lowest.

Suddenly there was a loud explosion, lights went out and the whole room began shaking. Water filled the windowless container up to our necks, blasting through holes in the walls, smoke filled the room and a deafening siren numbed our ears.

The Royal Navy disaster recovery unit is designed to train teams with fixing submarines or ships hit by artillery and are in danger of sinking. Not the native environment of an English pharmacist, Egyptian oil project manager, Russian aircraft salesman, Turkish marketing director, Indian software engineer, Spanish architect, Libyan property consultant, a head-hunter, an accountant and me, all who have known each other for 48 hours.

The water was freezing, it was dark and deafeningly loud. We had had eight hours sleep in two nights and we were expected to plug holes with wooden stakes to stop us all drowning.

Fight or flight. Everyone worked for 40 minutes before emerging victorious with a sense of achievement that was difficult to replicate or even convey to others. It was an exhausting but thoroughly rewarding experience, one that as a group we’ll never forget. The group is now bound together, our new world formed of stories and memories of an amazing first week. We’re now ready to take on anything that the MBA can throw at us.