Last week me and my colleagues Ralph, Ellen and Roy visited the ASCI conference. For those of you who do not know what the ASCI is, please check out their amazing website… Well I’m sure that that didn’t help you a lot, so in summary, the ASCI is the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, and they organized a conference in Center Parcs in Flevoland. The secretary of ASCI asked me to take some pictures of the event after she stumbled upon my website by accident.
Well the pictures of the conference itself are not all that interesting but there was a workshop that I would like to share with you. This was the workshop “Art of Communicating” by Peter van der Roest. The ASCI website states (when you find out which buttons to click) “Peter specializes in communication styles and techniques and has developed a highly unusual workshop based around a combination of martial arts techniques and military strategy. He uses martial art as a metaphor. Through martial art participants interactively discover their impulsive behavior and learn how to act strategically.” Right…
So what it was about, basically, was putting on boxing gloves and beating the living daylights out of your colleagues. Which, in essence, I have nothing against. However, this had to be done in the context of communication. Your fighting style would represent your communication style, aggressive, passive, leaving each other space, etc. So after three hours of trying not to seriously injure small female PhD students and fending off overly fanatic and aggressive computer nerds, I was supposed to have learned about my way of communication and better myself in the future… Yeah right!