By October, the question starts making its way around the office: So what we doing for Christmas this year? Dinner? Drinks? A Christmas lime? Somebody suggests the same place everybody went last year. Somebody else wants an all-inclusive. One person has already mentally declined before the WhatsApp poll even goes up. I love a good Christmas lime, but I started thinking about how strange it is that after spending most of the year working together, our end-of-year celebration can sometimes amount to simply going somewhere else together. What if, this year, your team actually made something together?
That is the thinking behind Connect Differently, a new creative Christmas team-building experience from 1000 Pieces, designed for small groups of six to eight people to step away from the office for three hours and experience each other outside the routines, responsibilities and titles of the working day. Yes, there will be Christmas crafts, trees, ribbons, ornaments, greenery and all the lovely little bits and pieces that make you want to sit down and create, but what immediately interested me was that the thing being made around the table is almost secondary to the people sitting around it.
I first came across 1000 Pieces through its work in organisational culture and employee development, and the more I learnt about the company, the more Connect Differently made sense. At its centre is Director Shauna Huggins, who has built a practice around something organisations talk about constantly but do not always stop long enough to examine: people. Not people as numbers on an organisational chart or “human resources” as an abstract business function, but actual human beings with different experiences, strengths, pressures, personalities, communication styles, ambitions and ways of understanding the world around them.
Shauna’s philosophy is rooted in reflection, accountability and intentional growth. She believes that strength already exists within people and that development is not about somebody arriving to “fix” them. It is about creating the conditions in which people can recognise what they already carry, understand themselves more clearly and take greater ownership of how they develop. It is a wonderfully human idea, but it is also a practical business one because organisations do not perform independently of the people inside them.
That philosophy explains the breadth of 1000 Pieces. Its work moves across organisational culture and workplace insights, leadership development and staff capability building, performance management and evaluation, mediation and constructive dialogue, strategic planning and stakeholder engagement. Those may initially sound like very different services, but look a little closer and they are pieces of the same puzzle. They are all concerned with how people understand themselves, understand one another and contribute to the organisations of which they are part.
Which brings me back to Christmas trees.
I have always found the phrase team building interesting because we tend to treat it as an occasional activity when, really, teams are being built every day. They are built in the way people speak to each other when something goes wrong, in who gets heard during a meeting, in whether someone feels safe enough to admit that they do not understand, in how disagreement is handled, in how leadership is experienced and in the hundreds of tiny exchanges that eventually become what we call workplace culture. One three-hour Christmas session cannot manufacture a healthy organisational culture, nor does 1000 Pieces suggest that it can, but it can give the people who make up that culture an opportunity to encounter each other differently.
Take away the boardroom table and something interesting can happen. The manager you usually meet with a spreadsheet open is now sitting beside you trying to make a ribbon behave. Someone discovers that the quietest person in the department is wildly creative. Somebody cannot figure out what goes where and another person instinctively helps. People share materials, opinions, stories and probably a few laughs about creations that looked considerably better in their heads. Without anybody delivering a presentation about collaboration, people are collaborating.
That is what I find clever about Connect Differently. It does not ask people to sit in a circle and announce that they are connecting. It gives them something to do together and allows connection to emerge around it. We can work beside someone five days a week for years and still know surprisingly little about them beyond the function they perform. Proximity is not necessarily connection, and sometimes all people need is another context in which to meet one another.
Creativity changes that context. Most of our working days are spent attached to phones, laptops, calendars, targets and the relentless little red circles telling us somebody wants something. Using our hands to make something asks something entirely different of the brain. We experiment, make mistakes, borrow things, ask for help, admire somebody else’s work, change our minds and start again. Conversation happens while our attention is occupied by something other than having a conversation, and some of the most revealing interactions between people happen precisely because nobody is trying to make them revealing.
For Shauna, that relationship between the individual and the collective sits at the heart of 1000 Pieces. Culture is not simply a statement an organisation puts on a wall or a list of values inserted into an employee handbook. It is lived through behaviour, communication, leadership, trust, accountability and the accumulated experiences through which people decide what an organisation actually feels like. When people are given opportunities to reflect, develop and understand one another better, the effect does not remain with the individual. It travels into teams, relationships and ultimately performance.
And perhaps that is why this feels like more than an alternative office Christmas lime to me. Connect Differently takes the philosophy behind 1000 Pieces and makes it tangible. The company spends much of its time helping organisations examine culture, strengthen people and create greater alignment. Here, the same thinking is being expressed through a deliberately lighter experience. Team development does not always have to happen beneath fluorescent lights with a PowerPoint presentation on the wall. There can be learning in laughter, connection in creativity and insight in simply sitting beside someone long enough to discover something about them you did not know before.
For companies considering their end-of-year activities, that creates a rather different proposition from another lunch, dinner or drinks package. You still get Christmas. You still get the celebration and the chance to exhale after another working year. But you also give your people something increasingly rare: time with one another without their usual job functions dictating how they interact. After months spent meeting deadlines, serving customers, chasing targets, managing change, solving problems and navigating all the ordinary complexities of working with other human beings, I don’t think three hours spent creating together is frivolous at all. I think it is intentional.
That word, intentional, keeps bringing me back to Shauna. Connect Differently may be seasonal, but the thinking behind it is not. 1000 Pieces is ultimately asking organisations to pay closer attention to the people who make them possible and to recognise that stronger organisations are built through the way those people grow, communicate, resolve conflict, understand their contribution and connect with one another. Sometimes that work requires a culture audit, a leadership development programme, mediation or a difficult conversation. And sometimes, delightfully, it may involve ribbon, pine cones and a Christmas tree that leans slightly to the left.
Connect Differently by 1000 Pieces runs during October and November 2026, with three-hour guided creative sessions for groups of six to eight participants. You will leave with something you created, certainly, but the more interesting question may be what your team builds together while creating it.
For bookings and further information, WhatsApp 354-7274 or email discover@1000piecesltd.com.
